Theology
The report of Christianity’s death has been an exaggeration
Immigration is revivifying congregations, with many people showing signs of spiritual openness, in contrast to the bare-knuckle rationalism that characterised New Atheism, says Rupert Shortt
Is it time for Jordan Peterson to declare his spiritual allegiance?
In an outstanding study of the Old Testament, Peterson teases out the inner meaning of one story after another. But though in effect signed up to Christian metaphysics, his beliefs are a mystery
What does Christian atheism mean?
Slavoj Žižek claims to value Christianity’s ‘dissident’ credentials, but his atheist vision of reality rests on assumptions repeatedly challenged by Jesus
Why did Jon Fosse win the Nobel Prize for literature? It’s baffling.
If Jon Fosse’s novels are experimental, they are experiments in exhausting banality, says Philip Hensher
A playful version of the universe: Pure Colour, by Sheila Heti, reviewed
Readers familiar with Sheila Heti’s work, most notably How Should a Person Be? and Motherhood, in which she examines both…
The End of Times and the coming of the Antichrist
Two things it may be wise to know before picking up this relatively short and surprisingly cheerful brand spanking NEW…
What does John Gray’s anti-atheism amount to?
K. Chesterton, in one of his wise and gracious apothegms, once wrote that ‘When Man ceases to worship God he…
Reza Aslan doesn’t fear God. But should he fear his fellow Muslims?
Eating human brains, burying one’s face in dead people’s ashes and publicly deriding the president of the United States as…
What did the ancient Greeks believe?
It is a curious fact that the modern Hebrew for ‘atheist’, Tim Whitmarsh notes in passing, is apikoros. The word…
Charles Moore’s Notes: Who benefits from Prince Charles shaking Gerry Adams’s hand?
Who benefits from Prince Charles’s handshake with Gerry Adams? Not the victims of IRA violence, including the 18 soldiers who…
Paying and praying: economics determined theology in the early Christian church
Peter Brown’s explorations of the mindsets of late antiquity have been educating us for nearly half a century, ever since…
The forgotten flowering of the medieval mind
Sean McGlynn is delighted by a cultural journey through the Middle Ages, replete with philosophy, heresy and mysticism
This ex-priest’s history of the gospels could unsettle the most faithful churchgoer
When James Carroll was a boy, lying on the floor watching television, he would glance up at his mother and…
Humans hunger for the sacred. Why can’t the new atheists understand that?
Atheists are blind to a fundamental human need
Spectator letters: Why Aids is still a threat, elephants are altruistic, and crime has gone online
Aids is still deadly Sir: Dr Pemberton (‘Life after Aids’, 19 April) subscribes to the now prevalent view that we have…
Village life can be gripping
Black Sheep opens biblically, with a mining village named Mount of Zeal, which is ‘built in a bowl like an…
The Rocks Don’t Lie, by David R. Montgomery - review
James McConnachie finds that theology and geology have been unlikely bedfellows for centuries
