Theology
The spiritual journey of St Augustine
Christians should consider themselves ‘peregrini’, said Augustine, and his life on the periphery of the Roman empire taught him that we are all citizens of nowhere
A double loss: The Möbius Strip, by Catherine Lacey, reviewed
Lacey writes in the aftermath of two break-ups – one romantic, one religious – in a hybrid work that even she has difficulty defining
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
God’s first draft
Readers familiar with Sheila Heti’s work, most notably How Should a Person Be? and Motherhood, in which she examines both…
End-of-Times panic
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…
War on Mount Olympus
It is a curious fact that the modern Hebrew for ‘atheist’, Tim Whitmarsh notes in passing, is apikoros. The word…
The Spectator’s Notes
Who benefits from Prince Charles’s handshake with Gerry Adams? Not the victims of IRA violence, including the 18 soldiers who…
Early Christian alms race
Peter Brown’s explorations of the mindsets of late antiquity have been educating us for nearly half a century, ever since…
Middle Age cred
Sean McGlynn is delighted by a cultural journey through the Middle Ages, replete with philosophy, heresy and mysticism
A heterodox understanding of Jesus
When James Carroll was a boy, lying on the floor watching television, he would glance up at his mother and…
Sacred hunger
Atheists are blind to a fundamental human need
Letters
Aids is still deadly Sir: Dr Pemberton (‘Life after Aids’, 19 April) subscribes to the now prevalent view that we have…
Paradise lost
Black Sheep opens biblically, with a mining village named Mount of Zeal, which is ‘built in a bowl like an…
Writ in stone
James McConnachie finds that theology and geology have been unlikely bedfellows for centuries
