Theology

Why did Jon Fosse win the Nobel Prize for literature? It’s baffling.

4 November 2023 9:00 am

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

26 February 2022 9:00 am

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

19 December 2020 9:00 am

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?

21 April 2018 9:00 am

K. Chesterton, in one of his wise and gracious apothegms, once wrote that ‘When Man ceases to worship God he…

Reza Aslan: personable, charismatic and a keen self-publicist. He could be wearing togas and flying around in a private jet in five years’ time

Reza Aslan doesn’t fear God. But should he fear his fellow Muslims?

4 November 2017 9:00 am

Eating human brains, burying one’s face in dead people’s ashes and publicly deriding the president of the United States as…

The sacrifice of Iphigenia: Agamemnon’s crime was ‘impious’, according to Lucretius

What did the ancient Greeks believe?

27 February 2016 9:00 am

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?

23 May 2015 9:00 am

Who benefits from Prince Charles’s handshake with Gerry Adams? Not the victims of IRA violence, including the 18 soldiers who…

The influence of money: a donor who helped build the fifth-century Basilica of Aquileia is commemorated in a mosaic portrait

Paying and praying: economics determined theology in the early Christian church

11 April 2015 9:00 am

Peter Brown’s explorations of the mindsets of late antiquity have been educating us for nearly half a century, ever since…

King Louis IX embarks for the Crusades

The forgotten flowering of the medieval mind

24 January 2015 9:00 am

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

13 December 2014 9:00 am

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?

31 May 2014 9:00 am

Atheists are blind to a fundamental human need

Spectator letters: Why Aids is still a threat, elephants are altruistic, and crime has gone online

26 April 2014 9:00 am

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

2 November 2013 9:00 am

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

31 August 2013 9:00 am

James McConnachie finds that theology and geology have been unlikely bedfellows for centuries