From the annals of the Christian history of Rome there is a curious legend that on the night of the 4-5 August in the year 352 AD there was a totally unseasonable and therefore miraculous...
John Seargeant, 61 Fordington Rd, London N6 4TH When someone asked ‘why is life so hard?’ Groucho Marx replied, ‘compared to what?’ So questions about the meaning of life can appear to be meaningless, like...
Fr Adrian Smith, in the latest of a series of interesting books that he has written, seems to have no such misgivings. Whereas there were once quasi- biographies or Lives of Christ, so now there...
Michael Morton looks at the possibilities for our present victorious late capitalist system. During the 1930s and at the time of the Fascist government in Italy, an Italian doctor and political activist called Carlo Levi...
Come On In, The Water’s Lovely Because Australia is so far away, most people rely for information about it from television soaps and other dramas. Then there is the advertising campaign from the Tourist Board,...
Pastoral Michael Morton explores how the metaphor of the shepherd and his sheep has been used to support both an ‘anti-establishment’ and an ‘authoritarian’ view of Christianity. In English writing and drama, there was once...
The Young Christian Workers’ Movement Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum was the first papal encyclical to address the workaday world of capital and labour. It criticised ‘the hard-heartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked...
So what are we to make of the passion narrative with regard to history and the insights of second-century Christians? In one sense, ‘passion’ is a misleading name because it was not suffering that caused...
City of Dreams Michael Morton reflects on the Secular City and the City of God. As a reflection on human, humanist and Christian thought, it is probably best to place them in the context of...
The American newspaper The Herald Tribune recently called Europe ‘the most godless quarter on earth’. However, it may be that the situation in Britain is more complex than that. The Archbishop of Canterbury has begun...
