Austen Ivereigh

Winding up the Synod in Rome on the Word of God yesterday Catholic bishops from across the world endorsed a gadget They called for increased distribution of the Bible in the largest variety of our planet s languages — nothing new there — before adding that the voice of the divine word must

Not even buses can escape the great British punch-up between revivified religion and its old-fashioned opponent in the opposite corner aggressive atheism The idea of atheists advertising on the sides of buses the non-existence of God was first suggested in an online article nbsp for the Guardian i

Now that taxpayers on both sides of the Atlantic have woken up to find they are shareholders in their own banks governments are going to begin asserting a little shareholder power on behalf of their citizens nbsp In a few days Gordon Brown the British prime minister has managed partially to nat

In a globalized world money flows like blood coursing through interconnected veins and capillaries nbsp into the furthest corners connecting up different parts in the most astonishing ways Like blood money can go toxic and when it does all those different parts are affected And they put up ba

Back in August I posted an item on the controversy over the disinterment of John Henry Newman the British nineteenth-century convert cardinal who is on the track to sainthood Almost as soon as special permission was obtained to move the body from its resting place outside Birmingham to a city chur

It was almost a throwaway line in an interview with a London newspaper by a prominent British woman politician who has always shied away from excessive publicity But it said everything Until she stood down this week from Gordon Brown s Government Ruth Kelly was one of the most competent and eff

It takes a European to ask this I know And I tread gingerly here – at least by my own largely ginger-free standards Only nbsp whatever happened to the death penalty as a moral priority for Catholics in the US presidential election Why don t they challenge their candidates on the issue It

Wall Street forgot that the money at issue was not just a dollar figure on a balance sheet but the life savings of a human person a grandmother who had earned her retirement or a married couple trying to put money away for their child s college education Thus Michael Sean Winters s last post

Back during the Anglican communion crisis I half-mischievously suggested that the Archbishop of Canterbury should dispatch his quarrelling bishops to the Marian shrine of Lourdes in south-west France because nbsp — and here I was in deadly earnest — it is the one of the greatest forgers of commun

The British prime minister who arrives today in New York is for the time being safe from his own party following a vigorous speech at the Labor conference Gordon Brown saw off the vultures circulating around his leadership and bought himself time with what has been widely praised as the speech