Ruth Gledhill - Times Online - WBLG

SPCK: one man and his shop

A contributor to my last blog on the sorry doings at SPCK notes that if anyone wants to talk to owner Phil Brewer, they need only go down to the bookshop in Exeter, pictured here. All the staff have resigned, as we reported, after being faced with contracts that demanded they work on Sundays and do some cleaning. And so apparently he is running the show all on his lonesome. So if it is a book you want to order, or some information, or merely just a look, you know where to go. Meanwhile, it is worth remembering that the publishing arm is separate from the bookshop. Among recent offerings was Katharine Jefferts Schori's A Wing and a Prayer. Read our review here. 

Great big book giveaway (6)

It's been a while since I did one of these but it is time to get them going again. The spur has been the wonderful new slot I've been given on the Times faith page to review books each week. The first lot are now up and I'm offering four of those, including this one, below. (Update: see the latest reviews, of Stephen Bates and Katharine Jefferts Schori.) I'm hoping to expand it to movies and films as well, and will be enlisting work experience people who come here to help with that. I'm also changing slightly the way I handle requests, because last time it coincided with a change to our email system at The Times. It degenerated into chaos and I lost control and never got half the books out. (Apologies everyone for that!) This time, please request your book as a comment on the blog. If the comment appears, you can assume the request has been successful and can then email me your postal address. Please don't put addresses in the comments. This means you can check comments to see if a book has gone or not before requesting it. Book giveaways below, this has been compiled by a recent work experience trainee, Tom Kent. (ps: when emailing me your addresses, please don't forget to state which book it is I'm sending. rg)

Failure to prophesy profit of Biblical proportions

Our story today of the Bishop Phillpotts library at Truro, sold to one John Thornton for £36,000 last year and which has already generated more than half a million pounds for the London bookdealer in auction rooms and private sales, is heartbreakingly familiar. This is St Mary's Gratwich, a Georgian gem where my father was priest-in-charge and then incumbent in the 1970s and 1980s. In the eighties, they moved to Llanyblodwel on the edge of the Lichfield diocese. The diocese sold the nearby huge Queen Anne vicarage where we grew up for about £18,000. At the same time, I bought a tiny two-up two-down cottage in Twickenham for £57,000. Similar cottages in Twickenham now sell for about £350,000. A few years ago, Gratwich Rectory sold for nearly £800,000. It must be worth more than £1 million now. At Llanyblodwel, the diocese had at vast expense to build a brand new vicarage for my parents and their five children. The splendid neo-gothic Rectory adjacent to one of the country's most beautiful churches had of course been sold years before, and was occupied by the late John Biffen and his wife Sarah. Has the Church learned its lesson? It would appear not.

If you go down to an SPCK bookshop today

This is what you can expect. According to a source - I am still awaiting a comment from SPCK management - this letter from was sent to staff at St Stephen the Great SPCK bookshops from the desk of the company's president Philip Brewer with a note that they disseminate it as widely as possible for "maximum impact". I hope Mr Brewer is grateful for my assistance in this matter. The background to this is that last October, the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, a British charity founded in 1689, transferred its 23 bookshops to the ownership of the St Stephen the Great Charitable Trust, an Eastern Orthodox body. First to go from the shelves was the Koran. And things have been, as they say in the East, 'interesting' ever since. Enjoy. (Update: sorry this and the other post disappeared for a while yesterday, I took them down to change them slightly and forgot to repost. rg)

Why Christians must work on the Sabbath

More amusing leaks from SPCK, where a source tells me that staff have reportedly been given a strong theological Christian argument for why they must work on Sundays. And on Bank Holidays. And, incredibly, even Good Friday! If this is the case (I am still waiting to hear back from SPCK with a comment) think this is the first time I've heard of a Christian organisation telling its staff they actually must work on Sundays. Normally they're on the other side of the argument. But apparently, staff at the St Stephen the Great bookshops must be there on Sundays and holy days to fulfil their vital mission of selling bibles and other literature to the faithful who flock to the churches and cathedrals in which the bookshops sit. The argument of the heads of the company comes from the Council of Laodicea, which said that for a Christian to try to take the Sabbath of was to be guilty of Judaising. Willing and happy Judaiser that I am, I post this up on Friday afternoon before disappearing to have my sacrosanct Saturday off. I wish you all a joyful 'shabbat shalom'. (Update: sorry this post disappeard for a while yesterday, I took it down to change it slightly and then forgot to repost it. rg)

Great Big Book Giveaway (5)

My guest blogger today is Jeremy Austin, son of the famous George. Years of seeing the Church of England's best-loved Archdeacon at General Synod had alerted me to the fact that he had a would-be hack for a son. As a daughter of the cloth myself, I was interested to see where Jeremy would pitch up. Then one day he turned up at my right shoulder, just yards away, working for Hugo Rifkind on our People column.  He sits next to Michael Evans, our defence correspondent, himself son of a bishop. You don't need me to tell you which is Jeremy in this picture. I will for the first time add to the list as books go, so keep an eye out here for new additions. This is because there are about 300 piling up, ready to be given away. This is my early Christmas present to all you wonderful readers and commentators who have helped to make this blog number one at The Times. Don't post requests as comments, email them to me at ruth.gledhill@thetimes.co.uk. Please remember to send your address and put 'book blog' in the subject field. If you feel like posting a comment with a review of the book you are sent, that would be great.

Now it's over to Jeremy.

A new "generous orthodoxy" for troubled times

There are some who are saying now that Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech seems more than a little prescient. With Nick Griffin's sensational acquittal on race hate charges after he called Islam a "wicked, vicious faith", to the cancellation of the Gay Pride march in Israel, we do indeed seem to be living in perilous times. Aegis Trust are among those rightly condeming the verdict as wrong. We in Europe do have remarkably short memories of where racism lands us. Just take the unbelievable events in Germany, where police arrested 16 neo-Nazis after they disrupted a commemoration ceremony of Kristellnacht, just 24 hours after the German President warned at the dedication of the new Munich synagogue that anti-Semitism was still alive in Germany. Even the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, has been speaking openly of a "clash of civilisations", although he believes this is not between Islam and the West, or even between neo-Nazis and Judaism, but between the secular and the sacred. In his speech to the Newcastle Readers' Dinner, this former judge in Uganda seemed almost to advocate civil disobedience to churchgoers of Plymouth angered by the decision to scrap free parking on Sunday. He actually called for a corporate, robust but peaceful response, although sources indicated that this could include not paying parking fines.

Delusions of the deluded

God is back!" is the triumphalist cry from religionists everywhere today. Only this week, a new religious think tank, Theos, has claimed in a poll that most people think religion is a force for good and should lay an important part in national life. The truth is, as ever, more complicated. For a start, God is not back at all. If only He were, a Christian might understandably feel right now, the world might be put properly to rights. It is merely the subject of God that is back on the agenda, and arguably this is nothing to do with Christianity at all. God has been bombed back onto the agenda by the extremist actions of a particular set of fundamentalist terrorists who do not deserve to be known as adherents of the inherently good religion they have hijacked for their own ends.

As the British Humanist Association has noted this week, the Theos poll found the public split down the middle on whether faith was "one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eliminate." The poll gave 42 per cent agreeing and 44 per cent disagreeing. The two per cent difference is within the margin of error for a sample size of 1000. This seems to me a rather worrying amount of people who think that religion is evil, like a plague.

I began reporting religion for The Times towards the end of 1988. Previously on the paper, I had made brief forays into zoology, media, arts and general news. I was seen as very ambitious although secretly, in my heart, the reverse was true. "Why are you going into that backwater?" asked one baffled editor.

(Correggio's Renaissance pic of war god Zeus kissing river nymph, Io, comes from NASA website)

Haggard on the ropes: spiritual warfare beats a holy tattoo

In the latest story to come out of the US, covered originally by Times Online and many other since, the Rev Ted Haggard, head of the powerful National Association of Evangelicals in the US, has resigned after being accused of paying for sex with a man. The married father-of-five has denied the charges, but has said he cannot continue to minister under such a cloud of allegations. Not surprisingly, the video of Richard Dawkins being lambasted by Haggard on Channel 4's Root of All Evil is climbing fast to the top of the most watched charts on YouTube, as is another of a typical Haggard anti-gay rant. Haggard has now admitted to being a "deceiver and a liar".

Jeffrey John gets 'married'

Jeffrey John, Dean of St Albans, has formally tied the knot with his long-term partner Grant Holmes, a hospital chaplain, with a civil partnership ceremony. His installation in 2004, after he was forced to withdraw from his nomination as Bishop of Reading, was widely covered. Jonathan and Stephen have also covered the story. Why is this of interest? Jeffrey John, whose relationship with Grant is "abstinent", lives in accordance with the Church of England bishops' guidelines on civil partnerships and the 1991 Issues document. Its significance derives from the fact that the Reading dispute was the seminal moment in the primacy of Dr Rowan Williams when liberals realised to their lasting dismay that their cause was to be sacrificed by the Archbishop, their one-time standard bearer, and co-founder with Dr John of Affirming Catholicism, on the altar of Church unity. Theo Hobson has an excellent analysis of Dr Williams' journey in all this in the latest Tablet.

'Those two will never agree - they're arguing from different premises'

That was the punchline of the Rev Sydney Smith's story about two housewives arguing over a fence in his native East End of London. I am reminded of him often when editing the comments to this blog. We are based in Wapping, where Sydney Smith hung out when he was a journalist, and before he was given a living in Yorkshire. One of the local hostelries, where some of my News International colleagues go to entertain their fellows with their customary wit and erudiction at lunchtimes, is named after him. (As a non-drinker, I prefer the Coronarium in St Katharine's Dock, formerly a chapel, now a Starbucks.) I had to write a little about Sydney Smith for the paper on Saturday, for the books section. It was just a few words for,Critic's Chart, but whenever I do this it makes me feel like a proper "writer" for a change and not just a jobbing journo. Links to blogs such as those of my former editor, Peter Stothard, appear in the books pages. In this picture here, from the National Gallery, Smith actually looks more like a journalist than a clergyman but there's not much to choose. The two callings are often closely related. Smith reminds me a little of George Austen, whose son has been working with Hugo Rifkind on our diary section. Our defence correspondent Michael Evans is is also a son of the cloth.

Great Big Book Giveaway (4)

Due to the weather I've been finding it really difficult to function up to normal speed recently, too sluggish to blog...ish. But at last here is the latest book giveaway. James O'Donnell's new biography of St Augustine has got to be one of the best on offer, although there is the usual eclectic variety. For the rationale behind this, see the first one. Please email me with requests, as usual it will be first come first served. Please put 'book giveaway' in the subject header to make it easier for me to manage. If you have time to write short reviews of your books, please post them on the next book blog, not this one. Any past recipients of books are welcome to post reviews on this blog. Thank you, Ruth.

Yearning like a God in pain... for cedar'd Lebanon

I wonder how John Keats, our early 19th century poet misquoted above, might lyricise about Lebanon today. Thank you to the regular contributors to this blog who've asked me to post something on the Middle East. As I've said to them, I've felt too unwise, ill-informed and out of my depth to do so. I fear being another fool rushing in where angels there are none. Like our leaders, I strongly support Israel's right to exist and defend itself. In fact, it was the wisdom of one of those very leaders in the West, none other than Bush himself, that at last made me believe I might have something useful to say. "You see, the ... thing is what they need to do is to get Syria, to get Hizbullah to stop doing this shit and it's over." Well the thingy I say is, President Bush, you all turn down your air conditioning units over there and stop guzzling so much gas and then we might not be sweltering over here in a world that in every respect seems to be overheating to the point of conflagration and then there might still be cedars in Lebanon , the cedars of God as they are known, in a new Millennium.

Ecusa: I'll cast a spell on you

Reading 30 days in New Directions, I couldn't quite believe my eyes. The Episcopal Book Resource Centre, an "offshoot of the ever-heretical Ecusa Inc", is selling a book of spells by the British witch, pagan, astrologer and mother-of-four, Teresa Moorey. Unaccountably, given a pledge to remove it reported on 19 May, three weeks ago, on the American Anglican Council website, the book is still there. Stand Firm first broke the story here, with lots of entertaining links. Moorey has been a witch all her life but describes in this BBC interview how difficult it was to "come out" as such at the age of  20. Teresa's own page is here. It is staggering really. Just when my own liberal principles come to the fore and I start to wonder whether everyone is not being just a bit too tough on Ecusa, they go and do something like this. Never mind what planet they're on, what church do they think they're in? Not mine. Druidism and celtic religions might have been anglo in origin, but they can hardly be called Anglican, and surely not episcopalian. See Titusonenine for more debate on this, and also Drell's Descants.

Great Big Book Giveaway (3)

Another week and another list of book to give away. Today you also have a guest blogger (oh ok then, I'm here on work experience). Although I am a journalism student, nothing has prepared me for the mountain of books that is the Great Book Giveaway, so I am thrilled (perhaps) to be packaging up another 20 books to send to prospective reviewers. It certainly makes a change from previous work placements where I covered locals in a small town arguing over A-frame advertising boards. I've also been told off by Tessa Jowell and knocked on several hundred doors. Such is life when one is looking for a job. Perhaps The Times will be so impressed by this hurriedly-typed effort and offer me a job on the spot. Then again, perhaps I should just remind you that as before, all we ask is a short comment on the blog when you have read the book. So take your reading glasses, find a title you like the look of and email Ruth your request. Please do not post book requests as comments. Thank you, Dominic Tobin.

Great Big Book Giveaway (2)

Yes I really am giving books away. To see the rationale for this, look here. Those books went in 24 hours so I'm putting 20 up this time. This one's the last on the list, see below. Plse don't post requests as comments, email them to me at ruth.gledhill@thetimes.co.uk. And if you have the time, please do post a comment about the book on the blog when you've read it. Ruth.

Great Big Book Giveaway (1)

Even though I rarely do reviews, I get sent lots of books by publishers. Sometimes I get sent several copies of the same book. In the past I have given them away to local churches, but now I'm going to experiment with giving them away to you. The books are listed below. If you would like one of these, email me, ruth.gledhill@thetimes.co.uk, with your name and address. I promise I will delete the address from my inbox immediately after posting the book. All I ask in return is that, when you've received and read the book, you post a little comment to this blog telling us all what you thought of it. For the first books on my list, see below. I'll just post ten to start with to see how this goes, but I have about 300 to give away so if it goes well I'll post a lot more next time. If you happen to be the author of one of these books, please don't be offended. It is not that I don't rate the books, it is that there simply isn't room to store them here or at home and this is after all a way of giving them some publicity. It'll be strictly first come first served. Ruth

The Government must act on Faithful Cities

As Rowan Williams said at the press conference to launch Faithful Cities, one of the most unjust and far-reaching developments in our country has been the loss of the statutory status for the youth service. Dr Williams described how this has led to a drop-off in funding and a consequence surge in drug addiction, crime and other problems among the young. He had seen this at first hand during his time as a bishop and archbishop Wales. If the Faithful Cities report led to even this alone being redressed, it will have been worth the many hours of painstaking consultation, writing and working that has gone into it.  Our reports in Tuesday's paper are here and here. Here is the website for the document itself. Thinking Anglicans has some good links to other coverage here. (This and other pictures by Times photographer Chris Harris: Two Archbishops on walkabout on typical English summer's day in Camden.)

'Pray to Mother Jesus' says Ecusa

I am indebted to Kendall Harmon at Titusonenine for pointing me to this story, which he links to from his site with the advice: 'Check it out'. The Women's Ministry page of Ecusa, the Church of England's Anglican brothers and sisters of the US, has on it a new eucharistic liturgy. As commentators have pointed out, the flames in the bottom left hand corner of the page might seem appropriate to some. As might the start of the confession: 'Most merciful Lady, we confess that we have separated ourselves from you in thought, word and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone.' Devotion to God the Mother in Anglican churches is not new, but this is the first time writing about religion that I can recall a liturgy where Jesus is actually feminised into a mother as well.

Da Vinci Code - surely this film cannot damage religion

If the churches could command such large and attentive congregations as that which filled The Empire in Leicester Square last night for a preview of The Da Vinci Code, their problems would be over. We sat through two hours of ritual, symbol and mystery, along with several chunks of sermonising and a bit of mortification thrown in for good measure, while remaining rapt in unusually plush pews. Personally, I loved it. I had been dreading the mortificaton scenes with Silas but in the end they were tame, compared to Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. There was almost no sex. But there was lots and lots of religion,lots about the transfiguring grace of women and in particular Mary Magdalene, and lots of what could almost pass for reverence. I don't see why the churches need worry about this film, although I can see why some men in the churches might. My own brief review for the paper is online here. See James Christopher's review from the preview in Cannes here. There are blogs on this here, Metacatholic here, Dave Walker at The Cartoon Blog here and Dave Lucas here. (Update 18 May: For a readable account of why any of this matters, read Boris Johnson here. Dan Brown is the new Arius, he argues. And for a selection of the most readable reviews, see the Rotten Tomatoes site here.)

One interesting feature I neglected to mention when posting this blog at first was a protest from a quarter that has not received much coverage to date - campaigners for those with albinism. Silas, the murderous monk, is an albino. One in 17,000 have albinism, and the Albinism Fellowship was handing leaflets out at Leicester  Square last night. The fellowship has offered to brief the filmmakers and has put up stories of real-life people with albinism on its website, where the picture above is taken from.

Da Vinci Code damaging faith - official

  It's official: the Da Vinci Code has damaged faith in the doctrines of Christianity as taught by the Roman Catholic Church. See the full ORB poll carried out by Austen Ivereigh's Da Vinci Code Response Group here. Full story below. To the left is a Da Vinci-style poster of the chapter of Manchester Cathedral, which is planning a Da Vinci Mass at the end of the month. The organiser, Canon Robin Gamble, second from right, who will be 'starring' as Opus Dei 'monk' Silas, reassures me that he does not wear a cilice, ever, not even in Lent.  Gamble is promsing a 'deep, unusual form of prayer mass experience' on 30 May. The film opens at Cannes on Wednesday - see our Times Online story here. See and comment on my own review from Tuesday night's moviepress preview here.

RC Da Vinci Code row

On the website of the Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor's diocese of Westminster is the statement from the Da Vinci Code 'response group'. This was co-ordinated by Austen Ivereigh, the Archbishop of Westminster's public affairs director. Austen also wrote a piece in the Spectator which I reported last week. Among the members  of the Da Vinci Code response group was Peter Jennings, the Catholic commentator, who has condemned and distanced himself from the group's statement. I have been asked to make clear in reporting this that this dispute is absolutely and utterly not connected in any way with Peter's role as Press Secretary to the Archbishop of Birmingham, the Most Rev Vincent Nichols. Peter, third from left, is pictured here with senior members of Opus Dei at the organisation's recent media conference in Rome. Meanwhile the Church of England has launched its own DVC website, along with online poll, here. It has interesting links to a site that discusses in depth aspects of Christianity such as whether Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, or whether Jesus really did kiss her on the lips, as suggested in the gnostic gospel of Philip. There is a good blog, Cranky Insomniac, discussing it here with links to other blogs.

Poetry please

The Dean of Southwark, pictured here showing the Prince of Wales, a great friend of Islam, around his cathedral, had a little dig at the faith of Muslims in his Cambridge University sermon at St Bene't's on Tues. You can read more in our brief story online.

But he opened his sermon with a wonderful joke: 'Someone told me recently of a conversation between a bear, a lion and a chicken.  The bear said, ‘When I growl the entire forest freezes in terror.’ The lion said, ‘Well, when I roar the savannah stops, stilled by dread.’ The chicken said, ‘I don’t know why you two make such a noise, I only have to cough and there is global panic.’

Papa Benedetto is Father Christmas

You thought I was kidding didn't you? But here is the proof. Here is a 21st century representation of Santa Claus, or St Nicholas, if this picture is real, which it certainly is. So first we had the new Pope stepping out in the red shoes, and how here he is in the 'camauro', the red hat with fur trimming that was popular with pontiffs in the 17th century as well as Pope John XXIII, buried in it in 1963. Since Advent is a time of confession, I must confess that when Cardinal Ratzinger was elected Pope, the last person I associated him with was St Nicholas, the fourth century dowry giver and patron saint of children and sailors. And I will need to see a long white beard before being truly convinced.

A miracle for John Henry Newman

Back in 1991, I wrote my first story about the process to canonise Cardinal John Henry Newman.

It was then that the late Pope John Paul II awarded him the title Venerable in recognition of his 'heroic virtue'. Nearly 15 years later, Cardinal Newman is close to beatification after the miracle cure of a man in Boston, a deacon who wishes to remain anonymous. He had been suffering from spinal problems and is completely recovered after the intercession of Newman. If the miracle passes examination by the Vatican and Newman is beatified, those supporting the 'cause' must then go through the whole process again of finding another miracle and having it proven before he can be canonised.