And of course that&#39s just where the problems lie. Though people on both sides appeal to what is natural, nature unhelpfully supports both sides liking both consistency and variety in gender and sexuality. So most people are male or female, but there are some who are born with unfixed gender. Most

There is a kind of tribalism in us all which can make us feel uneasy, even threatened at times by difference. But our prejudices often tell us more about ourselves than we would like to admit. When the Quran says &quotwe have made you into nations and tribes so that you may get to know one another,&

Though it may be a small incident, it does raise the issue of personal responsibility and respect towards others, what should and shouldn&#39t be said in public. But it seems to me that it is also another example of religious sentiment being singled out, even privileged, because it&#39s religious, n

Last week, I was in Bruges. We were standing in front of yet another unbelievably stunning painting by the Flemish artist Hans Memling, in a 12th century hospital built specifically for the poor, when my daughter said: &quotOh no. Another picture of Jesus. Did they ever paint anything else?&quot上周我去

In the front gardens, even in the rain, I notice the first signs of spring and the greyness of winter giving way to small yellow white and purple flowers. Spring is rising in all the animals which include us humans. So we smile good mornings to our neighbours and put out food for our fellow creature

To be compassionate is, if we take the word to bits, to suffer with another, to feel their suffering almost as if it is our own. So someone can work hard to relieve suffering, and be highly skilled in doing so, without thereby exhibiting compassion - they could simply be doing their job and enjoying

The debate on gay marriage is making me uncomfortable. Columnists tell me breezily that I should welcome it because of equality. Catholic and Anglican Bishops say I should shun it because it undermines one of the fundamental building blocks of society. Now my instincts are liberal. I think the intro

The argument on how to get the balance right between the right to privacy in private life and the importance of having a free press working in the public interest to expose truth is still continuing. When I look for guidance in the New Testament, I come across these striking words said by Jesus,ther

But social security carries a risk: the risk that some will abuse the system, taking without giving. It&#39s a risk we seem increasingly unwilling to accept. Attitudes are changing. Yet coming down hard on the unemployed also carries a risk. The risk that we penalise those who want to work but canno

William Shakespeare wrote of the seven ages of man, starting with the puking infant and the whining school boy, through the lover, the soldier, the authority of the middle aged justice, then the slippered pantaloon, ending with the dependency of old age, sans teeth sans eyes, sans taste, sans everyt

So, as we continued walking through the city, I played a game, trying to separate what I thought was inspired by a true faith in God, and what was not. It quickly became difficult: for every almshouse there was a wealthy patron who&#39d paid for it the money made in the market might have raised the

It was the late 70s and we thought him almost a god, my school friends Helen and Anne and I. An actor-director undergraduate, impossibly tall, dark and drop dead gorgeous, he co-hosted a party every summer for which all the guests had to dress in white. Everything he did was cool and desirable. Unti

Over the last few days we have seen and been reminded of two massacres. Last weekend Norway remembered the first anniversary of the 77 victims of a bomb and gun shooting. During a brief television clip a young Norwegian man said that this tragedy hadn&#39t changed Norway&#39s commitment to an open a

The road to peace and reconciliation is a complex and painful process, whether in national or indeed individual conflicts. It involves the conquering of fear, the dealing with bitterness and outrage, and the building of trust. It can be supported or subverted by those outside of the immediate situat

For so long we have fought to be treated the same as men. And of course we have equal value in God&#39s sight, and deserve equal pay, equal rights and opportunities. But we are not the same. That&#39s the point. I will make a colleague and a companion meet for you, God says, fitting, appropriate and

The London Olympics has given us new vocabulary: ORNs and PRNs. Or as we&#39ve been hearing, Olympic Road Network and Paralympic Road Network. And as from today London commuters travelling along the Olympic network will have to beware of the 30 miles of Olympic Lanes crisscrossing the capital to spe

Last Friday a distinguished Anglican clergyman, the Rev Paul Oestreicher, told us that in his opinion Jesus Christ was probably gay because of his affection for his beloved apostle St John. Next day, however, the former Tory MP and Times columnist Matthew Parris challenged the very idea of an exclus

The spirit of the late Sir Jimmy Savile was alive and well in the Savile Hall in Leeds two days ago when personal items were sold to benefit his favourite charities. In a 12-hour sale over 350 items raised &#163330,000 for charity. Rolex and Rolls-Royce, shades and shirts all went under the hammer t

As things are, I see two dangers and they are linked. The first is that if the Church is quick to assert and slow to listen, it can give the impression to its own members that moral insight is never to be had outside Christianity and that can be heard by others as strident and bigoted. It may also l

It is said that faith is both a gift and a task. By Saturday this week most Muslims around the world will have begun observing the month of Ramadan, the ninth month of the Muslim lunar calendar known as the month of fasting. Between sunrise and sunset, the adult and able Muslim, neither eats nor dri

Risk is endemic in human affairs. To say to someone &quotI love you&quot or to say in church &quotI believe&quot can never be risk-free undertakings. They are to make investments in things that are not fully under one&#39s control. The other person may not love you back. The God in whom you stake yo

The Bible&#39s boring, everyone knows that. Phares begat Esrom and Esrom begat Aram and Aram begat Aminadab. When I was teaching public bible reading in our church, I made the lesson readers practice with a telephone directory, to learn how to make it interesting. Suddenly entrance, ancestry has bec

Perhaps it&#39s only when we fully accept that we will die that we can fully accept how alive we are right now.Death brings perspective, then. It brings us back to life and it asks of me, how, now, will I live? A friend works at a hospice, and recently she cared for a man who just had days left. The

Few of us want to appear dependent: witness the rugged determination of many older people to resist support to which they&#39re entitled and the intense frustration of some who&#39ve spent a lifetime caring for others who now find it painfully difficult to accept that they&#39re the ones who must be

In a more agnostic culture than the one I grew up with it&#39s a challenge to know how to talk meaningfully about something so enormous when we don&#39t really understand it. There is scepticism about the afterlife these days. But however sceptical people may be about heaven and hell, it always feel

The Passover season is well and truly on us.We&#39re preparing our homes for the festival of freedom, with its special foods and elaborate rituals, one of the oldest religious rituals in the world, and one of Judaism&#39s most sacred moments. What&#39s special is that it&#39s observed not in the syn

J. K. Galbraith once said, &quotPolitics is not the art of the possible. It consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.&quot He could have been speaking of the decisions we keep putting off about how we pay for future care of the elderly. Yet the urgent need for decisions was un

These well-informed young people had a very modest interest in the print media. Unlike me, they didn&#39t feel their day was incomplete without reading a newspaper.Total newspaper circulation has been declining by roughly a million copies each year. And yet a review of the main stories in the nation

The government and the Labour Party disagreed yesterday about what sort of enquiry there should be into the Libor scandal, but they both agreed there&#39re needs to be such an enquiry. Something went wrong and it&#39s important to find out why. What interests me, however, is a very much bigger quest

Surely nothing tests the faith of the believer as much as this - the sudden, frightening, violent death of those we love.There have been many attempts to reconcile intellectually such unbearable tragedies with faith in a loving God. They range from the not wholly convincing to the quite appalling. T