Culture Articles
George Jacob Holyoake
In 1842 George Jacob Holyoake became the last person in this country to be convicted of blasphemy in a public lecture, delivered at the Cheltenham Mechanics Institute. In reply to a question from the audience, he had wondered that, in view of the cost of the church, whether we were not...
Naming the animals
Even if you couldn’t read it, in previous centuries the Bible was thought important. It had a kind of magic power. It might even be useful: being able to quote a verse of Psalm 51 might save you from the gallows. Nowadays the Bible, for many people, would be handier...
Images of Christ: Standing at God’s right hand
Like Coventry Cathedral, the location of last month’s art work, Llandaff Cathedral in South Wales was heavily bombed during the second world war. When it was repaired in the 1950s, one unusual feature added to the twelfth century cathedral was a contemporary version of a medieval roodscreen, intended to...
Words and images in Glasgow
As part of Refugee Week 2017 Glasgow Meeting played host to two challenging plays. Journeymen Theatre performed a double bill: Feeding the Darkness, on state-sanctioned torture, and The Bundle, which tells the story of a woman negotiating the UK asylum system. Simultaneously, we welcomed This Light that Pushes Me, a photographic...
Images of Christ: Tablets of the law, tablets of the word
Words set in stone have a long history in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The first version of the Ten Commandments was believed to have been inscribed by the finger of God (Exodus 31:18). Funerary inscriptions from the Roman catacombs are among the earliest visual forms of Christian witness. They are characterised by...
Moment’s benediction
A moment takes place between seeing and knowing we’ve seen. A moment of awe, a small benediction as when I met a fox in the lane, and we paused and looked at the otherness of other.
Holiday or trespass
We pay our pot of gold To reach the sun But not the rainbow’s end There is no rain.
Christian beginnings
Geza Vermes, who died aged eighty-eight in 2013, was probably the greatest Jesus scholar of his time. The last book published in his lifetime, Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicea, AD 30-325, summarises his view of the historical Jesus the Jew, preaching to Jews, not gentiles as scholars such as E...
At the Quaker burial ground, Long Sutton
Beyond the window in the grassy burial ground the long-departed face the stars from which they came. Each modest headstone, laid out in total symmetry and modelled perfectly to fit some ancient template, proclaims the uniformity of all below. There are no crosses, angels or exotic slabs. The wording tells...
Making connections
‘Before we stopped flying.’ It is a very simple image, like a child’s drawing, of two people perched on the back of a dragon, flying across the night sky; in the background is the famous ‘blue planet’ image of the Earth, just touching a circle of gold. The accompanying...