Dan Hitchens is a senior editor at First Things. He is currently co-writing a book about Dr Johnson, and writes The Pineapple Substack.
Donald Trump’s verdict on his audience with Pope Francis – ‘fantastic meeting’, ‘honor of a lifetime’ – may disappoint those who were expecting a showdown. The Pope is supposed to be Trump’s ‘antithesis’, ‘the anti-Trump’, his ‘polar opposite’ and so on and so on. But in the end the meeting was merely awkward, to judge
With Italy facing a referendum that could unseat its president, the EU’s member states in furious conflict over immigration, and Hillary Clinton looking like an increasingly shaky last line of defence, our very own Brexit is being held up as the model of a new, disruptive politics. But its meaning has been debated. For some, Brexit
If Christian Britain is fading away, what will survive of it? One answer seems to be pilgrimage. In the past decade, 30 pilgrimage routes have been created or rediscovered; holy places have seen a 14 per cent growth in visitor numbers since 2013. These figures are recorded by a new organisation, the British Pilgrimage Trust,
The LGBT rights movement — so the story goes — has split the Christian churches in two. On one side are the progressives, who believe that Christianity should accept gay people and recognise gay marriage. Lined up against them are the conservatives, who hold fast to the belief that being gay is sinful. It’s not
According to the Times, Dan Walker, the new BBC Breakfast presenter, is ‘a creationist’. A ‘senior BBC figure’ is quoted as saying that this ‘nutty’ belief would make life difficult for Walker if, say, he had to present a story about a 75,000-year-old fossil. How could he if he thinks the earth is less than 10,000
The ‘red card’ on proposed EU legislation has been hailed by David Cameron as a breakthrough; the ‘Stronger In’ campaign have put it at the top of their list of renegotiation successes. But it already pretty much exists. The very similar ‘orange card’ was introduced by the 2009 Lisbon Treaty. (The European Commission’s website explains how it works.) Here’s a
The Swedish and German authorities say they have never encountered anything like it: groups of men encircling then molesting women in large public gatherings. It happened in Cologne and Stockholm, but is it really unprecedented? Ivar Arpi argues in the new Spectator that it may well be connected to a phenomenon called ‘taharrush gamea’, a form of group harassment
What’s the objection to the new contract? It applies to all junior doctors – that is, doctors who aren’t consultants and GPs – and would change how they’re paid. The major concern is about ‘unsocial hours’ – weekends and nights. At the moment, junior doctors are paid a basic rate for working between 7am and 7pm Monday
Are we really, as David Cameron claimed in his Christmas message, a country shaped by ‘Christian values’? Yesterday’s Evening Standard poll – which found that shopping is three times more integral to Britons’ Christmas than going to church – makes you wonder what the phrase even means. It doesn’t just mean do-goodery, though that is important. About 10 million Britons
Everybody skims over a document at some point: when you’re asked to agree to terms and conditions before accessing wifi, you don’t always look too carefully at the details. But you might hope that the officers of the National Audit Office would be more scrupulous. The NAO – which scrutinises £1 trillion of public spending
Martin Surl, the Police and Crime Commissioner for Gloucestershire, has been buying flipflops. Hundreds of them. Not for the police, but for a local Christian volunteer team of ‘street pastors’. Earlier this year, Surl announced a £40,000 grant to cover the group’s training and resources. ‘Some things are better delivered by people who aren’t the
Back in March, the Plymouth Herald was delighted by ‘a Budget with plenty for Plymouth’. As Mark Gettleson noted on Coffee House at the time, Plymouth is a ‘hyper-marginal city’: both its seats are currently held by Tories with small majorities, Oliver Colvile and Johnny Mercer. So the Chancellor’s generosity may not have come out of
In the run-up to Remembrance Day, my local branch of the Quakers has been displaying a sign on the front door. It reads, with ever-so-slightly combative bold type: ‘Remembering all who have lost their lives in war’. They’re willing to mourn, as long as they don’t have to be patriotic about it. Temperamentally, I’m with
Transgender men and women have a powerful story to tell. Their experiences are often heartrending: we should be appalled that nearly half of young trans people have attempted suicide. Meanwhile, there is compelling neuroscientific evidence to suggest that male and female can overlap, and that for some people gender dysphoria is no more eradicable from
In the ever-noisier debate about campus censorship, one party has been noticeably silent: the universities themselves. Last week, the journalists Julie Bindel and Milo Yiannopoulos were forbidden to debate (on the topic of free speech) by Manchester Students’ Union. Manchester University made no comment. The week before that, Oxford’s SU banned from Freshers’ Fair copies
Try as I might, I can’t make myself furious about the #ShoutYourAbortion hashtag. It is, above all, cause for sadness. Many of the stories women tell about their abortions are, in some form, about social indifference. The women tweeting often say that a baby would have shipwrecked their life chances, that their abortion enabled them
It is a startling about-turn. The National Union of Students, who have played a considerable role in the dismal recent history of campus censorship, are suddenly sounding as though they have ingested the complete works of John Stuart Mill. The ‘basic function of universities,’ the NUS declare, is ‘introducing students to a variety of opinions
The best speeches on the Assisted Dying Bill today were intelligent and sensitive – but not terribly new. The arguments were more or less the same as those in every debate on euthanasia for the last 80 years. Free choice vs concerns about the threat to public safety. So it was in 1936 and in 1969; so it was
As Charles Killick Millard conceded, there was an issue about grandparents. Millard, the leading figure of the Voluntary Euthanasia Legalisation Society back in the 30s, realised that people might cajole their elderly relatives into choosing death. But this had its benefits, he argued: ‘It would make querulous old folk more careful how they dilated upon
In November 2013, the campaign group Abortion Rights announced their first-ever student conference. It was, they explained, in response to ‘many student unions reporting increased anti-choice activity on campuses’. Societies such as Oxford Students for Life, which I’ve been part of for the last couple of years, don’t tend to think of themselves as ‘anti-choice’,
