Here goes...

I spent a day this week with a young asylum seeker from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and his friends. Jonathan is a gentle, unassuming and quiet 22-year-old, with a broad smile, who loves football, never really knew his father, and was brought up by a friend of his parents in Kinshasa. When he was a student, despite the fact that he and his friends were paying fees, the government defaulted on paying his university lecturers, and so lessons stopped. Jonathan joined a series of political demonstrations against the government, was caught taking a picture of the police and was duly arrested. He was bundled into a car, taken to an isolated spot, tied up and beaten. He still has nightmares recalling his torture at the hands of government agents. To cut a long story short, he eventually managed to get a visa to leave to the UK, as he had relatives here, hoping that things would die down a little before he would return home in due course. Phone calls with friends back in the DR...

On Monday I sat in on a senior meeting of the staff of a London prison, as they recounted the various incidents that had happened over the weekend. It was like listening to a tidal wave of pain. Half a dozen episodes of self-harm, several men found with ligatures around their necks threatening suicide, a number of fires set off in cells, rooms vandalised, a prison officer stabbed in the face by an out of control prisoner wielding a sharpened plastic knife. Visiting the segregation unit was sobering. The tiny rectangular cells, twelve feet by six, with a dirty window opening on a prison yard, were bare, stark, pitiless. The more extreme cases, like the man who stabbed the officer, had been placed in ‘special accommodation’, as a last resort to cool down – a dark, cold box room, with no light, not even a bed – nothing. It is hard to imagine a more desolate and desperate place. On rounds with one of the admirable Anglican Chaplains, I met a prisoner who, high on the unpredictable d...

Despite the claims of Christmas, Holy Week and Easter have always been the central moments of the Christian year. It's the week we come back again to the moment when the Creator of the world, in the person of Jesus Christ, entered the heart of the darkness of that world to rescue and redeem it - the ultimate snatching of victory from the jaws of defeat. It's also the time we remember what it means to be followers of this man.  At one point Jesus used a particularly stark image to say what that means. He said we were to 'take up our cross' and follow him. For centuries, Christians have puzzled over what that involves, but at the time, it was a dramatic picture. Urban dwellers in Roman provinces were used to the sight of condemned criminals carrying the means of their own looming deaths on their backs before undergoing the ultimate punishment. I have been thinking of how I 'take up my cross and follow Jesus' during Holy Week this year. During that dramatic fi...

As Christmas draws near, we begin to think again of the significance of what CS Lewis called “ The Grand Miracle ”. It has been said that the early Christian debates were all about Christology, the Reformation debates concerned Soteriology and modern debates are all about Anthropology: what it means to be a human person. In our modern (or postmodern) world, we are all struggling to work out what true humanity looks like, especially when faced with the man-made destruction we see in Yemen, Aleppo and the rest of Syria. And it is at this time of year that we focus on the Christian answer to that question.  Athanasius, in his great work De Incarnatione , describes human nature as so damaged that it is barely recognisable from what it was originally meant to be. He offers the wonderful image of a portrait that has become so defaced by stains and dirt that the artist needs to sit down and re-paint the image in all its original glory. This is what God does in the Incarnation: “He,...

The past few months have been a bruising one for our country. The debate over our continued membership of the EU has divided opinions significantly, just as it did in Scotland over the independence debate. The tone of the debate has been unpleasant, and will leave a damaged government, a fractious nation, and contribute to a dangerous trend of a more polarized world. While the USA flirts with a version of politics that threatens global stability, the last thing we need here is an angry Britain, with hurts that may take years to heal. The main lines of the debate have been gone over many times. Each side has its own stronger points – the economic arguments seem to lean towards the Remain campaign, with most financial analysts and commentators arguing for the merits of staying in. Immigration however remains a significant concern for many people, especially perhaps those whose wages might be undercut by immigrants from other European countries who are willing to work for a lower wag...