There are certain words in religious speech which are used so often that their meaning is easily assumed rather than examined: God, Spirit, light, grace, glory, kingdom, eternal life. They carry great emotional weight, but they are not always used with precision.
Month: April 2026
An argument that God is not best understood as an external commander, but as the inward source of moral recognition: the strength by which we see the good, stand by it, and give it outward form in law, art, worship, and responsible action. Drawing on Jesus, Paul, Shakespeare, Wilfred Owen, and the failure of external religion, the article reflects on truth, conscience, self-command, and the need to recover the spiritual key to Western moral life.
Some truths cannot be taught as information. They can only be pointed to, lived, and inwardly recognised. Drawing on Ecclesiastes, Paul, Eckhart, Tolstoy, and the teaching of Jesus, this reflection explores the possibility that the divine is encountered not as doctrine but as experience: a depth within consciousness that upholds, illumines, and transforms. Whether that experience comes from beyond us, from within the brain, or from some mystery joining the two, the practical question remains the same: whether we live in contact with that depth or merely skim the surface of life.
From Augustine to Eckhart, from Teresa to Tolstoy and beyond, the same lesson returns: the deepest truth cannot simply be taught from outside but must be realised inwardly. This essay follows that long mystical trajectory through childhood faith, doubt, animism, Jesus’ inward law of love, and the betrayal of his message by empire and institution.
Daniel Daddehs Deutung des Vaterunsers ist rhetorisch geschickt, aber geistlich falsch. Was in den Evangelien mit „Dein“ beginnt — dein Name, dein Reich, dein Wille — wird stillschweigend in „Mein“ verwandelt: mein gewünschter Zustand, meine Manifestation, meine Erfüllung. Das Ergebnis ist nicht eine Wiedergewinnung christlichen Betens, sondern eine moderne Spiritualität des Erwerbs, verkleidet in biblischer Sprache.
Daniel Daddeh’s reading of the Lord’s Prayer is rhetorically clever, but spiritually false. What begins in the Gospels with “Thy” — thy name, thy kingdom, thy will — is quietly transformed into “My”: my desired state, my manifestation, my fulfilment. The result is not a recovery of Christian prayer, but a modern spirituality of acquisition dressed in biblical language.
This morning’s Thought for the Day, given by the Revd Dr Michael Banner of Trinity College, Cambridge, used the death of Desmond Morris to raise an old question in a new form: are human beings fallen angels or risen devils? That reflection led me back to the postwar cultural watershed and to a select list of books that challenged inherited ideas about religion, science, human nature, and modern civilisation.
Christianity, as history has handed it down, is not identical with its original impulse. What may once have been a small Jewish movement, centred on inner change and moral re-alignment, was gradually overlaid by cosmic theology, mythological symbolism, sacramental structure, and institutional dogma. Paul universalized the movement; later centuries elaborated it; orthodoxy organized and defended it. Yet the stripping away of those later accretions need not end in mere negation. Beneath them, the original summons may still be heard: a call to metanoia, to a reawakening of the moral centre, to the recovery of that inbuilt orientation towards the good which the world so easily obscures. If so, the real significance of Christianity lies less in dogma than in the possibility that, beneath all its historical layers, it still preserves a call to become inwardly true.