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.
Prayer is often understood as asking for things, but in the Gospels it appears as something quite different. It is not a means of control, but a moment of release — a stepping back from the self and a return to what is real. In prayer, one lets go, sees more clearly, and, however briefly, is set in the right direction.
Crime and punishment are often treated as opposites: wrongdoing on the one hand, and the infliction of penalty on the other. Yet much of human conduct takes place under conditions of partial understanding. We act, judge, and react without seeing fully. If this is so, then the instinct to punish—to return harm for harm—rests on a confidence in our own clarity that may not be justified. The question is not whether wrongdoing occurs, but how we respond to it: whether we perpetuate the cycle, or bring it quietly to an end.
This article traces the history of Iran from the end of the Second World War to the present day. It examines the collapse of imperial influence after 1945, the 1953 coup that strengthened the Shah’s rule, and the dramatic upheaval of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. It also considers the long Iran–Iraq War, tensions with Western powers, disputes over Iran’s nuclear programme, and the country’s role in wider Middle Eastern politics. Through these developments Iran has moved from monarchy to Islamic republic while remaining a central actor in regional and global affairs.
The Bible recognises that societies organised around wealth and power easily drift toward injustice. Yet it offers no political blueprint for a perfect society. Instead, it proposes a moral framework built on prophetic criticism of injustice, limits on the accumulation of wealth, and—most radically—an inner transformation of the human heart. The teaching of Jesus challenges not only unjust systems but the human desire for possession and status that sustains them.
Religion can be understood not as literal cosmology but as a symbolic language through which humanity reflects on its own existence. From Feuerbach and Durkheim to modern psychology, religious ideas reveal how rational animals attempt to interpret consciousness, morality, and the mystery of being human. Seen this way, the emergence of reflective awareness is not a tragedy but one of the great gifts of evolution.