Will Heaven

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Originally published in The Catholic Herald - 10th January, 2010 edition
Perhaps I should have carried on with the leftovers of Christmas television. Or hunted down a board game. But instead, with a few friends, I sat down last week to watch The Boy in Striped Pyjamas, a film (based on the book by John Boyne) [...]

The traditional family is on the way out, the head of the Family and Parenting Institute said this week. No one can argue with that. For years, divorce has been seen as normal (if not quite the norm), and the decline of the nuclear family continues.
As a consequence, Dr Katherine Rake said, children are no [...]

‘Is it really necessary to avoid meat on a Friday?” my grandmother once asked Dom Antony Sutch. “Well,” my old headmaster replied with a straight face, “I’ve always rather liked crab.”
Benedictines have always, in my experience, had wonderful senses of humour. Another Downside monk, Dom Raphael Appleby, once told me about a dear old lady [...]

I was recently invited to spend a weekend at the Abbey of Lagrasse in the south of France. Here’s a feature about it, which is in this week’s Catholic Herald:
Historians struggle to date Lagrasse. A founding charter survives from the eighth century, but it only indicates that the abbey was established by the time Charlemagne ruled [...]

It has been a crucial week for the Conservative Party. Their conference – which I attended in Manchester – confirmed that they will be governing Britain by this time next year.
Four years ago, that prediction would have seemed ludicrous. And it seems fair to say the Tories owe their change of fortunes to David Cameron. [...]

This Notebook column was originally published in The Catholic Herald.
Aggressive secularism and militant Islam are the greatest threats to Britain’s Christian heritage, said the Anglican Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, in a recent interview. Well, I would like to add one more to that list. I’m going to sound like a cynic, but bear with [...]

This news story was originally published in The Catholic Herald.
A Catholic family of adventurers has set a new world record for the longest solar-powered flight by electric paramotor.  Along with a group of friends the Cardozo family spent 15 days flying from Monte Carlo to Morocco, a distance of around 1,250 miles. The adventure was [...]

This story was originally published in The Catholic Herald (front page splash)
Eight Pakistani Christians were killed, 50 homes destroyed and two churches burned when a rampaging mob of up to 3,000 Muslims tore through the town of Gojra, in eastern Pakistan, last Saturday. The victims, who included two young children, were either burned alive or [...]

This column was originally published in The Catholic Herald
How does the son of a renowned NHS consultant, given the best education money can buy, end up imprisoned, aged 20, after planning to suicide bomb a crowded shopping centre? Isa Ibrahim was sentenced to 10 years in jail last week. He was in the advanced stages [...]