Recent birthday boy!

Writing in the Guardian, Julian Baggini referred recently to the tendency of religious people to be critical of political or social wrongs, but to be jolly nice to the representatives of other religions. He repeats an anecdote (from Simon Blackburn) in which the representatives of various faiths react to each other’s presentations, saying, “Wow, […]

It is now 20 years since, as the book itself explains, I was among the students taken by Lama Chime Rinpoche on a pilgrimage to his home monastery in Kham, eastern Tibet. We were the first group of westerners ever to have permission to enter that region. From Beijing via Xining and on to […]

Baroness Warsi has claimed that “intolerant secularisation has to be held back by reaffirming the religious foundations on which our societies are built”, while the Pope is reported to have recently attacked “atheist extremism” and “aggressive secularism”. I’m not at all sure that I would recognise “intolerant secularisation” if I came across it. “Intolerant […]