THE news stream this week divides clearly into two: ghastly things from Africa, and quite cheering stories from Europe.

The balancing point is the Reuters correspondent in East Africa, Edith Honan, who has been using Twitter to send out tiny notes on the personalities of each of the 147 students murdered by al Shabaab in northern Kenya last week.

The cumulative effect is very powerful - more so, I found, than the traditional grid of tiny photographs, because on Twitter the reminders keep coming. You can't look away so easily.

In The Times there was a flurry of stories about Christian retaliation against the crimes of Boko Haram in Northern Nigeria. "Christian congregations in northern Nigeria had taunted Boko Haram insurgents with defiant hymns about religious war before their churches were overrun and burnt and their people slaughtered.

"In one of the songs obtained by The Times, the catchy beats belied an ominous message. 'Muslims don't want peace . . . they are destroying people's lives,' the singer claims. 'We Nigeria, we Christian Nigeria, we have come together now, we understand this is a religious war.'"

There is also a story about a Muslim woman and her child hacked to death with machetes by Christian vigilantes. The Times even had a pious leader about the fighting. "A soldier is justified not by his creed but by his actions. History does not make you right; nor do scraps of scripture. Boko Haram's irregulars have raped, terrorised and massacred Christians in the name of Islam. That does not license Christians to visit the same atrocities upon Muslims.

"This Easter, if the Christians of Borno choose to emulate their teacher's gentleness and hold themselves above the monstrous logic of Boko Haram, they will not only win international support. They will put themselves in the right. There are times when mercy is the greatest victory of all."

I don't know how convincing I would find this if I were a Nigerian Christian. When The Times says that "There are no winners in sectarian conflicts," it is simply wrong. Ask the Armenians, the Native Americans, or the Christians of Iraq today. 

THE GUARDIAN'S leader-writer also had a rush of theological enthusiasm. "David Cameron, fishing for votes, has told an Evangelical radio audience that he believes that the message of Easter involves 'hard work and responsibility'. So what does he think really happened at the crucifixion? Who were the criminals nailed up on each side of Jesus? Skivers being sanctioned because they had missed their appointments at the job centre?

"What Christianity brought into the world wasn't compassion, kindness, decency, hard work, or any of the other respectable virtues, real and necessary though they are. It was the extraordinary idea that people have worth in themselves, regardless of their usefulness to others, regardless even of their moral qual-ities. That is what is meant by the Christian talk of being saved by grace rather than works, and by the Christian assertion that God loves everyone, the malformed, the poor, the disabled and even the foreigner."

In The Spectator, Michael Gove had a spirited piece in defence of Christianity, which was mostly noticed because it laid out so clearly the ways in which it is currently attacked: "When Paxo asked Blair about his praying habits, he prefaced his question by suggesting that the Prime Minister and the President found it easier to go to war in Iraq because their Christianity made them see everything narrowly in terms of good and evil, black and white, them and us.

"Where once politicians who were considering matters of life and death might have been thought to be helped in their decision-making by Christian thinking - by reflecting on the tradition of Augustine and Aquinas, by applying the subtle tests of just-war doctrine - now Christianity means the banal morality of the fairy tale and genuflection before a sky pixie's simplicities.

"The contrast between the Christianity I see our culture belittle nightly, and the Christianity I see our country benefit from daily, could not be greater."

Even though this is the Chief Whip writing in the middle of an election campaign, I don't see any reason to doubt Gove's sincerity here. He writes like a man who has actually thought about what he's saying rather than someone playing a tune on the dog whistle.

HE MIGHT have added to his list of daily benefits the rather wonderful church in Wolverhampton which moved its Maundy Thursday service so as not to disrupt a regular drop-in session for the street prostitutes of the parish. According to the Express and Star, this decision followed the disappointment expressed by some of the women when Christmas Day fell on a Thursday last year, meaning that their church was otherwise occupied.