Looks like the football is going to clash with the carol services and we’ll all find ourselves at Messi Church

Philip North, Bishop of Burnley, Twitter, 18 December (as the World Cup Final approached extra time)

A society may be secular in its procedures . . . but it will still need the argumentative grit of the worshipping mentality to keep it asking moral questions and not reducing those questions to issues about majority opinion. This surely is one of the most important distinctions between a fully lawful democracy and a majoritarian tyranny, whether religious or secular

Rowan Williams, Reith Lectures 2022, Radio 4, first broadcast on 7 December, available on BBC Sounds

My worry about the lukewarmness [of tolerance] is that it can be simply a patronising, marginalising strategy that says: ‘Well, if a few eccentrics are so determined to carry on these outmoded and outrageous practices and beliefs, we can probably squeeze them in somewhere and hope they die off.’ It’s the granny-flat view of religious tolerance

Ibid.

There’s definitely a puritanical belief on the left that consumption is sinful: shut down people’s modes of transport or attack works of art. That’s quite extraordinary, isn’t it? That’s like an instinct from the Cromwellian era: smashing up the stained glass

Robert Harris, in conversation with Tom Holland, The Spectator, 17 December

The legal barrier against euthanasia and assisted suicide is there for a purpose. It is a line in the sand that prevents us slipping into a culture of death-dealing. Crossing it would not produce a culture of compassion. It would brutalise an entire society

Melanie Phillips, The Times, 12 December

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