Scanning a screen is not the same as belonging to anything as complex as a church. When we lose real contact (or should I say contact with the real?) we lose some part of what makes us human

Robert Colls, The New Statesman, 20 March

St Paul told the Ephesians that we are all members of one another. What we have seen in little over a generation is the dismembering of one another. Our public institutions are owned by people we do not know and cannot trace. Our jobs are increasingly provisional and done apart. Our businesses are contracted out. Our connectivity is made possible by a technology that has no edge or centre. Global finance is a betting machine. Our state has been privatised. A senior civil servant once told me that if you wanted to fix our railway system, it would be impossible to bring all those responsible into one room

ibid.

The Waleses . . . have spurned the public twice over. Firstly, by refusing to give of themselves, as gossip-substitutes for an atomised population who would hate village life if they tried it but who still crave the social lubricant of village gossip. And secondly, in declaring through their actions that they themselves still have a real-world community to turn to in times of trouble, and as such have no need of validation from internet strangers

Mary Harrington, UnHerd, 25 March

When Catherine disappeared from view in January after announcing a “planned abdominal operation”, the response from internet truthers was one of irate entitlement. They are now the 1980s tabloids: ravening for intimacies, and making stuff up when thwarted

Helen Rumbelow, The Times, 25 March

Stig Abell: “Are you ‘Woke Welby’?”

Justin Welby: “The trouble is, I could get an Olympic gold medal in sleeping. It’s my favourite part-time occupation”

Times Radio Breakfast, 21 March

Parish church buildings are an important part of our national heritage and local identity, but it is clear that in the coming years fewer of them are going to be used for regular weekly worship. Collectively the Government, the Church and local communities are going to have to work out different ways of maintaining church buildings and putting them to the best use

Sir Tony Baldry, chairman, Association of Festival Churches, letter, The Daily Telegraph, 20 March

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