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Quotes of the week

by
17 October 2025

Striking sayings or writings from the past week. Readers’ contributions welcome

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Higher walls and more guards are sadly necessary — but they resemble our hospital in the ravine. They treat the symptoms of antisemitism, not the illness itself. Unless we face the roots of this hatred with honesty and courage, there will, God forbid, be more attacks like the one at the Heaton Park Synagogue

Ephraim Mirvis, Chief Rabbi, The Sunday Times, 12 October

 

What has damaged the Church of England most in recent years is not honest theological difference but the intolerance of it. A broad church only remains broad if conscience is protected and disagreement allowed

Simon Jones, priest in Cumbria, letter in The Guardian, 14 October

 

Even now, bishops . . . are writing articles wondering whether showing a little more public sympathy to the concerns of the 13th September marchers — illegal immigration, Muslim grooming gangs — might bring them back into church. Bless their Christian Nationalist hearts

Alice Goodman, Prospect, November 2025 issue

 

Perhaps . . . we could give up flat-footed quests to prove the existence of the supernatural by rational means; we could start becoming alert to immanence, rather than simply hypothesising transcendence. That is: we could stop treating the natural world as if it were an Agatha Christie novel, where the only real mystery is how exactly the body got into the library

Kathleen Stock, UnHerd, 10 October

 

The Book of Common Prayer was the iPhone of its day — a single device you could hold in your pocket with apps for everything you could possibly need, from comminating your neighbours for moving a land-mark to churching women or determining if you could marry your uncle’s widow

Francis Young, historian, X, 7 October

 

We invite readers’ contributions. Quotations have to be from the past few days (or quoted therein), and we need author, source, and date. Please send promptly to: quotes@churchtimes.co.uk

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