The downside of living through a religious revival is that parking is a nightmare

Tim Stanley, The Daily Telegraph, 21 April

My mother once said to me: “why are there so many children with Down’s Syndrome in Catholic Churches?” I replied: “Because we don’t abort them.” That’s the practical effect of faith, the risk of choosing life, with its obligations and sacrifices, matched by the reward of having others around to love. And if euthanasia is legalised, we might be one of the last places you’ll find folks with dementia as well

ibid.

Every week, 685,000 people go to a CofE church, 650,000 to Catholic Mass, hundreds of thousands more to the pick-and-mix bag of services held by Methodists, Baptists, Pentecostalists and others. Compare that to, say, Premier League football, which gets a lot more media promotion than Jesus but only pulls in about 400,000 a week, and only then during the season (which, admittedly, seems eternal)

Stephen Bleach, The Sunday Times, 20 April

Rather than threaten British Christianity, the rise of Islam may have helped its revival by defending religion, making it harder to disparage. Wes Streeting, the health secretary, now speaks openly about his Anglicanism just as Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, talks about Islam. . . Both may now think that “doing God” is no longer the liability it was in Tony Blair’s day

Fraser Nelson, The Times, 19 April

I stopped using the ruinously expensive electric heating in our small, Grade I listed church, and instead provide worshippers with a fleece blanket. The cost of 120 of these — plus the airtight plastic boxes for storing them — was £400. This was 1 per cent of the sum that net-zero works on our building were expected to cost

Clarissa Reilly, churchwarden, letter in The Daily Telegraph, 19 April

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