In a three-part lecture series at St Peter’s College, Oxford, Mark Thompson, former Director-General of the BBC has addressed public understanding of, and engagement with, political and other public issues. These lectures naturally touched on questions of political and journalistic integrity, public authority and recent developments in media technology. 1) Is Plato winning the argument? […]

The principal argument advanced in favour of gay marriage appears to be based on a desire of gay people. Gay couples, it is claimed, consider their love equivalent to that of heterosexual couples and want it publicly recognised as such. That is all very well, but love, like religious faith, may be unintelligible to third […]

At present it looks extremely likely that legislation extending the possibility of legal marriage to same-sex couples will be passed in the New Year, and that in spite of strong opposition from voters, churches and even some homosexual people, too. We have blogged before about ‘gay marriage’ here, here, here and here. One aspect of […]

Religious experience is, for many sceptical or simply indifferent secularists, something unintelligible. The idea that there is a God who can become a man and forgive sins — even that there is such a thing as God or as sin — is for them unacceptable. Religious people must remember that this is no simple matter […]

Leaving aside the definite articles and one might, according to taste one’s economic and political points of view,place inverted commas over almost all the termsin this blog’s title. Letus perform the exercise. ‘Euro-Crisis’ This is not, in fact, the crisis of a currency, but rather that of a wholeculture, one spanning the EU as well […]

When Philip Schofield passed a list of alleged sexual abusers to David Cameron on camera it was clear the Prime Minister was not pleased. This was not a simple matter of the government or the Tory party facing charges of ‘honours for cash’ or of political ‘u-turns’. The possibility that senior members of the party […]

School nurses have given [contraceptive] implants or jabs to girls aged between 13 and 16 more than 900 times in the past two years, a survey by The Daily Telegraph has found… A further 7,400 girls aged 15 and under have been given contraceptive injections or implants at family planning clinics… Under the patient confidentiality […]

In a recent lecture at Davos Julian Savulescu argued that it is not beyond the reach of modern science to create human beings with considerably greater powers of intelligence, physical strength and even moral rectitude. It was possible, he suggested, to create a ‘super-human’, a person, or kind of person, capable of transcending ordinary biological […]