A question for readers: what is the difference between a Free School, an Academy, and a Swedish School? No, it is not that the latter boasts clog-shod teachers trained in ABBA dance routines, but that they are simply different names for what is essentially the same idea, introduced by the previous Labour Government, and extended […]

As a Catholic and an Englishman I have never quite understood the enthusiasm of some of my European co-religionists for the idea that there must be strict separation between state and Church, and have often thought that the amusement to be derived from watching indignant Frenchmen flail their arms around indignantly about Bishops sitting in […]

‘We live in an age of growing self-indulgence, of hardening materialism and of falling moral standards… When we see around us the havoc which has been wrought, above all among the children, by the breakup of homes, we can have no doubt that divorce and separation are responsible for some of the darkest evils in […]

‘Do we need another word for the great goal of our actions?’ Carolyn Moynihan investigates at MercatorNet.  Read the article here.

A report by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) into the standard of patient care in hospitals and nursing homes has been dubbed by one commentator as a ‘perfect storm’ for euthanasia advocates, and cited as evidence of the growing ‘culture of death’ enveloping health care. Anthony Ozimic, who has previously studied the effect of abortion […]

Can evolution explain human behaviour? This question has recurred among commentators since the publication of the book Supercooperators: Evolution, Altruism and Human Behaviour or, Why We Need Each Other to Succeed by the Harvard professor, Michael Nowak. The basic idea, as he explains here, is that ‘to succeed in life, you need to work together […]

From a guest blogger: ‘What shall we do to-morrow?                                                                                                                                   What shall we ever do?’ – T. S. Eliot If a substance were proved to be edible, legal, and productive of no physical or mental effects beyond an extremely pleasurable but incapacitating intoxication, would it be reasonable to say that there were any moral problems in […]

‘That there is a relationship between morality and aesthetics is an idea which, at various times, writers and artists have been keen for one reason or another to assert. On the face of it there would seem to be a pleasing relationship between the two if we could say that the person most capable of […]