Jenny Taylor

The thoughts of Benedict

by - 12th February 2013

Amid all the sturm und drang of media-generated ‘shock’ at the Pope’s abdication, the sheer breathtaking nastiness, hypocrisy, and conspiracy theories of commentators without a religious bone in their bodies (and some who believe they have), you might not learn much about the great man himself. 

So I reproduce here a few perhaps surprising bons mots garnered in preparation for a Russia Today TV interview:

Leveson, the megamosque and reporting Islam

by - 5th December 2012

Tonight at 6pm (Wednesday 5 December) Newham Council’s Strategic Development Committee meets to hear why its officers are recommending refusal of outline plans for the Riverine Centre, aka ‘megamosque’. 

In a fairly scary YouTube video, one Sheikh Haitham al-Haddad, yet another pantomime bearded finger-wagger who has set up home among the infidel and who, according to Quilliam Foundation has ‘tens of thousands of followers’ – has called for a protest of up to 15,000 Muslims with their families outside the council offices. 

Women bishops

by - 21st November 2012

One small thought.  If the church is advocating ‘flat structures’, is anti-hierarchy, professes a saviour who told his disciples not to lord it over each other, and went everywhere with people whom he described as ‘friends’ and whose slave he insisted on being right to the very end, why do they want bishops?

The Christians who run a Delhi madrasa

by - 31st October 2012

As Islamophobia Awareness Month starts on Friday 2 November at the London Muslim Centre, here’s an example of Islamophilia, sent me by a Muslim friend, that might cheer things on a bit. 

Christians in Delhi are running a madrasa for girls in a slum district.

They’re not just any old Christians either.  They’re the inheritors of the extraordinary legacy of the Cambridge Brotherhood  (since renamed Delhi Brotherhood Society) who founded St Stephen’s Hospital and St Stephen’s School – alma mater of Rajiv Gandhi.

Tom Holland's Islam film: the scholar versus the booby

by - 5th September 2012

Historian Tom Holland is bravely shrugging off Twitter threats this week following broadcast of his Channel 4 documentary Islam: the Untold Story.

What’s been even harder for him to take is the media’s inability to cope with it: religious illiteracy to coin a phrase.

Now Channel 4 have cancelled the screening party due to be held next week.

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