Religion

For forty years, writes D.M. Hopkinson, the eccentric Vicar of a remote parish in Cornwall led a richly combative life both in High Church politics and in literature.

Tom Holland speaks to Gerard Russell about religion in the Middle East. 

For nearly a hundred years, travellers and archaeologists have been investigating the mysterious ruins of Angkor. Today, writes Michael Sullivan, much of the mystery has been dispelled; but these relics of a vanished civilization still preserve their beauty and dignity.

After being expelled from Portugal, writes J.S. Cummins, France and Spain, the Jesuit order was suppressed by a reluctant Pope.

Lord Balfour, then Foreign Secretary, announced that he viewed with favour a national home for the Jews in Palestine. I.T. Naamani examines the philosophical writings of a remarkable British statesman.

K. Theodore Hoppen describes how the victory of the ultramontanes in 1870 meant that for a considerable time the largest Church in Christendom adopted an attitude hostile to the modern world.

The Vatican Council now in session, writes John Raymond, faces many issues very different from that which dominated its predecessor nearly a century ago.

Findings at a desert site in eastern Syria shed light on pagan, Jewish and early Christian religions.

J.B. Morrall offers his study of the events that led to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and of the French Calvinists’ fortunes thereafter, both at home and abroad, down to the beginning of the present century.

Only in a free political society, declared Lamennais and his followers, could nineteenth-century Catholics hope to evangelize the new age. Complete religious liberty, with disestablishment of the Church, freedom of education and of the press, and the decentralization of governmental authority, writes J.B. Morrall, were among the aims they advocated. His views having been condemned by the Vatican and himself denounced by conservative critics as “Robespierre in a surpliceLamennais at length abandoned the faith to which he had devoted so much talent and energy.