From the Editor's Desk, THE TABLET 21 November 2018 Nobody envies Theresa May, but some have come to admire her. She has shown remarkable powers of persistence in a very hostile environment. The draft of the deal under which she is proposing that Britain will leave the European Union appears to have almost no friends.…
Author: Fr. Michael Campion
Homily 32nd Sunday B 2018
The first clear and unambiguous statement in the Bible about resurrection from the dead did not emerge until the middle of the second century BC. And it is in the First Reading for today’s Mass (The Book of Daniel 12:1-3) that we find it, in words addressed to Israelites who were being persecuted for their…
Political class failed the early tests when it came to negotiating Brexit
A sobering and uncomfortable comment on Brexit by Simon Nixon from the Business Section of THE TIMES, 15 November 2018: This is merely the end of the beginning. All that Theresa May has achieved so far is to negotiate an agreement that will allow the UK to exit the European Union in good legal standing,…
Burning injustice of Britain’s forgotten poor
By Rachel Sylvester in THE TIMES, 13 November 2018 It’s the children who stick most vividly in my mind. There was ten-year-old Daniel, who calmly described how he had been homeless. It was frightening, he said, and he was often hungry because the only food he got was at school. Luke was 16 and studying…
32nd Sunday (B) 2018 ~ Remembrance Sunday
One hundred years ago to the day, at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, church bells were rung throughout the land to mark the end of the First World War. Back then, the bells pealed to celebrate victory. One hundred years later, in all the former combatant countries, bells are…
Bill Gates: from software to toilets
By Simon Kuper in the FT Weekend Magazine, 10 November 2018: Whenever Bill Gates visits a slum, an unasked question goes around his mind. “Do you mention to each other that it doesn’t smell good, and I wouldn’t like to live here, or is that just inappropriate?” he told me in a phone interview. “We…
What it means to be a Catholic feminist and why the church must embrace it
By Kaya Oakes in 'America, The Jesuit Review' For over a decade, I have taught a writing class on the intersection between music and social movements at the University of California, Berkeley, where the Free Speech Movement was born. On the first day of class, we talk about the history of protest music, and I…
Homily, 31st Sunday (B) 2018
31st Sunday (B) 2018 It was common in Jesus’ time for Rabbis to question if there was one commandment in the Torah, the Jewish Law, that outweighed all others, one that might be regarded as the basic principle on which life should be grounded. Judaism had over 600 rules or ‘commandments’ in the Law which…
Standing in solidarity with the LGBTQ community is a pro-life issue
By Maureen K. Day in The National Catholic Reporter (USA), 2 November 2018 Being a Catholic is usually pretty easy for me. While I have positions I'm passionate about and particular elements of church teaching that I hold especially close, I've always been grateful for, what Michele Dillon calls in her book Postsecular Catholicism, the "interpretive diversity"…
all the things I wish I’d done
By Melanie Reid in THE TIMES, 3 November 2018 There is a wonderful old Gardeners’ Question Time joke – “When’s the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago” – which is really a universal truth in disguise. When you get to the point in life of pausing to look back over your shoulder, you suddenly…
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