Viewing all items in Resource Category: Editorial

For Good Friday last year, the morning service at York Minister was offered online for everyone to see, anywhere in the world. It’s the most solemn day of the year. Hymns, readings, prayers: all focussed on Christ’s death and its benefits for humanity, for all time. A hundred or so people were in the congregation, alongside choir...

Cadbury Crème Eggs celebrate their 60th birthday this Spring. They have a lot to celebrate: the Creme Egg is the best-selling confectionery item between New Year’s Day and Easter in the UK, with annual sales of more than 200 million eggs, worth about £55 million. Cadbury Crème Eggs were first created by the British chocolatier...

In the New Testament the resurrection of Jesus is presented as a simple historical fact.  He did rise from the grave on that first Easter morning. The four evangelists, and Paul, carefully lay out the evidence. They record for us the details of the empty tomb, the names of those who visited it, the various...

The Coronation’s ‘Ring for the King’ challenge is still urgently looking for more volunteers – several thousand more of them, in fact. The new recruits will be needed if all the church bells in the country are to be rung on 6th May, the day of the Coronation. As we go to press, so far...

Easter eggs. We like them. So much so, that about 80 million are sold in the UK each year. They go on sale early: major supermarkets like Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons, and Waitrose launched Easter-themed confectionery ranges as early as January. Tesco had them on the shelves by 30th December 2022. On average, children in the...

The Saint of an English Army before he was Patron Saint of England, St George may have been a soldier, but he was no Englishman. Some stories say that he was an officer in the Roman army under Diocletian, who refused to abandon his faith during the Terror, and was martyred at Lydda in Palestine...

The Church of England’s General Synod has recently welcomed proposals which would enable same-sex couples to come to church after a civil marriage or civil partnership to give thanks, dedicate their relationship to God and receive God’s blessing. Synod members also voted to “lament and repent” of the failure of the Church to welcome LGBTQI+...

In England in the 1600s, singing in church was confined to simple melodies attached to the words of the psalms. Each line would be sung in turn by a precentor, and the congregation would follow. This was a slow, stilted and rather uninspiring process! When Isaac Watts was 15 years old, he complained to his...

Have you seen the film How to Train your Dragon? It’s set in a Viking village under attack from dragons, who steal livestock and burn down houses. Hiccup, the village Chief’s son, invents a machine to capture dragons. However, when he catches one of the most dangerous dragons, he cannot kill it, when he sees...

“We are not divided but we disagree, and that is very painful. And I will use again the words close to those I used to the Bishops gathered at the Lambeth Conference on a very similar debate. “For some, to question the inherited teaching damages witness and is sinful: you point out that in many provinces across...

It was 90 years ago, on 3rd April 1933, that the first flight over Mount Everest took place. British pilots the Marquis of Clydesdale and Donald McIntyre flew two biplanes over the summit. The two Scots were financed by the striking and rather eccentric Lady Houston, who started life as a chorus girl but through...

If you are exposed to air pollution over a period of many years, you may suffer from depression in later life. Such are the findings of a recent study carried out by a team at Harvard University. It found a correlation between the risk of developing a mental health problem and the amount of time...