Viewing all items in Resource Category: Editorial

Jill Dando, a popular TV presenter, newsreader, journalist and Crimewatch reporter, was shot dead on the doorstep of her house in Fulham 20 years ago this month, on 26th April 1999. It is still a mystery who killed her. Jill had been brought up as a Baptist, and her funeral took place at Clarence Park...

By Arlen Victoria, Authentic, £9.99 Paralympics champion and Dancing with the Stars contestant Victoria Arlen shares her courageous and miraculous story of recovery after falling into a mysterious vegetative state and how she broke free, overcoming the odds and never giving up hope, eventually living a full and inspiring life. When Victoria Arlen was 11...

Zeno of Verona (d. 371) should be the patron saint of all ministers who suspect that the more things change, the more they remain the same. For instance:  ethnic diversity…church-planting… teaching…. concern for the poor… women’s ministry in the church… sound like modern-day Christian concerns?   Not a bit of it – this was the life...

Some of the most beautiful things in the world have an ugly side. What about the emperor penguin chick, nestling in a feathery pouch above its parent’s feet? There’s a lovely moment when mum and dad greet each other over the gaping beak of their fuzz-ball offspring. Heads bent together, making a heart shape in...

Manchester City Football Club, top of the pile in the Premier League last season and now in the running for more honours, was founded 125 years ago, on 16th April 1894 – as a reorganised church team. The original church team was established in 1880, initially by two churchwardens at St Mark’s (West Gorton), as...

In the month of Christ’s ultimate sacrifice of Himself for us, the martyrdoms of Carpus, Papylus and Agathonice are well worth remembering.  What they said as they died could be said by the many thousands of Christians who are facing persecution all over the world today. Carpus, Papylus and Agathonice lived in Pergamum (Asia Minor)...

It was 300 years ago, on 25th April 1719, that Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe was first published. The book is believed to be second only to the Bible in the number of translations made. The author was born Daniel Foe in London in 1860 and added the De to his name when he was...

 The Easter bunny is a gentle figure of folklore, who seems to have first come from the German Lutherans.  They depicted him as a rabbit who brought coloured Easter eggs to children.  The idea of an egg-giving hare went over to the US in the 18th century, when Protestant German immigrants in the Pennsylvania Dutch...

What was the largest ever Easter egg hunt? The most-ever entrants for an egg hunt competition was 12,773.  It was The Fabergé Big Egg Hunt, as part of World Record London, in London, UK in April 2012. What was the largest-ever decorated Easter egg? This was built in March 2008, by Freeport in Alcochete, Portugal. ...

As a new tax year gets underway, did you know that the men who collect our taxes are working in one of the oldest professions known?  Archaeological evidence dating from 1900 BC includes a clay tablet recording a tax for public works and a papyrus scroll which reveals that even 4,000 years ago, tax-payers had...

What’s the point of Easter? From the Vicar The Beatitudes – ‘Blessed are the Poor in Spirit’ Easter joy A time to mourn Charles Wesley’s hymn for Easter:  Christ the Lord is risen today!   **   Editor:  The Rev Paul Hardingham, on the power that we need… What’s the point of Easter? As we...

Holy Week begins with Palm Sunday, when the Church remembers how Jesus arrived at the gates of Jerusalem just a few days before the Passover was due to be held.  He was the Messiah come to his own people in their capital city, and yet he came in humility, riding on a young donkey, not...