Jesus, Mary and Joseph and the wee donkey! Can we just move this thing along, before it drives us all round the bloody bend?

Superintendent Ted Hastings, quotation from Line of Duty (spoken by Adrian Dunbar, written by Jed Mercurio) that has gone viral since it was broadcast on 25 April

The moral space in which the finale of Line of Duty leaves its characters is —perhaps appropriately for something that might or might not be the end — a penultimate space. It’s a space that calls for patient and impassioned efforts, individually and collectively, to bend the arc a little way further in the direction of justice

Professor Rachel Muers, Church Times online, 5 May

In truth the issues at stake in today’s culture wars are bred of very specific cultural assumptions. That empires are evil; that hierarchies of race or class or gender are wrong; that it is more virtuous to be oppressed than to be an oppressor. But these views are not undebatable “givens”. They are not, uncomfortable though it may make many of us feel, self-evident truths. Not remotely so. All are deeply rooted in the great seedbed of Christian theology and history. . . A culture war, properly speaking, is a war over sublimated theology

Tom Holland, The Sunday Times, 2 May

God might be dead, but his shadow, immense and dreadful, continues to flicker, even as his corpse lies cold. Progressives taking to the streets are no less in thrall to it, no less its acolytes, than are the devout and the socially conservative. God cannot be eluded simply by refusing to believe in his existence. Any condemnation of Christianity as patriarchal and repressive derives from a framework of values that is itself Christian through and through

Ibid.

God has tremendous influence on the Israeli experience. Without Him there is no Meron and no disaster. Therefore there is no point in convening a government commission of inquiry without inviting experts on God, who will interpret the event from a theological perspective. . . What does the bereaved father care what the commission will say? God took his son. The question is “why.”

Roger Alpher, columnist, Haaretz, 3 May

Some things I would read and really love. And other things, I would read and say, “Oh, that must be a typo”

Kathy Ireland, former model, Fox News, 3 May

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