On 6 December 2022, the Church of England published the Decision of the Winchester Diocese Bishop’s Disciplinary Tribunal that the Revd Dr Stephen Sizer had committed misconduct
under the Clergy Discipline Measure 2003. The Tribunal was held following a complaint made to the Diocese in 2018 by Mrs Marie van der Zyl, President of the Board [...]
At First Things today, I review The Church of Saint Thomas Paine, a new history of 19th-century American rationalists. The book offers interesting and sometimes amusing portraits
of these men and women, one of whom turns out to be my great-granduncle, M.M. Mangasarian (left), who founded his own rationalist congregation in Chicago in 1900. [...]
A draft of a short paper for a recent symposium I participated in at Notre Dame Law School. Here’s the abstract: A mystery of faith is a truth of religion that escapes human
understanding. The mysteries of religion are not truths that human beings happen not to know, or truths that they could know with sufficient study and application, [...]
A draft of a short paper for a recent symposium at Notre Dame Law School. Here's the abstract: A mystery of faith is a truth of religion that escapes human understanding. The
mysteries of religion are not truths that human beings happen not to know, or truths that they could know with sufficient study and application, but instead truths [...]
It is a kind of commonplace that Protestantism is anti-traditionalist in orientation, preferring a view in which unmediated, personal relationships with God and scripture are
what matter, while Catholicism is traditionalist, emphasizing the accretion of authorities that mediate the connection between religious source and the believer. [...]
From Book II.1 of the Metaphysics: "The investigation of the truth is in one way hard, in another easy. An indication of this is found in the fact that no one is able to attain
the truth adequately, while, on the other hand, we do not collectively fail, but every one says something true about the nature of things, and while individually [...]
Religious affiliation in England & Wales By far the biggest religious news item of the week was the release by the ONS of the 2021 Census data on religious affiliation in England
and Wales. We summarised it here and, helpfully, the Religion Media Centre collated some of the most important media comment as follows: [...]
Excellent news out of Oklahoma: In an official legal opinion, Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor says a state law that prohibits religious entities from operating
a public charter school likely violates the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and “therefore should not be enforced,” based on rulings from both the U.S. [...]
In Ilyin and Others v Ukraine [2022] ECHR 1005, the authorities had refused to register a community of the Unification Church based in Kyiv. Background The “‘Holy Spirit
Association for the Unification of World Christianity’ Religious Community in the Kyiv Obolonsky District”, adherents of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification [...]
