Jenny Taylor's blog

Good for Michael Lawson, Archdeacon of Hampstead, for getting his short harrowing film India’s Forgotten Women onto the big screen at Leicester Square’s Vue in London's West End last night.

It’s the first time, according to the press release, a human rights charity has attempted to film the dalit scandal.

As England reels from the horror of the Cumbrian slaughter, one small village in a similarly lush and hilly corner of Nigeria is coping with grief of an altogether different magnitude.  I try to imagine the 371 mutilated bodies lying beneath the sweet red soil of Dogo Na Hauwa (the name has since been changed to Gyang-buruk) half an hour out of Jos - and fail utterly.  The sun is shi

This is not the church as I know it.  This is ECWA – the offspring of the Sudan Interior Mission, a five million strong Presbyterian denomination centred in Plateau State’s uneasy capital Jos.  Sassy, less solemn than the Anglican churches I know in Uganda and Sudan – and my hosts this week.

Kind, brave and perplexed by the Muslim enmity with which they are either forced to live – or migrate, a phenomenon now on the increase from this 99 per cent Christian area on Nigeria’s religious faultline.

Can Islam be reformed? What role, if any, should government play in bringing about reform?

I admit I was apprehensive.  The words Deobandi Dar-ul-Uloom had haunted me for years – and here I was preparing to drive there to check it out.

Just a 20-minute drive west of Varanasi, where the gods that decreed the caste system are still worshipped with fire, live the poorest people on earth.

They are the Musaha, the ‘rat people’, who have nothing else to live off but the field rodents with whom they have adapted a remarkable partnership.

In a dusty old chapel behind the Civil Lines in Delhi, prayers of thanksgiving will be said at noon today by three Indian priests for a planning decision a long way away - in Westminster.

They – and we, for I am their guest - will give thanks for the fight to save St Mark’s Church, North Audley Street, Mayfair in the Parish of Charing Cross, West London.

Hopes of a British Islam may be closer to being realized than people think. And it’s not good news.

I turned up unannounced last week at the Dewsbury markaz – so-called European headquarters of the Tablighi Jama’at, in its unlikely green and rolling Yorkshire milltown setting. 

An anonymous clergyman accused the Church of England of ‘institutional opposition to the gospel’ at the launch of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FCA) in London today.

He told the conference at Westminster Central Hall how his church plant had been hounded out of several venues by the Area Dean, accused of being a ‘cult’.

A recording of the nameless priest was relayed to the audience of 1600 Anglicans during the afternoon sessions.

[This blog was published by Times Online http://timescolumns.typepad.com/gledhill/2009/07/praying-for-patients-debate-taking-place-now.html on 1 July 2009.]