Jenny Taylor

‘Underpants bomber from Kano may not be a one-off’ warns Kwashi

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.

The Church has been urged not to be embarrassed or "awkward" about converting others to the Christian faith in a new document published today.

At least that's what many of the reports said.

Except it's not true. The Church of England did no such thing, and the media reaction indicates the gulf between the church and the secular world in which it operates.

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.

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.

Fatwa to be debated as Deoband spokesman says beheading for apostasy is not supported in law.

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.

The problem with this sect is not that it proselytises, but it seems to have so little contact with the outside world.

Read Jenny's article in the Guardian »