Jenny Taylor

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 »

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. 

‘Nearly 3,000 mosques could be breaking law over marriage registration’.

A wave of church bombings puts Christians on the frontline in Iraq.

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.]

Police were called to a debate in London on ‘Shariah Law’ after violence erupted over segregation.

Leadership at loggerheads over ambitious Newham site, reports Jenny Taylor.

I realized quite suddenly that I was in love with India.  It had been building up, from admittedly inauspicious beginnings.  The suffocating yellow dust of Delhi, the huddled poor in filthy rags sitting by miserable little fires on every patch of waste ground; the scabby dogs and dying puppies; the way nothing ever seems to be finished off, or final; the traffic that careens crazily along pitted highways; the way no one, literally no one, can drive in a straight line, or give way.

We travelled through a seeming paradise all day yesterday to get to the edge of hell. All day the calm beauty of the Orissa countryside seduced us. White long-horned cattle against deep red sandstone-mud cottages; thatched hay-ricks on stilts, the harvest safely gathered in. An old man in a fine white handspun dhoti walking calmly behind his single cow, umbrella aloft against the still fierce winter sun. A small boy with a string of shells and tiny bells around his loins. Women in dazzling saris washing clothes in ponds full of lotus flowers.