The Government has rejected a recommendation from the parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) that school pupils of “sufficient maturity and intelligence” should be able to opt out of religious education and collective worship.

The National Secular Society has called for a full public inquiry into the role of the West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service relative to a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary broadcast on 15 January 2007 which exposed the views of extremist Islamic clerics.

Dire warnings about the future survival of the Church of England have been sounded by the authors of the annual book of church statistics Religious Trends which is produced by Christian statisticians.

Yet another dissenter in the Church of England ranks wrote to the Church Times last week to attack the religious entry criteria that are applied in so-called “faith schools”.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor didn’t quite get the support he was looking for when he invited Rabbi Julia Neuberger to give a talk in his “Faith and Life in Britain” series of lectures at Westminster Cathedral.

Editorial by Terry Sanderson
This week a group of Christian MPs published a report “Faith in the Future” which sought to provide some answers to why the British are allegedly so depressed and unhappy despite the unprecedented affluence they enjoy. Money can’t buy you happiness, they say, so what can?