Amid all the athe­ist bus hokum of recent months, I passed a Lon­don bus this morn­ing which car­ried the ad “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” (Psalms 14:1 (KJV))

The ad reminded of some­thing a North­ern Irish cleric said to me dur­ing The Troubles — “We’re a very reli­gious people. But we’re not very Christian.”

A while ago an indi­vidual left a racist com­ment in response to a post on the far right Brit­ish National Party. It didn’t get through mod­er­a­tion. Today that indi­vidual emailed me again, from rhoryfraser@hotmail.com.

Let’s take a look at the com­ment trail left by that email account. Con­tinue read­ing →

It being the night before Christ­mas and the sea­son for ghost stor­ies, I thought I would pass on prob­ably the shortest ghost story I know (and I’ve cut it short).

It is from the pen of the (head)masterly M.R. James. A clas­sic tale, it even mer­its its own schol­arly art­icle — “The Rules of Folk­lore” in the Ghost Stor­ies of M. R. James, Jac­queline Simpson, Folk­lore, Vol. 108, 1997 (1997), pp. 9–18.

The story takes its inspir­a­tion from The Winter’s Tale. Enjoy. Con­tinue read­ing →