John Cornwell's account of his teenage years in Cotton, a junior seminary in the West Midlands, skilfully captures the strange, paranoid world of English Catholicism in the 1950s. It was almost compulsive reading for me, brought up as I was in the same archdiocese at almost the same time. Cornwell tells his story in calm, understated prose that contrasts effectively with the fervid piety of Cotton, where the boys' religious [...]

The activity that we call religion is complex. Religious and non-religious people alike often share the same misperceptions. Today in the west, it is often assumed that religion is all about the supernatural and that it is inseparable from belief in an external, personalised deity. Critics claim that religion encourages escapist fantasies that cannot be verified. The explosion of terrorism (which is often given a religious justification) has convinced many [...]

My heart sinks on the all-too frequent occasions when I am invited to review a book about the Holy Grail. The subject has recently inspired some very silly fantasies and conspiracy theories, in which authors try to demonstrate the "secret truth" of Christianity or claim to have discovered the Grail in the cellar of their family home. Richard Barber, however, has written a serious and useful history of the Grail [...]

We are living through a period of pernicious religious intolerance, so it is vital that people of different faiths find new ways of healing the lethal divisions of the past. Jewish-Christian relations are especially problematic. For 1,000 years, Jews suffered persecution in Christian Europe and hatred of Judaism became a chronic disease in the churches, at both a popular and an official level. When Hitler attempted to exterminate European Jewry, [...]

In this second pilgrimage, Victoria Clark seeks insight into our present predicament by exploring the lessons of the past. Her first, widely acclaimed book, Why Angels Fall, was a portrait of Christian Orthodoxy in Cyprus, eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. This time, she puts the west under the microscope, by tracing the momentous events of the 11th century, a historical watershed in which she discovers the origin of [...]

We are now approaching a religious season of peace and good will. The Jewish festival of Hanukkah, the Feast of Lights, celebrates a victory of faith over the forces of irreligion. At Christmas, Christians will celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace. Yet this is a time of darkness and fear. Not only are we living in an atmosphere of violence and cruelty, but the people who are terrorising [...]

Fundamentalists of all faiths have convinced themselves that militant piety is the only way to save religion from annihilation in an increasingly secularised world. If we are to stand any chance of beating terrorists after the attacks on the United States, we must try to understand their motivation and fears.

This is not a centuries-old phenomenon. Fundamentalism actually began in the US early in the 20th century. Today, it [...]

The strange story of Sabbatai Sevi, the 17th-century Jewish mystic who claimed to be the Messiah but instead became an apparently committed convert to Islam, is not merely an embarrassing incident in Jewish history, but is one of several religious attempts to come to terms with the drastic changes of an emergent modernity. John Freely has written a careful account of Sabbatai's life, making the findings of scholarship accessible to [...]

I sometimes smile wryly when I hear myself described as an "ex-nun". It is true that I no longer observe the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience that governed my seven years in a Roman Catholic convent during the 1960s. I am no longer poor, and am certainly not obedient. But I have never married, I continue to live alone, pass my days in a silence that would not disgrace [...]