Religion & Society

Last year I had the opportunity to pay two visits to France for teaching purposes. I am quite a Francophile and so when such visits come around, I take some time out to enjoy the special charms that the country offers. On both occasions last year I was able to return to an old haunt: the Abbaye Notre Dame, a cloistered Benedictine monastery for nuns in the small village of Wisques in northern France, not far from Calais. I have been visiting that particular monastery since October 1998. So have countless other people who share with me a particular fascination for the attractions of the monastic environment. Notre Dame is a splendid 19 th -century construction but, in addition to its main buildings, it also includes outside the cloister an eight room hostel, called St Charles Hostel, which can accommodate over a dozen guests. One of the nuns I spoke with pointed out that all visitors come seeking something, yet seeking very different things. There are pilgrims who are walking the l...

Western Europe is still reeling from the terrorist attacks that struck Paris on the evening of Friday 13 November, killing 129 people and injuring over 300 more, many critically. Political leaders are discussing appropriate responses, to follow up on France’s initial airstrike against Raqqa, the capital of the Islamic State that has claimed responsibility for the attacks. Details are emerging about the eight gunman who carried out the attacks, all in their 20s or 30s. They appear to include at least five French citizens, including the Abdeslam brothers, Salah and Brahim, who lived in the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek, described by Belgian authorities as a "breeding ground for jihadists". Two others were born and bred in Paris, the target of their attacks. Another of the terrorists was a Syrian national who appears to have arrived in Greece and registered as a refugee in October. An obvious question that arises from the above details is the motivation of the eight young Mu...

A busy life in a big city with a demanding job can creep up on you, pushing alternative perspectives on life to the margins, and threatening to relegate faith to a mechanical hour or so on a Sunday. In such circumstances, one way to take time out for some therapeutic spiritual reflection is to have a monastic experience. At least, this is what has worked for me down the years. After establishing myself in London in the mid-1990s, and getting buried in my work, I was introduced by a close friend to a wonderful Benedictine monastery in the north of France, only thirty minutes from Calais. Over the last ten years I have visited it five times; these visits have taken place at different times of the year, and all have been satisfying. However, perhaps the most meaningful have been those visits coinciding with the Advent season, where the solitude and silence afforded by the monastic environment have served as an ideal context to consider the birth of Christ and its significance in human sa...