Who will be the next Archbishop of Canterbury?

Justin Welby’s resignation as Archbishop of Canterbury is truly unprecedented. No archbishop has ever, in the history of the Church of England, resigned—not even in 1621 when the primate of all England shot and killed a gamekeeper with a crossbow while hunting. It has felt like a very strange week; when I think back to …

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Is Church decline the fault of poor leadership?

In the summer, and after a year’s delay, Bloomsbury published That Was the Church That Was by Andrew Brown and Linda Woodhead. Woodhead is professor of sociology of religion at the University of Lancaster, and Brown has been a religious correspondent for a national newspaper for many years. So you might expect them both to know what they are …

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Should the Church be disestablished?

The continuing decline in Church attendance and the apparent marginalization of Christian perspectives within the country naturally lead to the question of whether the Church should be disestablished. Does it make sense to have the life of the nation tied in to Christian belief by having a Church ‘established by law’ if so few people are actively involved in that Church, and a growing number don’t share its beliefs?