Nick Spencer

3 weeks ago | hyphenonline.com | Nadia Khan |Nick Spencer |Nathan Stilwell

Dr Nadia Khan, consultant in palliative care, British Islamic Medical AssociationMuslim healthcare professionals in the UK are confronting what it means to open Pandora’s box: death now being framed as a credible “treatment option” for those with life-limiting illness. Much of the debate on the proposed assisted dying (or more accurately, assisted suicide) law has been an arena where nuanced perspectives have collided with dogma.

1 month ago | churchtimes.co.uk | Nick Spencer

ARCHAEOLOGISTS have a saying. “One stone is a stone. Two stones make a feature. Three stones make a wall.” It is a maxim worth bearing in mind when we read about surveys that claim to detect signs of religious revival. Having perused these data for nearly 30 years, I have become tired, and a little cynical, about such claims. And yet, recent trends have caused even an exhausted sceptic like me to take note.

2 months ago | thetablet.co.uk | Nick Spencer

I speak to Jonathan Sumption in the kind of the room I would like to be resurrected in. We’re in the small, elegant study on the ground floor of his late seventeenth-century detached house overlooking Greenwich Park in London. Sunlight scatters across the erudite volumes that grace the shelves that stretch from floor to ceiling. Even the loo is book-lined, biographies of Bach, Mendelssohn and the 29 volumes of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians laid out for curious privy-goers.

2 months ago | spectator.com.au | Nick Spencer

Noah and the Flood in Western Thought Cambridge University Press, pp.407, 35 ‘They put the behemoths in the hold along with the rhinos, the hippos and the elephants. It was a sensible decision to use them as ballast, but you can imagine the stench.’ So begins Julian Barnes’s quirky novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, through which the story of Noah and the flood flows like an underground river.

2 months ago | spectator.co.uk | Nick Spencer

‘They put the behemoths in the hold along with the rhinos, the hippos and the elephants. It was a sensible decision to use them as ballast, but you can imagine the stench.’ So begins Julian Barnes’s quirky novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, through which the story of Noah and the flood flows like an underground river. As Philip C. Almond shows in this impressively erudite book, the tale courses through two millennia of western thought with similar power.