From Fire, by Water By Sohrab Ahmari Ignatius, 240pp, £18/$22 My first thought when reading Sohrab Ahmari’s From Fire by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith was, “Did he write his memoir too soon?” Sohrab only converted three years ago and he’s even younger than me (which, trust me, makes him very young), and some

I have seen the future and it is Russia’s past, although not necessarily the bit I expected, certainly not the communist era, which has almost been airbrushed out. On my jolly holiday to St Petersburg and Moscow, I spotted one public statue of Lenin, one of Marx. Lenin, of course, still has his own private

You must see the Edward Burne-Jones exhibition at Tate Britain in London, especially if you love myths and legends, heroes and monsters. Jones was a 19th-century, Protestant, Pre-Raphaelite artist with a background in theology: not quite “one of us” but with a foot in a medieval past that gave his painting a Catholic sensibility, much

I take the war on Roger Scruton personally. The conservative philosopher was recently appointed to some unimportant British government committee on making houses prettier, and the “offence archaeologists” went to work. Digging through his back catalogue, they found that he once said Islamophobia was a dubious concept; he called homosexuality “not normal”; he spoke of

Norfolk is full of suppressed Catholicism

I recently took Gilda away for a few days in Norfolk. Gilda’s not my wife, she’s my green Mini Cooper, and she just loves the open country. Like a dog unleashed, she speeds off into the distance and I really have no say on where we end up. When you own a Mini, you’re never

We’re never truly alone with God but it’s perfectly normal to feel like you are, because I often do, too

Sometimes I feel like a bit of a fraud. I never intended to become a public Catholic: I converted to Catholicism expecting it to fix me on the quiet. But when I saw the Church being attacked, I felt a call to defend it, and year by year I became an amateur evangelist. I do

The communist regime has a much clearer game plan than we have in the West

Sometimes we look at the People’s Republic of China and think, “Come on, they can’t be communist any more – half of them are overweight!” So why shouldn’t the Catholic Church make peace with their rulers? What’s wrong with inviting them to help pick a few bishops? Well, I’m sorry to report that ideas do

Once you’ve seen Channel 4’s Naked Attraction, you can’t unsee it. A contestant is presented with six boxes containing six naked people. The boxes lift from the ground up, in stages. First come the goolies; second the torso; third the face. Our hero then chooses one of these bodies to go on a date with.

Funerals aren't just about the dead. The living hijack them