Chapter House columnists and contributors to this page share their favorite Christmas story, book, movie, or music.

The film shares the life of Father Peyton through archival footage and contemporary interviews.

Seamus Heaney drifted from the Church, but his poetry offers a link to the past

The culture of patronage in the arts has been fundamental to the Church

The supposedly ‘boring and suburban’ style reflects English self-confidence and a spirit of moderation, argues Jacob Phillips

David Fincher’s The Social Network, starring Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake and Andrew Garfield, turns 10 this autumn. In its focus on the origins of Facebook it seems rather quaint and dated; yet, in its depiction of the new meritocracy and the peculiar character formation of the techie world, it is perhaps more relevant today than

The exhibition explains the Christian concept of sin and salvation to an audience that may never have heard it before

Seventy years ago, in October 1950, a book bearing a curious title was published: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The first of CS Lewis’s seven Chronicles of Narnia, it soon established itself as a classic of children’s fiction and has now sold untold millions around the world in more than 40 languages. In

It’s the stuff of feminist polemic: what might female painters have achieved in history if they only had had the opportunities that men did? Artemisia Gentileschi shows what one woman achieved: she was not the only notable female painter in Italy in the seventeenth century but she was valued highly in her own lifetime in

A word? Well, it was voted “word of the year” by the American Dialect Society in 1998, because it was becoming increasingly used in such expressions as email and e-business – “e” being short for electronic. But for most of us, e is just a letter – though in English an especially interesting one. I’m

Aubrey Beardsley’s work is instantly recognisable: sweeping, sinuous black lines, sensual, mythological, with a haunting beauty all of its own. The new exhibition of his work at Tate Britain is the first there in almost a century, and the largest anywhere in 50 years. And it’s a delight to see. As well as covering his

In mid-20th-century American art, Mark Rothko’s work is the best-known example of abstract expressionism. Famous for his featureless clouds of colour, his rejection of form and his belief that abstract images can – in his friend Adolph Gottlieb’s words – “simply express complex thoughts”, Rothko is often assumed to be an individualist who broke with