In a book published two years ago Alain de Botton, an atheist philosopher, suggested a secular, irreligious equivalent of Christian worship, mainly based on the Catholic ritual of the Mass but deprived of any religious meaning. He constructed this idea on the assumption that non-believers can have a similar communal experience to that of believers. Similar ideas have been put…

Shortly after I’d come to Elgin as a parish assistant, I realised that many of my compatriots living in that area were struggling because they didn’t speak English. Dealing with simple, everyday hurdles caused problems, as their inability to speak the language required massive hand signals or finding an interpreter. The solution seemed obvious: help them to learn English. So…