• What research on violent extremism tells us about swamps and crocodiles

    Posted on: 05/06/14  |  Posted By: Linda Woodhead  |  Category: Blog

    The research on violent Islamic extremism and how to tackle it is now extensive. What guidance does it give us in deciding whether Michael Gove or Theresa May and Charles Farr are right? The former believes that Islamist ideology…

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  • Abandoned by their religion? People of faith encountering biomedicine

    Posted on: 30/05/14  |  Posted By: Jackie Leach Scully  |  Category: Blog

    Faith group members are just as likely as anyone else to suffer from infertility or debilitating genetic conditions, and to seek medical help. For those people whose religious identity is important to them, knowing about the…

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  • Quakers, (Same-Sex) Marriage and the State

    Posted on: 28/03/14  |  Posted By: Rachel Muers  |  Category: Blog

    In 1663 Charles and Mary Appleby, a Quaker couple from Liskeard, Cornwall, were summoned and questioned by the mayor and eventually imprisoned in Launceston gaol. Their misdemeanour, according to the fellow Quaker who recorded…

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  • Pope Francis, One Year On

    Posted on: 09/03/14  |  Posted By: Tina Beattie  |  Category: Blog

    After a year in office, Pope Francis’s popularity shows no sign of waning. A weekly Italian fanzine called Il Mio Papa (‘My Pope’) has just been launched by Silvio Berlusconi’s publishing company, though Francis says he…

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  • Earth to Earth: Natural burial and the Church of England

    Posted on: 11/02/14  |  Posted By: Hannah Rumble  |  Category: Blog

    At the time I write this blog there are several stories in the news and on the radio about the problems that religion in general is facing – and the Church of England in particular. Linda Woodhead’s research, showcased on…

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  • Religion in the United Nations

    Posted on: 19/01/14  |  Posted By: Jeremy Carrette  |  Category: Blog

    “United Nations too Christian” was the Guardian headline for a story on our report Religious NGOs at The United Nations this January. This slant caught the imagination, and led to news stories around the world. The research…

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  • The Opportunity of New Leadership

    Posted on: 08/01/14  |  Posted By: Charles Clarke  |  Category: Blog

    In 2013 we got a new Pope, a new Archbishop of Canterbury and a new Chief Rabbi. As far as I can make out only once before have all these three faiths got a new leader in the same year. This was in 1758 when Clement 13, Thomas…

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  • Youth work and church growth: what works

    Posted on: 12/12/13  |  Posted By: Naomi Stanton  |  Category: Blog

    My research into young people’s experiences of Christian youth work challenges the dominant assumption that it is the young that have rejected the church. It’s the churches which too often reject the young. I encountered many…

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  • Unlikely Bedfellows? The Supreme Court Considers Christianity and Homosexuality

    Posted on: 02/12/13  |  Posted By: Mark Hill  |  Category: Blog

    There was something of an inevitability about the decision of the Supreme Court concerning the refusal of Christian hoteliers to provide a double room to a couple in a same-sex relationship: Bull & Bull v Preddy & Hall…

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  • A Blessing in Disguise?

    Posted on: 29/11/13  |  Posted By: Simon Reader  |  Category: Blog

    The Pilling Report is all about distinctions, and distinctions matter. The commission which produced it offers eighteen “findings and recommendations”. Points two through eighteen read as recommendations, articulating what…

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recent posts

  • Gladiators, humanists and religion: a battle over collective worship

    Posted on: 10/01/2020

    Under current legislation, all schools in England and Wales must provide daily acts of ‘broadly Christian’ collective worship for their pupils. Although it is no longer enforced, this is a much-contested requirement seemingly…

  • GCSE Religious Studies numbers plummeting outside the faith school sector, new report finds

    Posted on: 19/08/2019

    Thanks to a grant from the Culham St Gabriel’s Trust, and the work of my colleague Mi Young Ahn, now a research fellow at UCL Institute of Education, I have been able this week to publish figures on the dramatic drop in…

  • Letter published in The Tablet

    Posted on: 06/08/2018

    RE syllabus A letter from Charles Clarke and Linda Woodhead, published in The Tablet on 2nd August 2018. In 2015, we published a set of recommendations on how to improve the quality of religious education in state schools, and…

 

popular posts

  • Youth work and church growth: what works

    Posted on: 12/12/2013

    My research into young people’s experiences of Christian youth work challenges the dominant assumption that it is the young that have rejected the church. It’s the churches which too often reject the young. I encountered many…

  • Quakers, (Same-Sex) Marriage and the State

    Posted on: 28/03/2014

    In 1663 Charles and Mary Appleby, a Quaker couple from Liskeard, Cornwall, were summoned and questioned by the mayor and eventually imprisoned in Launceston gaol. Their misdemeanour, according to the fellow Quaker who recorded…

  • Surveys reveal widening gulf between Catholics and Church teaching

    Posted on: 18/11/2013

    As the Vatican surveys the opinions of Catholics in dioceses and parishes around the world, three large polls I carried out this year with YouGov for the Westminster Faith Debates reveal a profile of British Catholics adrift from…

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