Easter is one of two moments in the year when church congregations experience a surge. The Christmas Day surge is easier to understand, given that it has been the focus of the retail industry for weeks beforehand. Easter remains essentially a religious festival and its congregations may contain a greater proportion of people who are enquirers, either asking themselves whether the time has come to return to the faith of their parents, or possibly, having no previous contact with Christianity, wondering if it is for them. 

A new survey by the Christian charity Tearfund has found that while one in 10 of the population professes to attend churches of various denominations every week, another three million would attend regularly if they received the "right invitation". Many clerical heads will be scratched, trying to work out what exactly this means. Declining congregations are a serious problem not just in Anglican churches but even more so in the Free Churches, where predictions are common that Methodism, say, will be all but extinct in another 20 years. In the Catholic Church, at least, the more pressing concern is the shortage of priests. But there is a continuum between the two forms of decline: it is unlikely that the reason young men are not coming forward to the priesthood is very different from the reason their contemporaries have given up on the Church altogether. Thought should also be given to the needs of those travelling in the opposite direction, therefore, not least because better understanding of their journey might identify obstacles that can be removed. Knowing why people join might also illuminate why people leave.

Those with most experience in the Catholic Church of the journey of faith are the dedicated lay volunteers who run the parish-based Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). Their evidence seems to be that conversion to Catholicism is rarely akin to a thunderbolt, and is much more often the result of a gradual conviction, sometimes ...

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor used his erudite Corbishley Lecture this week to erect a breakwater against the incoming tide of aggressive secularism and atheism. His purpose was both to start a debate, he said, and to sound an alarm against the "new intolerance" that disputes the presence of religion in the public sphere. A new breed of secularists, increasingly visible in the media and in politics, ...

For weeks the Conservatives have subjected Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer and likely next Prime Minister, to hard political pounding. An accompanying chorus of muttering has been heard on the Labour back benches, looking forward with dread rather than hope to his assuming the leadership of party and country in a few weeks' time. So far the desire of those MPs for a convincing rival candidate has failed ...

The Vatican's denunciation of certain works by the Jesuit theologian Jon Sobrino will be widely seen as a renewal of its campaign against liberation theology. He is one of its leading exponents. Nevertheless, the terms of the latest judgement differ significantly from previous actions against this theology in two respects. First, the grounds of disapproval, likely to seem somewhat arcane to secular commentators, ...

Planet Earth should in theory be capable of supporting life, including human life, for thousands of years to come - indeed, some estimates say millions. It all depends on the human race. Not long ago the greatest danger seemed to come from nuclear war between the superpowers. Now the major threat is environmental damage, particularly the heating up of the atmosphere owing  to the discharge into it of so-called ...