A week is a long time in an archiepiscopacy, as Dr Rowan Williams found last week. First, a learned lecture, coupled with a radio interview. Then vitriol poured upon vitriol through newspaper headlines. There were 17,000 emails of complaint to the BBC and 30,000 to one newspaper alone, expressing outrage at the Archbishop of Canterbury's thoughts on Islam and sharia law. But, day by day, a more considered response has emerged. Did Dr Williams, in his lecture on "Civil and Religious Law in England: A Religious Perspective", have an important point after all, about the place of faith in the public square?

Dr Williams has had a tumultuous time as Archbishop of Canterbury, his five years at Lambeth Palace marked above all by rows about homosexuality and the priesthood, both in the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion. These rows have been observed by the secular world, more at ease with gay people in its midst, with bemusement and dismay. But for the secular world, the place of Islam in society is a topic with which it is most definitely ill at ease. A combination of understandable fear of Islamic terrorism, concern about threats to a British way of life, together with undeniable bigotry, makes for a troubling mix. Perhaps Dr Williams, in the rarefied worlds of Lambeth Palace and interfaith dialogue, had little idea of the volcanic nature of this brew, although the leading cleric in the Church of England ought to understand what bubbles beneath the surface of British society.

In raising the issue of sharia law and Islam, and the desire of some Muslims to use that law, Dr Williams was using it as an example of an undeniable development in Britain: that as society becomes increasingly secular, so the space for religion is squeezed.

That message was in danger of being lost amid the initial uproar. Dr Williams was right, when he addressed the synod on Monday, to acknowledge his culpability - what he called his unclarity - for the material of the ...

The German theologian, Johannes Baptist Metz, once posed the rhetorical question: was it any longer possible to pray "with one's back turned to Auschwitz"? He felt that the immensity of suffering and evil inflicted on the Jews in the Holocaust, for which Christianity itself had to accept some responsibility, had implications for almost every detail of Christian theology and worship. It is instructive ...

There is recognisably such a thing as Catholic fundamentalism. It might be defined, by reference to Protestant and Islamic parallels, as believing in a strict and literal interpretation of basic texts and leaving no room for development. When the new head of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, told Catholic journalists recently that it was not the role of the Catholic press ...

Laïcité is not an easy concept to translate from French to English, nor is it easy to interpret the argument now raging in France about its implications. It refers to the supposedly secular character of French public life, and to the maintenance of a proper distance between Church and State. President Nicolas Sarkozy has stirred up fears, particularly on the French Left, that he wishes to modernise the ...

Disraeli is supposed to have coined the phrase "lies, damned lies and statistics", which would, according to a recent report, be an apt comment on the accuracy of Catholic Mass attendance figures in England and Wales. Research by the Catholic sociologist, Dr Tony Spencer, indicates the true drop in figures over the last 10 years is more than half a million, compared with a mere 72,000 in official figures ...