There are few areas of public debate so contaminated by prejudice and misrepresentation as the issue of faith schools, essentially church schools, Anglican and Catholic. The week in which anxious parents discovered the allocation of school places was a neuralgic one, therefore, for The Observer to leak some research purporting to show that church schools were creaming off more middle-class pupils than they were entitled to, thereby skewing the social composition of non-church schools in the other direction. The inference was that this explained not just church schools' middle-class appeal, but also the relative academic success of these schools as shown in national league tables. The inference behind the inference, so to speak, is that the effect of the religious ethos on which church schools put such emphasis was illusory, and not the secret of their success. And though subsidised by the taxpayer, church schools were not contributing anything of value and indeed they were socially divisive.

Given that the facts needed to rebut these myths are so readily available, it is astonishing that the Churches have not yet won the argument. The research quoted in The Observer was done by Rebecca Allen, an academic at London University's Institute of Education. She compared poverty among pupils measured by the take-up of free school meals, against poverty in the surrounding neighbourhood, and found a discrepancy. But because religious affiliation is relevant to school admission policies, the immediate neighbourhood is not a fair basis for comparison. In the Catholic case, the catchment area would be approximately 10 times the area of a non-denominational school, as only one tenth of the school-age population, on average, is Catholic. Once the take-up of free meals is compared nationally, the Catholic sector turns out to be typical. Indeed, some 30 per cent of the 800,000 children in its schools are not Catholic and Catholic schools take a slightly higher proportion of pupils from ...

Although well aware that Archbishop Robert Zollitsch of Freiburg favoured celibacy being made optional in the Catholic Church, the bishops of Germany recently elected him as their president in succession to Cardinal Karl Lehmann. That is not the only recent straw in this particular wind. The organisation representing priests in Brazil - the country with the greatest shortage of priests - has just launched a petition ...

Common to most progressive thinkers of the twentieth century was the conviction that human enlightenment would sooner or later banish religious dogma. If religion was merely irrational superstition (Voltaire) or a way to manipulate power relationships (Marx), the arrival of a better educated or a more equal society would eliminate the space it occupied. Those thinkers are still waiting. Indeed, the delay has sparked ...

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 ...

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 ...