In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis recalled the steady, unrelenting approach of God. His approach at first was not wanted. Then Lewis began to read the gospels and attend church services. God was after him, he felt, to acknowledge his Son. One day he set out to drive to Whipsnade. On the way there he did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God. But, he recalled, "when we reached the zoo I did." That road to Whipsnade was Lewis' road to Emmaus, the path on which he did not at first see Christ but a profound encounter led him to faith.

The story of the road to Emmaus - where two of the disciples set off on a seven-mile trek to a village outside Jerusalem, fall into conversation with a stranger, and realise eventually that he is the risen Christ - is one of the great accounts of faith in the gospels. Like C.S. Lewis, the disciples - grieving after the Crucifixion, sensing the failure of their hopes, bewildered by what has happened - are surprised by joy.

The accounts of Christ's appearances after the Resurrection, including that on the road to Emmaus, reveal much of what Christianity is. These are intimate encounters but they are shared encounters. Discipleship is a calling, but it is a shared calling, not a solitary relationship with God. It is a calling lived out in community, and the story of Emmaus, where the disciples finally recognise Christ as he breaks bread, is a reminder that Christianity is lived out in a eucharistic community. And that eucharistic community requires not only love and worship of God, but recognition of, and love of, one's neighbour.

Part of being in community, and encountering one's neighbour, as the story of Emmaus shows, involves conversation. Hopes, fears and troubles are part of that conversation. This week's edition of The Tablet includes a previously undisclosed conversation between the theologian Jacques Dupuis and Cardinal Franz König, both now dead, about the nature of dialogue, ...

Catholic MPs on the Government side have demanded a free vote - without party whips - so that they can vote against certain clauses of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill now before Parliament. Three Catholic members of the Cabinet have indicated that they may even resign over the issue, and are said to have rejected the offer to be allowed to abstain on what they have said is a matter of conscience ...

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 ...

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 ...