How much harm has the European church caused the indigenous peoples of North America? According to the paper I have been sharing with you recently the answer is a great deal. The American Indians (as the paper refers to them) were not without a deep spirituality when the first Christian missionaries arrived among them to preach the Gospel. But in this life at least this Gospel became for them very bad news as their culture ...

There are only around 600,000 of us. We’re squeezed into a small strip of land on the fringes of Western Europe. In the 1960s we faced a real struggle for survival though there has been a modest improvement since then. We generally lack self confidence and often feel we have to prove ourselves better than our nearest neighbour. But the amount of talent we have seems to be astounding. I’m talking about Welsh speakers and...

Tomorrow we fly off to the United States (depending on the ash cloud!) to spend two weeks with our friends Ron and Lisa Fess. Though blogging may well be sporadic while we’re away, it will not disappear altogether. I have been fascinated by the US since my school days when I studied Geography for A level and that country was part of the curriculum. The other country outside the UK that was part of the study was...