Mail & Guardian
Mail & Guardian
giles fraserlatest news & developments

Empty words, broken lives in northern Iraq

The place the Yazidi call home has been seeded with tens of thousands of mines.

Gideon Levy

Peace a dirty word in time of war

Even those Israelis who are secretly against the military assault on Gaza are cautious about voicing their opposition openly.

Are modern detectives the new priests?

Our obsession with fiction such as "True Detective" suggests something remarkably adjacent to traditional theological concerns, writes Giles Fraser.

World-weary: Medieval spiritual writers said ?boredom was a sin — ?the ultimate crisis of ?meaning. (Marcelo del Pozo/Reuters)

The spiritual side of boredom

Once a luxury claimed by the idle rich, languor is now the ultimate personal failing.

Blame psychological warfare

Blame psychological warfare

The latest Kandahar massacre has illustrated how soldier’s have hardened and how their natural ‘shoot-to-miss’ instinct have been stifled.

‘Just war’ erodes Christian belief

Far from being wishy-washy, Christians are right to be wary of any justification for violence.

King James Bible’s longevity proves bigoted is better

Who said this? "We are a Christian culture, we come from a Christian culture, and not to know the King James Bible is to be, in some way barbarian.

More art. More prayer. More holidays

The headlines were grabbed by the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’s attack on United States foreign policy. But the deeper point, widely missed, was his attack on Western…

Not faith, but fanaticism

The college head thinks 95% of us are going to burn in hell. His new deputy believes it’s wrong for women to teach men. Insiders are complaining about an "openly homophobic"…

Who wants to live for ever?

Beneath the question of whether a nutty sect has actually cloned a baby, lies the more interesting question of why it actually wants to. "The goal is to give humans eternal life…