Rowan Douglas Williams, Baron Williams of Oystermouth, is a Welsh Anglican bishop, theologian and poet. He was the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, a position he held from December 2002 to December 2012. Previously the Bishop of Monmouth and Archbishop of Wales, Williams was the first Archbishop of Canterbury in modern times not to be appointed from within the Church of England.
Martin Henry Bashir is a British journalist. He was a presenter on British and American television and for the BBC's Panorama programme, for which he interviewed Diana, Princess of Wales in 1995. Although the interview was much heralded at the time, it was later determined that he had used forgery and deception to gain it.
Humanists UK, known from 1967 until May 2017 as the British Humanist Association (BHA), is a charitable organisation which promotes secular humanism and aims to represent "people who seek to live good lives without religious or superstitious beliefs" in the United Kingdom by campaigning on issues relating to humanism, secularism, and human rights. It seeks to act as a representative body for non-religious people in the UK.
The Templeton Prize is an annual award granted to a living person, in the estimation of the judges, "whose exemplary achievements advance Sir John Templeton's philanthropic vision: harnessing the power of the sciences to explore the deepest questions of the universe and humankind's place and purpose within it." It was established, funded and administered by John Templeton starting in 1972. It is now co-funded by the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and Templeton World Charity Foundation, and administered by the John Templeton Foundation.
Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, author, and public commentator. She began her career writing for The Guardian and New Statesman. During the 1990s, she came to identify with ideas more associated with the right and currently writes for The Times, The Jerusalem Post, and The Jewish Chronicle, covering political and social issues from a social conservative perspective. Phillips, quoting Irving Kristol, defines herself as a liberal who has "been mugged by reality".
TheGuardian.com, formerly known as Guardian.co.uk and Guardian Unlimited, is a British news and media website owned by the Guardian Media Group. It contains nearly all of the content of the newspapers The Guardian and The Observer, as well as a substantial body of web-only work produced by its own staff, including a rolling news service. As of November 2014, it was the second most popular online newspaper in the UK with over 17 million readers per month; with over 21 million monthly readers, Mail Online was the most popular.
Vincent Gerard Nichols is an English cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, Archbishop of Westminster and President of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales. He previously served as Archbishop of Birmingham from 2000 to 2009. On 22 February 2014, Pope Francis admitted Archbishop Nichols to the Sacred College of Cardinals at a general consistory.
Michael James Nazir-Ali is a Pakistani-born British Roman Catholic priest and former Anglican bishop who served as the 106th Bishop of Rochester from 1994 to 2009 and, before that, as Bishop of Raiwind in Pakistan. He is currently the director of the Oxford Centre for Training, Research, Advocacy and Dialogue. In 2021, he was received into the Catholic Church and was ordained as a priest for the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham on 30 October 2021, one of several Anglican bishops who converted to Catholicism that year. In 2022, he was made a monsignor. He is a dual citizen of Pakistan and Britain.
Ruth Wilson is an English actress. She is known for her performances as the eponymous protagonist in Jane Eyre (2006), as Alice Morgan in the BBC psychological crime drama Luther, as Alison Lockhart in the Showtime drama The Affair (2014–2018), and as the eponymous character in Mrs Wilson (2018). Since 2019, she has portrayed Marisa Coulter in the BBC/HBO fantasy series His Dark Materials, and for this role she won the 2020 BAFTA Cymru Award for Best Actress. Her film credits include The Lone Ranger (2013), Saving Mr. Banks (2013), I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016), and Dark River (2017).
Monica Furlong was a British author, journalist, and activist. She was born at Kenton near Harrow, north-west of London and died at Umberleigh in Devon. An obituary called her the Church of England's "most influential and creative layperson of the post-war period."
Christianity is the largest religion in England, with the Church of England being the nation's established state church, whose supreme governor is the monarch. Other Christian traditions in England include Roman Catholicism, Methodism and the Baptists. After Christianity, the religions with the most adherents are Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism, Buddhism, modern paganism, and the Bahá'í Faith. There are also organisations promoting irreligion, including humanism and atheism.
The Church Times is an independent Anglican weekly newspaper based in London and published in the United Kingdom on Fridays.
Linda Jane Pauline Woodhead is a British academic specialising in the religious studies and sociology of religion at King's College London Faculty of Arts and Humanities. She is best known for her work on religious change since the 1980s, and for initiating public debates about faith. She has been described by Matthew Taylor, head of the Royal Society of Arts, as "one of the world's leading experts on religion".
Caroline Wyatt is an Australian-born English journalist. She has worked as a BBC News journalist for over 25 years, as defence correspondent until August 2014, when she replaced Robert Pigott as religious affairs correspondent until June 2016, when she revealed that she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
Christopher Mark "Chris" Chivers is an Anglican priest, composer, and author. From 2015 until 2019, he was the Principal of Westcott House, Cambridge, an Anglican theological college in the Liberal Catholic tradition.
Lapido Media - Centre for Religious Literacy in World Affairs is a British-based ‘philanthromedia’ charity, founded by journalists to "advocate for greater awareness of the faith dimension in policy, governance, and conflict."
The Trojan Horse scandal, also known as "Operation Trojan Horse" or the Trojan Horse affair, involves claims of an alleged conspiracy that there was an organised attempt to introduce an "Islamist" or "Salafist" ethos into several schools in Birmingham, England. The name, based on the Greek legend, comes from an anonymous letter sent to Birmingham City Council in late 2013, alleged to be from Birmingham "Islamists" detailing how to wrest control of a school, and speculating about expanding the scheme to other cities. The letter was leaked to the press in March 2014. Around a month later, Birmingham City Council revealed that following the letter release it had received hundreds of allegations of plots similar to those described in the letter, some claims dating back over 20 years.
Isabel Euphemia Oakeshott is a British political journalist and broadcaster.
Catherine Pepinster is an English editor, historian, commentator and writer with a focus on theology, Catholic and Anglican ecumenism, church history, and religion and politics. She was the first female editor of The Tablet in the newspaper's 176-year history. In 2017 she published the book The Keys and the Kingdom: The British and the Papacy from John Paul II to Francis.
