The Dispatch

A Week at Canary Wharf

March 2, 2025 Tracey Rowland 4

The ExCel Conference Centre near Canary Wharf in the East End of London was recently the location for two major conferences: the 2025 ARC (Alliance for Responsible Citizenship) event, and a Word on Fire conference […]

Essay

Making Christianity Weird Again

February 6, 2025 Tracey Rowland 30

It’s rare for me to hold a fashionable position but I am delighted to be in the company of high-profile people, from the historian Tom Holland to Bishop Robert Barron and the authors Michael Frost […]

Books

Ecclesiology Today

October 18, 2024 Tracey Rowland 22

The Cambridge historian Richard Rex has noted that the first great crisis in Christianity was over the nature of the Trinity, especially over the nature of Christ, hence the early Christological heresies. The second great […]

Analysis

Spinning Balthasar

May 11, 2024 Tracey Rowland 19

Recently the name of Hans Urs von Balthasar has been invoked to defend the concept of a more “feminine” Church. On reading some reports it seems that the invocation has now become a meme and […]

Essay

Remembering Cardinal Pell

January 16, 2023 Tracey Rowland 35

In one of my last conversations with Cardinal Pell we talked about Margit Balogh’s biography of Cardinal Mindszenty, titled Victim of History. Balogh chose as the opening epigraph Mindszenty’s statement: “I shall keep on fighting…until […]

The Dispatch

Remembering David L. Schindler

November 21, 2022 Tracey Rowland 7

The first time I came across the name Schindler, I was a doctoral student in Cambridge, working on the topic of tradition-constituted rationality in the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre. The couplet “faith and reason” shares […]