Can you stop being a Christian? Is it possible, for whatever reason, to wriggle out of God’s grip? This was the question I faced yesterday on hearing of a funeral for someone who had been a committed Christian in his younger days. It seems that knowing his end was near, he had arranged a humanist funeral where Jesus was not invited. As it happened I had been reading only that morning of what the Puritans call “the perseverance of the saints.” AKA “once saved, always saved.

Dateline Qatar 2009: “Doha has everything for the planet’s biggest football tournament — apart from the stadiums, fans, hotels, climate, heritage, a football team and cultural tourist appeal. You may as well take golf to the moon.” So reported sports journalist Matt Dickinson of Qatar’s bid for the 2022 World Cup He recalls: “We laughed, at least I did, which goes to show how naive I was about the vast ambition, the unimaginable wealth and extraordinary lengths to which Qat

“It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war,” reported Erich Maria Remarque in his 1929 classic novel from WW1, All Quiet on the Western Front. This is what war does to you. Ron never spoke of his experience at Arnhem, where the Allied forces failed to fight their way into Germany towards the end of WW2. And he simply refused to watch with me the Richard Attenborough film of the battle, A Bridge

As far as we can tell there are about a hundred billion galaxies, each one containing roughly about a hundred billion stars. That makes some 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars, give or take a few. Quite a lot really. I’ve always been fascinated by cosmology, defined by NASA as "the scientific study of the large-scale properties of the universe as a whole." I try to keep up-to-date by reading regular articles in the New York Times while recently there was a great series