Christ is the salvation for the shipwrecked. Clinging to Him will keep us afloat in a shipwrecked world. The order He brings gives the martyr the ability to lay down his life, the sorrowful to find hope, and the grieving to find peace that the world can never give.

Those of us who believe that England was built on Christian foundations must look at the current situation with a ruthless honesty. With faith and hope, yes, but certainly not with optimism.

Perhaps reporting the figures of martyred Nigerian Christians might cause compassion fatigue, but the world needs to know the intensity of the persecution—which many argue has developed into a genocide.

The transformative and hope-filled message of Good Friday is that our hate can be “turned to pity, and our pity to love.”

The example of the 21 Coptic Martyrs of Libya, poor, simple, faithful men, can strengthen us. Let their example give us fortitude to follow Him wherever He leads, and if it costs nothing less than everything, so be it.

If nationalism engenders a sense of loyalty and devotion as it did in the case of John Paul II, it might be worth asking, to whom (or what) are those who have no sense of loyalty or devotion to their nation devoted?

For those who love Lebanon and its people, the apparent indifference of the West to this unique nation and its struggles is incomprehensible.

In 1989, with the fall of what Ronald Reagan rightly called the “evil empire,” this magnificent Church of martyrs emerged from the catacombs of communism, not liquidated, not re-educated, but forged like gold in the furnace of persecution.

Pilgrims came because Blessed Karl of Austria lived those virtues and qualities contemporary society longs to see in its leaders, in Church and State. He was a man of integrity, a ‘whole’ man; his inner and private life was the same as his public life. He believed in the virtue of duty: to be dutiful, even to the point of losing his country, his Empire, his worldly goods and ultimately his life, makes him a man worthy of admiration and imitation.

At the very moment when the Christian Gospel, with its life-giving and hopeful message of the triumph of life over death, and of light defeating darkness, so desperately needed to be heard, there seemed to be silence from those charged with preaching that Good News.

Tim Stanley is often seen as a ‘moderate’ conservative, but in his new book, he argues convincingly that the moral confusion and historical amnesia of the West can be traced back to the loss of an understanding of the place of tradition in society.

A good chair can be ‘conservative’ because it speaks of ‘home’—the place that Roger Scruton said “defines us, that we hold in trust for our descendants, and that we don’t want to spoil.”