It happens like clockwork; every 3 years, on the first or second Sunday of July, the Parable of the Good Samaritan rolls around once again as the Gospel. And just as regularly perhaps 9 out of 10 preachers in the land will do their best to hammer out some kind of a new take on […]

He was a young man, a pawnbroker’s apprentice in Nottingham, living in two very different worlds; Sunday a world of Methodist chapel, respectability, clean Sunday-best clothes; weekdays a world of poverty, dirt, blasphemy, drunkenness. Monday morning to Saturday night in the pawnshop he dealt with the poorest of the poor and the lowest of the […]