James encouraged his great friend Robert Runcie to commission the important report ‘Faith in the City

There's one question about Leaving Alexandria - otherwise a quiet epic of a biography about faith, doubt, class, philosophy and social action - that won't go away. How did such an innate dissimulator and self-dramatist as Richard Holloway, wracked with crippling, carnal doubts about the authority and certainties of organised religion, actually get to become the Episcopalian Primus and Bishop of Edinburgh?

Briefly

1. Intelligence Squared

The ancient world of disbelievers

Victorian gothic, without the gymnastics

Deporting Abu Qatada to Jordan was the easy option. After all, the man said to be Osama bin Laden's right-hand man in Britain had already been convicted in Amman, in absentia, for his involvement in a plot to target American and Israeli tourists. With deportation facing legal obstacles in the form of a European Court of Human Rights ruling, the most pertinent questions focus on why a trial cannot go ahead in the UK.

Anyone who has ever heard Jeffrey John preach, read his poetry or met him knows that he is a man of immense spirituality who should have been made a bishop years ago.

I wonder what Christopher Hitchens, who died some 24 hours earlier, would have made of David Cameron’s speech, in which he implored Britain to follow the values espoused in the Bible. In fact, there’s no need to wonder. He’d have employed his most excoriating polemic.

The often controversial singer packs an emotional punch as she lets her powerful voice rip in an east London church

Trying to catch up with a series like Torchwood: Miracle Day is a bit like trying to get up to speed in Sumerian mythology in just 10 minutes. Actually, it's worse, since the cross-series references that produce a warm bolus of joy inside true devotees mean you don't have only one belief system to disentangle. If Enki, the Sumerian deity of crafts, occasionally popped up on Mount Olympus, in ways that were critical to a full understanding of later Greek theology, then you'd be a bit closer to it. I don't have the time (or the inclination frankly) to engage in such an arduous field of scholarship, so I might as well confess right now that I don't have the faintest idea what Phi-Corp is or what the Trickster's Brigade are up to or how Jack keeps skipping around between different time dimensions. What I can say, on just two minutes' acquaintance with the current series, is that it has a great central idea. Everybody has stopped dying, one of those monkey's paw miracles that looks like a blessing but turns out to be a catastrophe. Jack and his Torchwood cronies are currently trying to find out why it's happened, though the urgency of their quest doesn't appear to prevent Jack spending quite a bit of happy downtime with a fetching young Italian immigrant called Angelo.

Several readers have written in to raise objection to this headline, which appeared above a comment piece on Monday: "At last – a public figure who refuses to deny their past." The public figure in question is the Tory MP Louise Mensch. Why follow the fashion for using "their" in a singular sense, my correspondents demand. Surely it should be "her past". I am not so sure, much as this column hates to be outdone in pedantry by its own readers.

The Church of the Latter-day Saints is one of the fastest-growing and wealthiest religions in the world. But can the Mormons convince America to vote one of their number into the White House?

"Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours," argues Eagleton in this brisk, deep and oddly entertaining book about mankind at its very worst.