Rob Stewart

[Marcus Walker @WalkerMarcus]

No, a university education is about allowing you to explore and develop yourself as a human being. It isn’t a job, it’s devoting your time to thinking - and getting stuck into clubs and societies which pique your interest. It’s about growing into the person you could become.

[Capel Lofft @CapelLofft]

As someone who commissions and edits books for a living; writes book reviews; has recently written & published a book myself; collects books; and has as my primary leisure activity reading books, this seems to be a very odd question. What else do people do with their lives?

[Nick Timothy MP @NJ_Timothy]

The Church of England is sending £100 million overseas for slavery “reparations”.

Meanwhile our parish churches - our national inheritance - are crumbling.

This is gesture politics - and it’s theologically nonsensical.

My letter to the Archbishop.

[Simon Knott @TheSimonKnott]

I'm not an Anglican, and I'm not a member of the party for which Nick Timothy is an MP. But I do care very deeply about Suffolk's historic churches, I've been documenting them for nearly thirty years and I'm a vice-president of the Suffolk Historic Churches Trust.

The Church of England's plan to use its resources for 'reparations' of this kind seems at once ill-thought out and performative, without any basis in historical reality, a kind of gesture politics that will do few communities any good and will do some communities harm.

The churches that Mr Timothy mentions are national treasures. But more than this, the medieval parish churches of England are the greatest act of witness the Church of England has, a visible sign of its presence in every community, and if they are allowed to wither on the vine they will be symptoms of the Church of England's own withering away.

[Sophia Apologetics ♱ @orthodox22790]

Atheism is a form of religious illiteracy and secular superstition.

I find it alarming that an entire generation, especially in Western Europe, was persuaded by theologically and philosophically shallow arguments into philosophical naturalism, largely through pop intellectuals like Dawkins, Hitchens, and Dennett.

New Atheism was never a sign of intellectual strength, but of cultural fragility, a blend of scientism, radical secularism, neoliberalism, and imperial confidence masquerading as reason.

Classical philosophy must return to the public education curriculum. It's not acceptable. I sincerely believe it's intellectual child abuse.

[Rob Stewart @Bogomilbob]

Character cannot be subsumed under a universal principle of ‘analysis’ or ‘reasoning’ without doing it injury and all the problems that entails.

Look at Wittgenstein. He went to the Realschule. Not the Gymnasium.

[Rob Stewart @Bogomilbob]

‘The future belongs to those with the ability to … deploy the higher level reasoning that academic education imparts’

https://t.co/NheP4HTMhj

If that’s the case then the future (as now) belongs to a privileged elite (regardless of their socioeconomic background).

[Rob Stewart @Bogomilbob]

The point of Burnham’s pivot to technical education is not to deny or discourage individuals from any background to fulfil their academic potential but to recognise that people can achieve excellence in different ways that suit their *character*.

[Rob Stewart @Bogomilbob]

Yes exactly. Striking the slightly obdurate characterisation of Burnham’s proposals by some critics.

[john milbank @johnmilbank3]

Point of the Burnham educational shift is not to focus more on the technical as second tier but to promote the French-German-Italian idea that there can be a parallel tech elite stream just as conversely most in the academic stream are really also-rans… https://t.co/xbEoNwq5CJ

[BijanOmrani @BijanOmrani]

I wrote this @Telegraph about @esmeLKPartridge 's new report on what is drawing the young back to church - the desire for local connection, parishes, serious, liturgy, intellectual depth and "full-fat faith" is especially relevant following the @SaveTheParish manifesto launch. Free access to article in thread... 1/2

[Rob Stewart @Bogomilbob]

I like a lot of the stuff Andy Burnham is saying. Especially the challenge to neoliberalism. Too often the latter starts from a typical eighteenth century abstract argument about the economy, without seeing the nihilistic poison it has injected into human culture and behaviour.

[Hugo Rifkind @hugorifkind]

Oh God please stop telling me what you think about The Odyssey

[Rob Stewart @Bogomilbob]

Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026) https://t.co/2B8B58g1W2

[UnHerd @unherd]

How to save postliberalism, by David Goodhart (@David_Goodhart)

Today, we live in low-growth, ageing societies, with an archipelago of competing value and interest groups who consume individualised media, with weakened families and national attachments. Liberalism is under strain and it needs a helping hand from postliberalism.

My own version of that helping hand, which I categorise as belonging to the Left-conservative school of postliberalism has three main elements.

Small-c conservative common sense
Market-friendly, national social democracy
A regional settlement for the crisis of demoralisation in Somewhere Britain

Read more below ⬇️
https://t.co/jyDIJRetPz

[Rob Stewart @Bogomilbob]

https://t.co/mIOyzypcka

[Sebastian Milbank @SebMilbank]

The British constitution is based on the fusion of powers in a single deliberative body that convenes different groups with a stake in the British state. That model has been wrecked by successive governments, creating our contemporary gridlock https://t.co/sEQxEcnBkN

[john milbank @johnmilbank3]

Only 14% of children now read at all out of school. This constitutes a huge emergency for the future of human culture and democracy. Real oral culture also developed the brain, but we don’t have that. Our current visual culture merely results in zombification.

[Rob Stewart @Bogomilbob]

‘This is a veil of soul making …’

I couldn’t agree more but it really does require a complete cultural reorientation to embrace this insight.

[UnHerd @unherd]

"If enough people... started to think like this... we could see things turn around in a matter of a decade"

@dr_mcgilchrist tells @freddiesayers that the most vital response to our global crisis is for individuals to prioritise "soul making" through listening and openness.