It’s hard to think of a more varied group of people than the one that gathers at my local church. Surely a truly healthy society is built on this sort of diversity, writes Guardian columnist Giles Fraser

When my son can’t sleep and I offer reassurance I am reminded that, as a priest, that’s my job, writes Giles Fraser, priest-in-charge at St Mary’s Newington, south London

Loose canon: It’s the object of overwhelming projection, a place of dreams and longing. There can be no political peace there until Jerusalem the golden is understood

Loose canon: Materialism has swamped the real meaning of Advent, and transformed a fourth-century bishop into the grotesque patron saint of shopping centre grottoes

Loose canon: If Prince Harry’s fiancee can bring some of her campaigning spirit for the dispossessed into the Windsor mix, the monarchy will be all the richer for it

Loose canon: The only way out of the trap of the human condition is to admit our moral incapacity and call on God for help

Loose canon: Remembrance is too easily purloined by those who want to celebrate the sort of nationalistic chauvinism that led so many young men to pointless deaths

Loose canon: The Israel that David Lloyd George was won over to through Sunday school was a merger of Christian theological fantasy and British national self-aggrandisement

Loose canon: The British Museum’s Living with Gods exhibition describes some of the myriad ways in which faith expresses itself

Loose canon: At my vicarage door, I am seeing the terrible impact of these changes to the benefits system. It is nothing short of gross malevolence on the part of the Tories

Loose canon: Brexit logic in our deprived towns goes something like this: so what if the country collapses economically? At least then they will know what it feels like to be us

Loose canon: A century after the rise of the Bolsheviks, the young are reading Karl Marx again – and faith in the superstitious beliefs that underpin market economies is faltering

Loose canon: America itself has become the object of its own collective worship, with Donald Trump the Herod of its civic religion. But loyalty to God will always beat loyalty to the state

Loose canon: Grayling revives a fear of the mob that’s as old as Plato. Brexit convinced our elite that ordinary people were not intelligent enough to know what’s best for them

Loose canon: Those who think their way into dancing have two left feet. The mind as puppeteer to the body is the philosophy of dad dancing

Loose canon: Now over half the UK population have no religion, it’s time the church stopped being courtiers of the establishment and reclaimed its counter-cultural voice

Loose canon: Nobody’s job is safe. But a citizen’s income in a post-work world could see us avoid the Terminator scenario and return to pre-capitalist sources of value

Loose canon: On a visit to the grave of a relative killed in Flanders, I saw how the War Graves Commission 100 years ago helped obliterate social divisions among the dead

Loose canon: If Israel’s PM has trouble denouncing US neo-nazism, it’s possibly because the far right of both countries support the concept of a secure homeland based on race