Erasmus

CAN classical Islam be reconciled with freedom of expression as a modern, liberal-minded person would understand the term? It is not merely Wednesday's horrible events in Paris which make that question urgent. In Saudi Arabia today, a liberal blogger, Raif Badawi, received the first 50 of the 1,000 lashes to which he has been condemned (along with a 10-year prison sentence) because of the allegedly impious contents of a website he founded.

FOR GREEKS (and generally for those eastern Christians who observe the new calendar) today is a day of warm public togetherness: a time when Hellenes of all classes, generations and ideological persuasions put aside their differences and join in an enjoyable public ritual. For the religiously-minded, it is a commemoration of a primordial scene in the Christian drama: the moment when Jesus was baptised in the river Jordan, with a dove flying overhead to represent the Holy Spirit, and the voice of God the Father declaring Himself "well pleased" with His progeny.

IF THERE is one individual who first gave expression to the American ideal of freedom, and religious freedom in particular, it was Thomas Jefferson. Indeed, the third president himself had very clear ideas on his role in history. He laid down that his tombstone should record three achievements: his authorship of the Declaration of Independence; the statute of religious freedom in his home state of Virginia; and the establishment of the University of Virginia.

Nobody questions Jefferson’s decisive part in establishing liberty of belief.

SIR PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR, the late doyen of British travel writers, wasn't formally religious, and as his biography discloses, he wasn't a paragon of ascetic virtue either. But he had interesting and beautifully expressed observations about almost everything, including the difference in spirit between Byzantium and Renaissance Italy. In Byzantine art, he wrote:

The Virgin Mary...has the austere aloofness of an oriental empress; she is calm, unreal, hieratic, wide- and dry-eyed....[while] the western medieval Madonna is a gentle and beautiful mediatrix...Her statues, like Venus addressing a reluctant Adonis, seem almost to woo her devotees.

POPE Francis is a bag of surprises. When members of the curia, the Vatican's Italian-dominated bureaucracy, gathered this week for a pre-Christmas meeting with the boss, they may have been expecting some emollient words of encouragement and good wishes for the season when their faith's beginnings are enjoyably celebrated. Instead they got a terrible scolding. All manner of pathologies were at work, they were told, in the corridors of ecclesiastical power: ruthless careerism, back-biting, narcissism, complacency.

ACROSS the world, people who reject all religious belief or profess secular humanism are facing ever worse discrimination and persecution, but the existence and legitimacy of such ideas is becoming more widely known and accepted. That is the rather subtle conclusion of the latest report by the International Humanist and Ethical Union, an umbrella body for secularist groups in 40 countries, which in 2012 began making annual surveys of how freedom of thought and conscience are faring worldwide.

AS RECENTLY as 2009, the football authorities in Brazil got a scolding from FIFA, the body which administers soccer worldwide, because Brazilian players were in the habit of proclaiming their religious faith in spectacular ways. Whether battling for their own country or for foreign sides, Brazilian players of a Pentecostal or evangelical persuasion like to display their faith by pointing upwards to heaven after a goal, kneeling to give thanks after a victorious match, or, as "Kaká" famously did in 2002 and often thereafter, stripping down to an under-shirt which proclaims "I belong to Jesus" (see picture).