Alan Bennett is astonishing. Last week the French President dined with the Queen at Windsor, but as long ago as 2006, in the London Review of Books, Bennett began his essay “The Uncommon Reader” thus:

“At Windsor it was the evening of the State Banquet and the French President took his seat by the Queen who said, ‘I have been longing to ask you about the writer Jean Genet... Homosexual and jailbird, was he nevertheless as bad as he was painted? Or more to the point – and she took up her soup spoon – was he as good?’

Unbriefed on the subject of the glabrous playwright and novelist, the president looked wildly about for his minister of culture, but she was being addressed by the Archbishop of Canterbury.”

I loved “The Uncommon Reader” and read it at a single sitting after the departure of the French President from the City. I found myself strangely warmed with a gentle smile which came straight from Mr Bennett.

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Throughout the events of recent weeks I have been accompanied by a remarkable book, A Bishop’s Tale, by Craig Harline and Eddy Put. While he was Archbishop of Mechelen from 1596-1620, Mathias Hovius kept a day book recording in unusual detail his daily life, both the triumphs and the disasters. It ran to 10 volumes, of which only one survives to form the basis of the book which begins with the terrifying sack by English troops of Mechelen. The future Archbishop hid in a wardrobe to escape the English fury and so begins a tale of civil and religious war in Flanders which puts the challenges of a 21st century bishop in their proper perspective.

A blog is not of course such a confessional vehicle as Hovius’s daybook, but it may have its uses as a contemporary Bishop’s Tale.

New Year’s Day I spent walking the ramparts of Maiden Castle with family and the dog Alfie. Alfie and I mused on the late 4th century ruins of a shrine built in the heart of an enclosure which had been occupied since Neolithic times.

The year’s work begins on the festival of the Epiphany with the ceremonies at the Chapel Royal, so I had time to read Davenport Hines’ biography of WH Auden. The book describes the struggle of the poet to assemble political, social and personal reality in a truthful coherence using apt, believable and available words and allusions. This is also part of the vocation of the preacher.

I visited Harry Juniper’s shop in Bideford to pick up a Toby jug I had commissioned. It was destined for my chief collaborator in the restoration of St Ethelburga’s, Bishopsgate, and shows the hero clutching a mobile phone and holding a model of the church. Pots have been made from the clay of Fremington, between Bideford and Barnstaple, for centuries. Harry Juniper is a national treasure and produces a marvellous range of bespoke commemorative pots.

It has been my habit for some years to offer a Juniper Toby jug to departing members of the London team. Perhaps it became something of a cliché, and even an ominous one. A fragment of gossip was reported to me from a nervous office holder – “they say that the bishop has already ordered my Toby jug”.

Still, it was a pleasant surprise in welcoming the new Dean to St Paul’s to notice what was obviously a Juniper Toby jug on display in his hall. Apparently, the Bishop of Carlisle (who had received his jug as the departing Bishop of Willesden) had continued the tradition with his own team in Cumbria.

January 6th at the Chapel Royal is always a cheerful occasion. The Queen’s gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh are presented at the altar of the Chapel in St James’s Palace by senior officers drawn from the three services and escorted by the Yeomen of the Guard. At the end of the liturgy, the most senior officer is charged by the most junior choir boy with the crime of wearing spurs in Her Majesty’s Chapel Royal. James I had forbidden the practice and the child of the Chapel Royal demands the customary forfeit.

The General gruffly replies: “Boy, before I accede to your request, you must sing the gamut”. If the boy manages to ascend the scale with confidence (as he did this year superbly), the General extracts a ten pound note from his tight trousers and the choir spend it on pop. This scene has been repeated every Epiphany since the early seventeenth century with, I imagine, something of a hiatus under Cromwell.

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I have just viewed a DVD of an affectionate and admiring film on the life and music of Vaughan Williams. Entitled O Thou Transcendent, it is due to be televised on Channel Five on New Year’s Day.

The commentary does full justice to the bleakness of Vaughan Williams’ later music and his courage in confronting the darkness of a century whose horrors he encountered as a member of the ambulance corps in the First World War.

The film is organised however around the very 20th century thesis that Williams, as the son of a vicar and architect of the English hymnal, could not bring himself to embrace the Christian faith. In reality, as a left-wing socialist whose close family relationships extended to Darwin, Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes, the faith he lost and was never able to regain was in human perfectibility and progress.

The Christian hope is related to realism about the human condition and a lively sense of the role of original sin in corrupting the best utopian schemes.

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In Parliament last week the Children's Society briefed me to ask a supplementary question on the topic of children in prison. I was horrified to realise that we locked up more children in the UK for various crimes and misdemeanours than all the other EU states combined.

Furthermore, of the children incarcerated in 2005, 76 per cent of them re-offended within a twelvemonth of being released. Why is our record so much worse than that of our European neighbours?

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We celebrated the life of Chad Varah, the founder of the Samaritans, in St Stephen's Walbrook yesterday afternoon. He died peacefully in his sleep on 8th November at the age of 95.

I could see him in my mind's eye sitting in his usual place by one of the pillars, in the Hollywood director's canvas chair which he used for services.

Hearing the story of the Good Samaritan, it was good to reflect that here at least was a priest who did not pass by on the other side.

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I was invited back to Cambridge to give a university sermon on Sunday haunted by the title of Professor Nicholas Lash’s inaugural lecture, “Doing theology on Dover Beach”. Standing on Dover Beach in the mid-19th century, Matthew Arnold pictured the sea of faith ebbing:

Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

The tide was going out, but perhaps it was going unnaturally far, leaving fish stranded and the sea floor exposed. One child on a Thai holiday beach read the sign correctly and saved her family. “Run!” she shouted, because such a recession of the tide is a sign of an approaching tsunami.

In a cosmopolitan place like Cambridge, but perhaps even more so in London, a world in a city, there are many signs of increasing turbulence, and there are foreshadowings of the spiritual tsunami that is building among the very youthful population of the world – in places like the vast housing projects in greater Cairo and in the megalopolises of South America.

In a way that bewilders members of yesterday’s Anglo-American avant garde, it is already clear that the four to five billion people in the world who follow some kind of spiritual path are not going to conform to what until recently was seen to be the inevitable consequence of modernisation – that is, the relegation of religion to the margins of life.

Exceptionally in north-western Europe, this is what has happened and this is what Arnold saw on Dover Beach. The resulting lack of seriousness about the quality of our spiritual education has of course resulted among other things in a new credulity, and people who have few defences against the peddlers of the cults of unreason.

There was an amusing example in the Economist not so long ago. The astrology correspondent on one of the tabloids failed to turn up one morning to cast his horoscopes, so a rather cynical senior hack was pressed into service. Somewhat bored with his task, he decided to spice things up and wrote under the sign of Cancer this prediction: “All the ills of yesteryear will be as nothing to what will befall you today.” He thought it was harmless fun, but the switchboard was jammed with panicking readers and he was sacked.

But it is another sign of a sea change that the editorial team at the Economist has recently decided that the reality of the contemporary world cannot be described without reporting its religious news. Five years ago, ink would not have been wasted on something which was seen to have no value in understanding the daylight world. This week there is an 18-page special supplement on faith and politics.

We do not live in a world or a city that can be simply described as secular. On the other hand, we do not inhabit a religious world and, still less, can we be described as a Christian country – although every single week in the Greater London Area there are 630,000 Christians assembling for worship in more than 4,000 churches. If that were true of any political party we would regard it as a non-trivial fact.

Ken Livingstone remarked recently that there were two obvious things about London as he toured the various communities – that the population was still growing and that it was an increasingly religious city. The truth is that London is secular, religious and Christian all at the same time and this will become increasingly true of the whole of the UK.

If we are to bequeath a creative culture and a good country in which to live, then conversation between these different perspectives on life has to be sustained and deepened. If we are not in respectful and strenuous conversation, there will be more destructive conflict.

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It was not so very long ago that London's City churches were regarded as failed parish churches, fit only to be mothballed. Now the scope offered by such sacred spaces in the City is better appreciated. The intention is not to find alternative uses which ignore the primary role of the churches as places of worship, but to explore extended uses for which the context of a sacred place is appropriate and even an enhancement.

All Hallows London Wall is a very good example of a City church which has developed in a number of directions – not least in launching Wallspace as a spiritual home for the visual arts. I was very glad to read in the Financial Times, the parish magazine of the City of London, a positive review of the current exhibition organised by the curator, Meryl Doney.

It begins with the teasing question: "As the Young British Artists embrace middle age, are they turning to God for answers or even for inspiration?" As I approach the springtime of my senility, I think there are signs that they are. You can read the whole review here.

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I have just received a copy of an open letter due to be launched in Dubai at dawn. It is signed by 138 Muslim scholars and is addressed to the spiritual leaders of the Christian world.

The letter proposes a global conversation between religious scholars on the love of God and neighbour. It is clearly a conversation which is overdue and could make a significant contribution to building peace between the billions who follow a spiritual path in their lives.

Last year 38 Muslim scholars addressed the Pope in a similar way after his Regensburg lecture. The number has swollen to 138 this year who have addressed a wider group of Christian leaders including the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Certainly the signatories come in the main from parts of the world in which the dialogue has already started but the significance of this “open letter and call” should not be underestimated.

Students of religions might look with some humility at the success of the world’s scientists who have established a global conversation on matters vital to human flourishing such as climate change. The spirit in which a life is lived is also an essential contribution to human flourishing. In promoting a global conversation on the love of God and neighbour religious scholars will be rising to the challenge of the 21st century.

It is a substantial letter which speaks of the unity of God from a Muslim perspective. It demands a substantial response which approaches the same theme from a Christian perspective. That response will also provide a valuable stimulus to building the kind of institutions capable of maintaining and developing not only conversation but also cooperation between religions. Clearly the role of the Vatican in this work of institution building is pivotal. The work may also offer a welcome way of deepening ecumenical relations at a time when the old methodologies seem rather tired.

I am also a trustee of The Coexist Foundation, a charity which exists to promote inter-religious dialogue among the three religions which in their different ways look to Abraham as a seminal figure. Coexist helped to fund and sponsor Sacred, the recent successful exhibition at the British Library. The number and engagement of the visitors to the exhibition show that there is a huge appetite for the kind of constructive engagement proposed by the authors of the letter.

Sacred also included the Jewish part of the Abrahamic tradition, and it is very important that we do not go ahead in a way that marginalises the Jewish community.

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After the sombre political picture painted in Tom Gallagher’s book (see below), it was a relief just after Budapest to turn to Andrew Gimson’s biography of Boris Johnson. Excited by his pledge to drive bendy-buses from the streets of London, I turned eagerly to learn more about the man who would be the Mayor of the capital. Gimson’s account is a page turner that kept me happy until the Romanian border.

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Travelling to Transylvania by train for the Third European Ecumenical Christian Assembly gave me time in the many hours it took to cross the great Hungarian plain to read three books, one directly related to Romania and two in preparation for an article on the Christian understanding of work.

Tom Gallagher’s book, Theft of a Nation, published in 2005, is an account of political life in Romania since Communism. After the way in which the Ceausescu regime debauched the institutions of civil society and created an atmosphere of distrust in the country it is perhaps unsurprising that the book records little success in developing a political elite devoted to the common good rather than to personal and sectional gain.

The EU is criticised for the way in which the spending of pre-accession funds was insufficiently monitored, with the result that little was done of direct benefit to the elderly and poor, while a class of wealthy operators with connections to the Securitate was enriched.

In these circumstances the role of the Churches, especially the Romanian Orthodox Church, is very significant. The extraordinary scenes at the funeral of Patriarch Theoctist illustrated the sense in which the Patriarch is father of the nation with a significance probably greater than that of the President. As Romanian society adjusts to the disciplines and challenges of the European project, the Patriarch of the second largest Orthodox Church after Russia has a national and international importance.

Last week’s election of Metropolitan Daniel of Moldavia and Bukovina is a very hopeful sign. He has studied both in France and Germany and speaks Italian and English in addition to French and German, and of course Romanian. For eight years in the 1980s he taught at the Ecumenical Institute at Bossey, near Geneva in Switzerland. It would be difficult to think of any British Church leader with a similarly wide experience of work in Europe.

The Patriarch elect’s experience, openness and energy was evident during the meeting of the Christian Assembly in Sibiu which owed a great deal to his inspiration during the two year planning phase. His enthronement on September 30th will open a hopeful new chapter in the Christian life of Europe and the re-integration of its Eastern and Western traditions.

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Still thinking about the Fukuyama book (see below), there are of course also questions about British democracy, particularly if the doctrine of absolute parliamentary sovereignty operates without the balance provided by respect for the old mixed constitution.

If the House of Commons is to be an elected autocrat, creating the laws and not in the last analysis bound by any law – as it was in past ages bound by the law of God and the common custom of the country – then the sooner we devise a written constitution policed by an independent judiciary the better.

The cavalier way in which the office and role of the Lord Chancellor was abolished, points to the dangers which attend a regime with theoretically unlimited powers between elections, and with a sparse memory and no reverence for continuities. Aristotle himself said, “Where the laws are not sovereign, there is no constitution”.

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Another blind spot in Fukuyama (see below) is a total lack of attention to the dangers and resources of religion in the world. There is an endorsement of the Olivier Roy thesis that lethal religious extremism is more likely to be a phenomenon of immigrant communities displaced from the supportive context of their own homelands than of religious cultures in places where they have developed over centuries.

I think that this underestimates the challenge and shock of modernity in places like Egypt where the teachings of Hasan al-Banna and Qutb were developed. Fukuyama’s view that the problem with religiously inspired terrorism is likely to be played out principally in Western Europe seems to be true up to a point, but underestimates the difficulty for any traditional society based on religion in coping with a modern mindset.

Fukuyama’s discussion of what comes after the neocons remains at the level of tactical adjustment and although there is a wry reference to Madeleine Albright’s contention that “Americans see further than other people”, it is not clear that Fukuyama is anything but a true believer in this doctrine.

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I have just finished reading Francis Fukuyama’s After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads. Fukuyama is best known as the author of The End of History and always writes with provocative clarity. In his latest book, he describes the genesis of the group of public intellectuals who identified themselves as neocons and charts their path to considerable influence on the Bush White House.

I was stimulated to think about the very different role of public intellectuals in our own British political culture, although Tony Blair’s use of Anthony Giddens and his Third Way early in his premiership is I suppose something of a parallel.

Fukuyama’s book is partly a candid confession – on the part of someone who has previously been happy to describe himself as a neocon – of the counter-productive outcome of the Iraq adventure caused in part by the lack of attention the neocons themselves paid to one of their defining attitudes – scepticism about the possibilities of social engineering. It is certainly clear that the Republicans in general have already moved beyond the Bush era and are looking for the next big idea.

I was very struck however by the uncritical and even superstitious way in which the word “democracy” is invoked. In the analysis of Leo Strauss, whose influence on the neocons has been so exaggerated, there is indeed a mention of Aristotle’s discussion of political regimes but no sophisticated description of the particular form of democracy operating in the US now with its many implications for non-Americans in this uni-polar world.

The need to fund advertising in hugely expensive elections, and the dominance of particular local commercial interests, both combine to link candidates too closely to well funded lobby organisations. Fukuyama refers to the development of new international institutions to make up the deficiencies of the UN and the post-war institutions, but the relationship between the distortions flowing from the form of democracy practised in America and the interests of the world’s poor and polluted population is hardly raised.

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