Pitching his creed to a roomful of comic stars, the pontiff pronounced that it is good to laugh at God. In which case, he may enjoy these

A hundred top comedians are generally considered a tough crowd, but Pope Francis had them rolling in the aisles at the Vatican on Friday, with jovial praise for their profession.

To “laugh at God” was fine, he explained, in the same way “ we play and joke with the people we love ”.

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Pontiff says it should never be for machines to decide whether human beings should live or die

Pope Francis has made a historic address to G7 leaders urging them to recognise they have the power to decide if artificial intelligence becomes a terrifying or creative tool, as he urged them to act to ban the use of autonomous weapons in war.

In the first address by a pope to a meeting of G7 leaders, he said it should never be for machines to decide whether human beings are to live or die.

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Hopkins’ Sigmund Freud locks horns with Matthew Goode’s CS Lewis in an imaginary encounter that is watchable but not terribly profound

Here is a determinedly old-fashioned drama, verbose and elaborate but also forthright and watchable in its way. It is a Stoppardian what-if meeting, imagining a bruising encounter between two celebrated historical figures who could, theoretically, have run into each other; it is adapted by director Matt Brown from a stage-play by American dramatist Mark St Germain, in turn inspired by a 2002 book by Harvard psychiatrist Armand Nicholi who had seized upon a report that Sigmund Freud met with an unnamed Oxford don just before his death. What if that don was CS Lewis, the Christian apologist who in his 1933 book The Pilgrim’s Regress had mocked atheist Freudianism and every other sort of godless trendiness?

Anthony Hopkins plays Freud at the very end of his life in exile in London in 1939 as war breaks out, in agony from mouth cancer. Matthew Goode is Lewis (also once famously played by Hopkins himself, of course, in the film Shadowlands), for whom fame through the wartime broadcasts and Narnia bestsellers was still in the future. Hopkins’ Freud is querulous, cantankerous and bad-tempered; Goode’s Lewis is diffident and supercilious. Lewis says Freud’s worldview is morally evasive; Freud smirkingly suggests that Lewis’s emotional relationship with the mother of his fallen first world war comrade is classic neurosis.

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Pontiff says speaking should be limited to eight minutes because ‘attention is lost’

Priests should keep their homilies short and speak for a maximum of eight minutes to prevent members of the congregation from nodding off, Pope Francis has said.

The homily, or message delivered during a church service, “must be short: an image, a thought, a feeling”, the pope said during his weekly audience on Wednesday.

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All-female lineup of presenters hope to break harmful Islamic stereotypes after Geert Wilders’ election victory

An hour before dawn in a nondescript building in Hilversum, a sleepy town half an hour south of Amsterdam, Nora Akachar grabs the microphone. There is nothing unique about a radio host summoning the nation out of its slumber. But this is, in her own words, “a big deal”.

The Dutch Moroccan actor turned radio host is live on air presenting Suhoor Stories, a talk radio show presented by seven Dutch Muslim women, inviting Muslim guests to demystify Ramadan for the wider public. The programme is believed to be Europe’s only daily Ramadan radio and television show aired by a national public broadcaster.

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Ex-president’s decision to sell Bibles branded with his name is ‘risky business’, says Warnock, pastor of historic Atlanta church

Donald Trump ’s decision to sell Bibles branded under his name is “risky business”, Democratic US senator Raphael Warnock said Sunday, as the former president stands accused of having few moral scruples in four separate criminal indictments pending against him.

“The Bible does not need Donald Trump’s endorsement,” Warnock, the pastor of Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist church, said to CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. Speaking on Easter, one of Christianity’s holiest celebration, Warnock added: “It’s a risky bet because the folks who buy those Bibles might actually open them up, where it says things like thou shalt not lie, thou shalt not bear false witness, where it warns about wolves dressed up in sheep’s clothing.

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Torrential rain forced the cancellation of Good Friday processions through Seville and other holy week parades, from Cádiz in the south-west to Zaragoza in the north

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Sir Keir Starmer is not a believer, but he is right to recognise the value of religious organisations’ commitment to the common good

Alastair Campbell never intended his famous assertion, “We don’t do God” to be taken as gospel for the Labour party. Though his intervention during a 2003 interview with Tony Blair has often been interpreted as a kind of secular edict, Mr Campbell has expressed personal sympathy for a “pro-faith atheist” position. As he seeks potential allies and partners to carry out his missions for national renewal, Sir Keir Starmer seems to be staking out a similar kind of territory.

Sir Keir, who has described himself as “loosely” from an Anglican background, is not religious. But he is rightly alive to what faith groups can offer to a future government committed to a different, more community-based way of doing politics. In a speech on civil society earlier this year, he pledged that Labour would work closely with faith leaders, praising their role in countering the “‘in it for yourself’ culture of the Conservatives”. Twenty Labour MPs have been appointed as “faith champions”, tasked with building on relationships between local authorities and religious groups which were forged during the pandemic and the cost of living crisis. Plans are also in train to link up government departments with faith and civil society leaders if Labour wins power.

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While religion doesn’t feature much in video games, I find the theory that we are all characters in a huge sim ever more believable – and appealing

It’s Easter weekend, when Catholics like me spend hours in church listening to the extended editor’s cut of a story whose ending we already know. Sitting there for the millionth performance of the Passion recently, I got to thinking about how few religious video game characters I’ve ever encountered. It’s interesting that in a world where so many people’s lives are dictated by religious beliefs, there is such a scarcity of religion in games. I mean, you could argue that all games are Jesus homages, with their respawns and extra lives, but even I admit that’s a stretch.

The Peggies in Far Cry 5 are a mind-controlling violent cult; those Founders in BioShock Infinite use religion to elevate and justify hatred of foreigners; and you have those wackadoodles in Fallout worshipping atomic bombs. Religion is almost exclusively used as means for leaders to get minions to do bad things. (Admittedly, they may be on to something here.) I guess that when so many video games are structured so as to set you up as a lone protagonist, up against a huge force, religion is a fairly obvious go-to villain.

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