Thought For The Day (Not): Rev Richard Coles

“[Going to church] was like going to AA and thinking, ‘I need this but I don’t want to be part of your club.’ I felt this powerful attraction to faith but I rationally didn’t believe it was real. In the end I had to put that to one side. I told myself, ‘I am hungry and this is the food I need to eat.’ So I did eat and everything else began to shift. My anxieties were not in the same order as my connection with it.”

“It is difficult to imagine yourself having to defend and be a public representation of an organisation that seems to discriminate against gay people… We’re in a complicated foxtrot that goes backwards as well as forwards. But if you can live in hope, you can live.”

The wonderful Rev Richard Coles is profiled in The Times today.

His autobiography, Fathomless Riches - alternative title; More E, Vicar? - is published next week; “Sex in lay-bys and telling a lie about being HIV might be too fruity for the Church of England, but I’m not going to apologise for telling the truth.”

The Daily Mail are shocked!

Elsie Bitchface is however also adored by the Daily Express; '... a clergyman who won't do Thought For The Day because "I just don't like being preached to over my boiled egg. I can't bear it, I really can't". No wonder he has been dubbed "the atheist's favourite priest".

Not 'arf!

Update: Ex-gay priest Chris Bryant on the hip priest, The Guardian. 'Like Kenneth Williams in a cassock and biretta.' And here she is on cracking form in The Independent...