In a week’s time the Friends of Christ Church Cathedral are to make a pilgrimage to Chartres, famous for its huge Gothic cathedral and its wonderful stained glass, and to Rouen, famous as the place where in 1431 Joan of Arc was burnt, aged 19, ostensibly as a heretic but in fact because she had caused the English so much trouble.

Chartresand Rouen are superb expressions of the medieval religious world of the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, its good and its bad sides. But what about religion today in our modern world? What do we build today to express our world view? That modern skyscraper in Abu Dhabi? The Gherkin and the Shard in London? Charlie Haughey’s financial centre along the north quays? What do they say about what really matters to us? Does religion matter to us anymore?

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