Last week I visited Durham Cathedral. I did so for no particular reason other than I was in Durham, and that’s what one does there. Amazingly, it didn’t cost me a penny. I was even given a little bookmark with a welcome from the Dean when I arrived. “That’s convenient,” I told the “listener”, a retired nurse who lives nearby, attired in a majestic purple robe. “I just bought a book.”
A recent report by Theos and the Grubb Institute entitled Spiritual Capital: The Present and Future of English Cathedrals presents new findings about the ways people understand their local cathedral. “People spoke of Church of England cathedrals as ‘our cathedral’, irrespective of who they were,” says Theos Research Director Nick Spencer, “and they meant it.”
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