I used to be a Catholic. I left because I object to conversion by concussion. If you don't agree with what they teach you get clobbered over the head until you do. All that does is change the shape of the head.

The Roman Catholic Church isn't going to change its theologies.

Damien Hirst is the Elvis of the English art world its ayatollah deliverer and big-thinking entrepreneurial potty-mouthed prophet and front man. Hirst synthesizes punk Pop Art Jeff Koons Marcel Duchamp Francis Bacon and Catholicism.

Catholics and evangelicals need to remain allied and in solidarity against the increasingly aggressive secularism of our age.

As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well as it turned out I never wrote a great novel sadly and I never converted to Catholicism happily but I did do one thing he did. That is in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.

I was born in ancient times at the end of the world in a patriarchal Catholic and conservative family. No wonder that by age five I was a raging feminist - although the term had not reached Chile yet so nobody knew what the heck was wrong with me.