It’s hard to learn from someone who doesn’t seem to believe the same as us. If we’ve made up our minds that they’re ‘unsound’, our curiosity tends to wither on the vine.

Imagine my own disbelief, therefore, when a ‘Mind, Body and Spirit’ bestseller I’d bought (to check out the opposition) crept up on my blind side and helped me to see things afresh.

Eckhart Tolle’s star is in the ascendant right now; suffice to say he’s the subject of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club ‘Summer School’ this year. Russell DiCarlo’s introduction to Tolle’s The Power of Now sets an intriguing scene: ‘Our ultimate destiny’, he writes, ‘is to re-connect with our essential Being and express from our extraordinary, divine reality in the ordinary physical world, moment by moment.’ Sounds dodgy on one level, of course, but so did Jesus. On another level it resonates deeply.

Richard Dawkins has long been recognised as Britain’s grumpiest atheist, our very own Darwinian Victor Meldrew, screeching ‘I don’t believe it’ at anyone who will listen. Readers of his recent God Delusion will have enjoyed him harrumphing his way through modern religion, vanquishing the faithful by the power of ridicule and rhetoric alone.

So, where were you at midnight last Friday? Tucked up in bed with a Horlicks and a John Grisham novel, or standing in a motley queue of striped stockings and pointy hats, itching to get your mitts on the latest (and last) Harry Potter?

Is there an English philosophy? Do the English see the world in a particular way?

These were the questions that the philosopher Julian Baggini set out to answer in his book Welcome to Everytown. Identifying the most typical postcode in the country – that is, the one that most accurately reflected its demographic and economic mix – he ended up going to live in S66 in Rotherham for six months.

‘Is the surface ultimately all there is?’ It could easily be the title of a book by John Stott, but this is the question currently confronting audiences at London’s Cottesloe Theatre in a new play by Nicholas Wright.

The Reporter is based on the remarkable life of the BBC correspondent and film-maker (and former MI6 agent) James Mossman, and specifically his last eight years. It begins with him ‘reporting’ on his own death, reading the suicide note he left behind in his Norfolk cottage: ‘I can’t bear it any more, though I don’t know what “it” is.’

In his distinctive BBC tones, he comments: ‘The “it” is cradled inside a pair of inverted commas, as though to protect it against enquiry. But a reporter must enquire. It’s what we do. What is “it”? How could a man in whose death “it” played such an intimate part not know?’

The purpose of the play thus declared, The Reporter goes on to examine the social climate in the years before Mossman’s death in 1971 and searches for the truth behind his bewildering end.

Recently, I’ve been wondering: Does my ‘community’ work for me any more? I’ve been part of a little gathering of Christian searchers, church refugees, dreamers and mavericks for several years now, but it’s hardly a model of church growth to rival Mars Hill…

If readers of Connecting with Culture are typical of the British population – and surely they are?! – then around a thousand will be members of a gym. (And if they are really typical, most of them will rarely use their membership.)