This year is the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. Here we invite a writer to reflect on articles of the Nicene and Apostles' Creed:
In an astonishing scene in the first chapter of his Gospel, St Luck stages a sisterly encounter between Mary and her cousin Elizabeth. Both women are pregnant, but neither is exemplary of the conventional mother-to-be. Elizabeth is beyond the usual childbearing age, while Mary has conceived, in the words of St John, "not by the will of man", and thus falls outside the orthodox patriarchal set-up of first-century Palestine.
