ASH WEDNESDAY was the day when foreheads were marked with ash and the words ‘Memento, homo, quia pulvis es’ were said (or, in English, ‘Remember, man, that thou art dust’). 

PREACHER and prophet, a leader for his people in the wilderness and schooled in scripture, Ian Paisley’s encore last Monday was the welter of biblical anathema exchanged with his former deputy Peter Robinson and others once close to him.

DON’T call me a “Polyester Protestant”. There’s nothing flimsy about me. I’m an Irish Linen Protestant, woven with the blood, sweat and tears of my exiled Huguenot ancestors.

Calvinism was important in that sense in forging the modern economy and contemporary society. By stressing God’s command to work, Calvinists encouraged the essential capitalist belief that secular success was also a religious imperative, and that idleness and dependency were sins