The celebration of Easter challenges human beings to accept death without delusion, but it also seeks to challenge our acceptance that death is without hope and the end to all meaning, says the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Easter is not about some nasty death cult where a blood sacrifice must be paid to appease an angry God, says Giles Fraser. The crucifixion reveals human death-dealing at its worst and the resurrection offers a new start, refusing the logic of scapegoating.

Today's world "lives with death and resurrection in many ways and in many places", says the president of the Methodist Conference in Britain. The duty of the church is to be with them in this and to point to the hope of the gospel.

The modern temptation is to dismiss resurrection as fantasy or reduce it to spiritualised sophistry, says Simon Barrow. The shape of the core Christian hope is both more substantial and more subtle than that.

The HQ of the Archbishop of Canterbury has described a headline in the Times newspaper as “completely misleading” in suggesting a report had declared the Bishop of Southwark drunk in a 2006 Christmas Party incident.

Easter is awkward for the church, because its revolutionary message leaves it nowhere to hide religiously, politically or intellectually, argues Simon Barrow.