I was grateful to be invited to address a conference of self supporting (unpaid) priests recently. It was a good day and I met many inspiring people. One of the things I found myself saying was that the church needs more feral clergy - this as an antidote to the dangerously inoffensive, ‘nice’ and only peripherally relevant tendencies of many a Church of England cleric. Feral can mean ‘having returned to an untamed state from domestication.....’.