Molière’s 1664 comedy Tartuffe transplanted to present-day Atlanta, Georgia: it sounds like an inspired idea. The hypocritical religious devotee becomes a charlatan preacher fleecing his flock, offering salvation in exchange for hard cash and a distinctly unpriestly grope. But Marcus Gardley’s attempt to put a contemporary spin on a once incendiary play comes with a trying side order of cartoonish caricatures and creaky sex farce.

TV series about the clergy are usually farcical, self-deprecating or just plain wet, so it's a pleasant surprise to find one that's prepared to slug it out with issues of good and evil. Compared to Rev, a wistful tragi-comedy about managing the terminal decline of the C of E, Midwinter of the Spirit wants to mount up and ride into battle against the Ungodly.

Following a dangerously selective reading of a religious text, 15-year-old Benjamin has adopted a fundamentalist doctrine that espouses misogynist, homophobic and puritanical views and, at its extreme, violence. Neither his mum nor his teachers know how to handle him. The clever twist in Marius von Mayenburg’s 2012 play: that text isn’t the Qu’ran, but the Bible.

Helen Edmundson’s The Heresy of Love may be set in 17^th century Mexico and follow the conflict between strict religion and personal development, but its theme of a woman denied her voice by a surrounding male hierarchy retains real contemporary relevance. First staged at the RSC three years ago, the dramatic strengths of the work shine through in this new Globe production, which reminds us most of all of Edmundson’s confident craft and limberness of language.

This programme was a puzzle. It didn't quite work, and it should have worked an absolute treat, as Buddhism is in some respects the religion, or rather the way of life, that has more and more caught the attention of the West in terms of scholarship and practitioners. It was an hour-long visual history, tracing in a trip through the subcontinent the life of the Buddha, presented by the charming and knowledgeable historian Bettany Hughes.

How do you live a good life? Is wealth a good thing? How do you create a just society? The United Kingdom's electorate recently pondered such questions in the polling booth, and made their decision. The Labour Party is agonising over them as it chooses its next leader. And yet while these anxieties may feel very now, they have deep roots. According to the historian and broadcaster Bettany Hughes, such questions first crystallised in the minds of three thinkers, born within a century of one another 2,500 years ago, who are the subject of her new series.

I’ve got no idea what the opposite of dumbing down might be. Swatting up? Whatever it is, it’s surely going to set the tone for the next couple of Friday nights on BBC Two, where Sex and the Church is as erudite a piece of television as we’re going to get in a long time.

The St Luke Passion I heard last night was my second sung Passion of the day. The first was in a parish church as a central part of the liturgy of the day on Good Friday: nothing too fancy, as befits an amateur choir, the words of St John as set by Victoria amid shining plainsong. We stood for the 30-odd minutes it took to sing, dropping briefly to our knees at the moment of the Lord's death.

One night in Cape Town, I was caught in a power cut. Like an untenanted theatre, the city went utterly dark, darker than perhaps it had been since settlers first arrived three centuries earlier. Street lamps, restaurants, car showrooms, offices were all plunged into Stygian gloom. Without traffic lights to impose order, we drove tentatively over the shoulder of Table Mountain and suddenly, sprawled out on the Cape Flats and shining as brightly as the stars overhead, were Guguletu and Khayelitsha. The lights were on in the townships.

When in Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies Thomas Cromwell exclaims in exasperation,  “to each monk, one bed; to each bed, one monk. Is that so hard for them?” he sums up the state of moral decay into which the monasteries had apparently lapsed by the time of their dissolution. They had, we are told, become dens of iniquity, the monks indulging in every vice and pleasure they were supposed to abstain from, and in command of such monstrous power and wealth that it is hard not to feel that maybe Henry VIII had a point.