Waiting for Lea to finish her shopping I strolled over to the monument to the victims of the Bologna railway station bombing in 1980 and was struck by how very many people in their early twenties had died.
I imagined them crowding the waiting room, where the bomb was planted. There would have been backpacks, books. Boyfriends, girlfriends, friends all heading somewhere – the future still ill-defined but full of possibility…
Continued at UKSpirituality
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Monday, January 25, 2010
When pop went down fighting (and what it fought for)
When you talk about choice
As if its something we were born with
This choice is for some, but not for everyone
And the way you talk about money
Like it's the currency of faith…
Waiting at the end of the queue for the shuttle bus between terminals at Gatwick Airport I watched workers laboriously shovel out salt on to the frozen path. I remembered how when I was a kid they used to do the same thing using a sieve so they wouldn’t have to go back to the store so frequently and the salt would fall evenly rather than in patches punctuated by islands of ice. I wondered where the sieve had gone. The likelihood was that it had been dispensed with long ago in the name of savings – a shovel could do many more jobs, after all, only this one not as well.
The lyrics from an Everything But The Girl song sprang to mind: Why does England call… when soon there’ll be nothing left at all?
Continued at UKSprituality
As if its something we were born with
This choice is for some, but not for everyone
And the way you talk about money
Like it's the currency of faith…
Waiting at the end of the queue for the shuttle bus between terminals at Gatwick Airport I watched workers laboriously shovel out salt on to the frozen path. I remembered how when I was a kid they used to do the same thing using a sieve so they wouldn’t have to go back to the store so frequently and the salt would fall evenly rather than in patches punctuated by islands of ice. I wondered where the sieve had gone. The likelihood was that it had been dispensed with long ago in the name of savings – a shovel could do many more jobs, after all, only this one not as well.
The lyrics from an Everything But The Girl song sprang to mind: Why does England call… when soon there’ll be nothing left at all?
Continued at UKSprituality
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Eight and a half years for Majid Tavakoli
Majod Tavakoli the popular Iranian student leader who was arrested on 7th December, Iran’s National Student Day, has been sentenced to eight and half years imprisonment.
The regime published photoshop images of Majid dressed in a chador after his arrest, with the intention of humiliating him, which only backfired and showed their misogynistic mind set...
Continued at Harry's Place
The regime published photoshop images of Majid dressed in a chador after his arrest, with the intention of humiliating him, which only backfired and showed their misogynistic mind set...
Continued at Harry's Place
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Myth moves me
Last year I listened to an excellent sermon by retired Canadian minister Philip Hewitt who was visiting Newington Green before setting off on a cruise around the Mediterranean which would focus on the ancient world.
What stuck in my mind was his observation of how the certainty of youth had given way to the uncertainty of old age. He used the metaphor of a wrapped package of water untied and falling through ones fingers to illustrate the difficulty of truly understanding ourselves. His message chimed with my own feelings: the older I get the more I realise the less I know...
Continued at UKSpirituality
What stuck in my mind was his observation of how the certainty of youth had given way to the uncertainty of old age. He used the metaphor of a wrapped package of water untied and falling through ones fingers to illustrate the difficulty of truly understanding ourselves. His message chimed with my own feelings: the older I get the more I realise the less I know...
Continued at UKSpirituality
Sunday, January 3, 2010
In praise of the militant moderate
I would like to declare my commitment to extreme moderation.
Times are tough for moderates – we are being assailed from all sides
On the one hand we have secularists, with whom I have always harboured some sympathy, enforcing the will of atheist fundamentalists and over-turning centuries of tradition. For example in Italy, where I live, a Finnish-born mother recently won a ruling through the European Court of Human Rights to have crucifixes removed from all classes...
Continued at UKSpirituality
Times are tough for moderates – we are being assailed from all sides
On the one hand we have secularists, with whom I have always harboured some sympathy, enforcing the will of atheist fundamentalists and over-turning centuries of tradition. For example in Italy, where I live, a Finnish-born mother recently won a ruling through the European Court of Human Rights to have crucifixes removed from all classes...
Continued at UKSpirituality
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
The Manhattan Project
Conservative Anglican blogger Cranmer has highlighted a new initiative – the Manhattan Declaration, of which he remarks, possibly somewhat tongue-in-cheek…
Perhaps, just perhaps, this declaration might one day be ranked with the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, or at least raise Manhattan to the equivalent historic significance to that of Boston.
And what does this historic document declare?
We are Christians who have joined together across historic lines of ecclesial differences to affirm our right—and, more importantly, to embrace our obligation—to speak and act in defense of these truths. We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.
To which it is tempting to reply: if only!
Continued at UKSpirituality
Perhaps, just perhaps, this declaration might one day be ranked with the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, or at least raise Manhattan to the equivalent historic significance to that of Boston.
And what does this historic document declare?
We are Christians who have joined together across historic lines of ecclesial differences to affirm our right—and, more importantly, to embrace our obligation—to speak and act in defense of these truths. We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.
To which it is tempting to reply: if only!
Continued at UKSpirituality
Monday, December 7, 2009
Amanda Knox and the Power of Projection
By far the best article I have read on the Meredith Kercher murder.
Like most of you, I'm sure, I've been stunned by the verdict against Amanda Knox in Perugia, Italy, and trying to gauge its accuracy. I've also been coming up with many questions about the trial and the Knox family's repeated statements of their daughter's innocence. As several commentators have pointed out, we seem to have watched not only two Amanda Knoxes on trial, but two different portraits of an American college student. Her closest friends insisted last night, on CNN, that Amanda is the least violent person they've ever met. The Italian media and prosecution insist, by contrast, that she's nothing short of a "she-devil," nymphomaniac, and a participant in satanic rites.
Continued at Psychology Today.
Like most of you, I'm sure, I've been stunned by the verdict against Amanda Knox in Perugia, Italy, and trying to gauge its accuracy. I've also been coming up with many questions about the trial and the Knox family's repeated statements of their daughter's innocence. As several commentators have pointed out, we seem to have watched not only two Amanda Knoxes on trial, but two different portraits of an American college student. Her closest friends insisted last night, on CNN, that Amanda is the least violent person they've ever met. The Italian media and prosecution insist, by contrast, that she's nothing short of a "she-devil," nymphomaniac, and a participant in satanic rites.
Continued at Psychology Today.
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