Getting the name right: revisionism

By and large you don’t get too many Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking on doors on the campus of a conservative evangelical theological college like ours. When they do, the odds are that the first question is, ‘What do you think is wrong with the world?’

It’s a searching question because it makes you try and boil down all your misgivings into as small a phrase as possible, preferably even a single word. It makes you focus. The short-hand answer is ‘sin’, and put less technically perhaps something like, ‘We have all loved ourselves at the expense of our love of God and of our neighbours.’

In a similar vein, Anglicans at the moment have to answer the question, ‘What do you think is wrong with the Anglican church worldwide?’ Because there’s a pretty widespread agreement...

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Can banning things lead to tolerance?

‘London is intolerant of intolerance.’

So said the Mayor of London as he stepped in to ban adverts which drew attention to the existence of people who identify as ‘post gay’. It is difficult to deny that our culture is increasingly confused about the meaning of tolerance. Should women playing football be banned from wearing the burkha? In 2007 FIFA outlawed the headscarf (on grounds of health and safety). That ban has just been lifted.

On the same day as London’s Mayor declared that, ‘London is one of the most tolerant cities in the world,’ the Vice-Chancellor of London Metropolitan University revealed that he is hoping to ban alcohol on university grounds since some groups view it as ‘evil’ and ‘immoral.’ Muslim groups and the Policy Adviser for the Methodist...

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Praying (and tweeting) for Muamba

I have been planning another post about Twitter and the changes brought by the internet. I never dreamt that it would be on this topic.

On Saturday afternoon, at 11 minutes past 6, 23 year old Fabrice Muamba collapsed on the turf of White Hart Lane football stadium. He had suffered a heart attack and lay dying in front of 36,000 thousand horrified spectators and a much larger audience on television.

A team of six medics fought frantically to keep him alive as fans of both teams began chanting his name, urging him to cling to life, even as it ebbed away. Amazingly, although at the time of writing Muamba remains critically ill in hospital, he seems narrowly to have escaped becoming a very public victim of sudden adult death syndrome (SADS). SADS is a collective term for the consequences...

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RIP Gregg Jevin

Before yesterday morning no one had ever heard of Gregg Jevin, literally no one. But within hours of the announcement of his death, his life and death were separately in the top four of the most widely tweeted topics around the English-speaking world. It could be said that Twitter created Gregg Jevin. Indeed it would be accurately said, as that is exactly what happened.

At about 9 o’clock yesterday morning, a comedian called Michael Legge twet (in the spirit of Gregg Jevin, I have just made that word up) as follows:

Sad to say that Gregg Jevin, a man I just made up, has died. #RIPGreggJevin

This set in train an apparently unstoppable stream of tributes, reminiscences and faux grief that soon saw Jevin being mentioned in news bulletins on BBC radio, and as a phenomenon by a variety...

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Trevor Phillips and our rights

‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.’ So says the character Syme in George Orwell’s great novel 1984. Orwell charts how words are both removed, evacuated of meaning and occasionally have their meaning reversed. The most famous example in the book is perhaps the threefold slogan ‘War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength, Freedom is Slavery’. But why does all this spring to mind because of Trevor Phillips, chair of the Human Rights and Equality Commission?

Yesterday Phillips was commenting on the struggle by some adoption agencies to abide by their religious beliefs about the impropriety of adoption by homosexual couples. The Daily Telegraph quotes him as arguing ‘Religious rules should end “at the door of the temple” and give way to the “public law” laid down...

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