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'These fragments I have shored against my ruins' (TS Eliot, The Waste Land)
Browsing All posts tagged under »Media«
Child circumcision and religious liberty
The reporting of the recent regional court judgement concerning infant circumcision in Germany has been predictably sensationalist; it is a ruling of a local and low court, binding only in a very limited geographical area, and I assume – albeit as a legal layperson – that it will be overturned fairly quickly. (The European Convention […]
The place of the churches in society
February 24, 2012
In an article in the Independent newspaper this week, Mary Ann Sieghart (or her subeditor) announced that ‘You don’t have to believe in God to cherish the Church’, a proposition which she offered in response to the latest attack by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins produced a survey showing that many people who ticked the ‘Christian’ – perhaps particularly […]
Modesty wraps rock! Or, getting public theology right
February 9, 2012
Over the last couple of weeks I have become aware of a campaign in the UK to make ‘modesty wraps’ (that is, plain covers) compulsory on all magazines displaying sexually explicit content on their covers. I am not sure who started it – there was an earlier, and linked, campaign concerning the placement of such […]
If you don’t want Tim Tebow, we’ll have him!
January 14, 2012
OK, the ‘Tebowing’ thing has been on the edge of my consciousness for a while now, mentioned on Twitter feeds and the like every so often. I could see various American friends getting exercised about it, concerned that it promoted ‘slot machine prayer’ theology, in which public intercession by a quarterback could be expected to […]
Of the Monarch, her Bishops, and the press
December 26, 2011
The Christmas tradition of the Monarch making a direct address to the nation is not one I object to, but nor, I confess, is it one I generally notice. All that I know of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II leads me to suppose that she is a person of wisdom, true Christian faith, and an […]
Baptist Times to close, apparently
November 15, 2011
ABP report that the Baptist Times is to cease publication from January here. At the time of writing, there is nothing about this on either the BT‘s own website, or on BUGB’s, but the report seems to quote the right people and when I queried it on Facebook Ian Bunce from Didcot assured me it […]
Education and religious commitment
August 12, 2011
The BUGB news sweep picks up another forthcoming piece of social scientific research (the report is from the Daily Mail, but as far as I can tell nonetheless fairly accurate), this one using data from the American General Social Survey. The headline is that there is a pronounced positive correlation between years in education and […]
On not being in love with ‘Judas’
July 3, 2011
My friend Pete Philips has a typically thoughtful and worthwhile guest post on the Church Mouse Blog a little while back, looking at Lady Gaga’s recent single ‘Judas’. Pete lamented the lack of Christian engagement with this song (& they accompanying video), suggesting Lady Gaga is a significant cultural icon whose invocations of Christian themes […]
The Manchester Passion
August 29, 2010
I have just discovered that a video of the whole of this is online. It was broadcast live Good Friday 2006, a modern-day passion play set amongst the streets of Manchester, and using music from the city’s club scene to convey the story. Even for a live outside broadcast, the sound was sometimes not great, […]
Culture, guilt, and Lockerbie
August 19, 2009
Local news today is full of the debate over whether Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, should be freed on compassionate grounds. He is dying of cancer, and my understanding is that it would be normal practice in Britain to allow any prisoner who is terminally ill to die at home […]
Shored Fragments 
July 2, 2012
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