Barefoot in the wilderness
in search of understanding

Jam, jam, jam

The past few weeks have seen a lot of fruit start to emerge from our garden – raspberries, loganberries, redcurrants, rhubarb. We’ve even gone and picked strawberries from a Pick-Your-Own farm, and acquired bowls of cherries from a neighbour with a prolific tree. So much fruit, in fact, that jamming is the only solution (for the USAians out there, jam is what you call “jelly”). So, we’ve set to and made strawberry jam, rhubarb and elderflower jam, raspberry and loganberry jam, and rhubarb and ginger jam. With the cherries, we got a little more adventurous and decided to pickle them – sweet cherry pickle, nice with cold meats and as an aperitif (apparently). It’s all good stuff, and should keep us going for quite a few months

pax et bonum

Wifely blogging

My wife’s started her own blog, so go here to find out what she’s talking about.

pax et bonum

Terrorism and asylum

We’re being treated, yet again, to the Press conflating two issues that have little to do with one another but that sell newspapers – terrorism and asylum. At least two of the tabloids today have front-page headlines about one of the London bombers apparently having arrived in Britain as a boy, as part of a family that was granted asylum. How, the papers ask, could he have done this to us?

A better question, though, is how did we fail this family to such an extent that their son did this to himself, to them and to the country that was supposed to protect them all?

An even better question is, what about the rest of the bombers? Most of the London bombers were born and brought up in Britain. They were British. How has this country so failed to include its own people that they feel as these young men did – closer to their fellow-religionists in the Middle East than to their neighbours in Leeds and London? The current media trends, of demonising muslims and the now-traditional targets of immigrants and asylum seekers, will only make this worse. They will only further divide our people when what we need is to draw closer together, to break down the walls of ignorance and prejudice (on all sides) and to learn more about one another.

If we can learn the truth about one another, it might be difficult, it might even be ugly, but at least it will be the truth.

pax et bonum

Spleen of bandicoot

Maggi has coined an excellent new term

5 Minutes

Richard Sudworth reports his experience of being on Sky TV, in a debate with muslims.

I chipped in my bit when the drift seemed to be all about “tolerance”. Tolerance is half the problem; we’re just happy to leave people be and do our own thing. Now, more than ever, we need genuine Christian neighbourliness that involves speaking and listening across boundaries…The Sky set-up was clearly aimed at getting some controversial soundbites, stirring the pot and avoiding nuance and complexity: “So, audience, do you feel more Muslim or more British?”...[W]e need to recognise the Christian tendency to denial (“those Christians that let off bombs in Northern Ireland in the 1970’s were not really Christians, were they?” “those church leaders who engineered the Rwandan genocide couldn’t possibly have experienced the work of the Holy Spirit”) too. And as Christians, be authentic neighbours, in humility

Mike at WorD pointed out this quotation:

People wonder why the moderates are not being heard – it is because they are being excluded .
Salam Al-Marayati, Muslim Public Affairs Council in America

pax et bonum

To kill and be killed

As if the UK wasn’t suffering from enough death and trauma after the two terrorist attacks on London this week, we now have to start suffering from the paranoia and “security mindedness” that leads to the removal of the very freedoms on which we base our way of life. First, we have the police shooting and killing an entirely innocent person whose only offences were to live in the same block of flats as a terrorism suspect and to wear a thick jacket in warm weather. Second, we have the press continuing to treat suicide bombing as though it was something unique to and endorsed by Islam.

(click for more)

Creative Commons

Have you wondered what that Creative Commons picture at the bottom left of my blog is about? Ever seen it elsewhere and wondered what’s going on? Well, the Creative Commons is an organisation that produces copyright licences. By default, under copyright law, you are not allowed to reproduce anything you read (whether that’s a blog article, a photograph or a piece of music), except for small extracts under “fair use” rules. If you want to do more (such as quote the whole of something, incorporate a photo into a montage, or alter it to make a new work), you would normally have to contact the creator to ask for specific permission. By contrast, the Creative Commons licence makes it clear that you are allowed to copy a work under certain limitations. So, I allow copying provided I am credited as the author, but do not allow commercial use or the creation of derivative works without specific permission. The Creative Commons licences allow control over each aspect of this – for example, you might allow commercial use but not derivatives, or vice versa. At root, it’s about making things clearer for anyone who wants to make use of material they’ve found on the net.

Sadly, some people get a bee in their bonnet about these licences, and some of the advocates of the Creative Commons can be technoutopians who spout silly nonsense. Joe Gratz has written a good, detailed explanation of why some recent criticisms are misdirected.

pax et bonum

Red foam of the River Thames

In the course of a different debate, I read this article from Townhall.com. Those familiar with this site might know what to expect – it’s a USAian site that bills itself as “Conservative News and Information”. However, this article isn’t just right-wing. It is superficial and uninformed on the matters that it addresses, and that’s always bad.

The article posits that Britain is a declining nation, and that a prime sign of this is that we don’t regard our national flag (the Union Flag) as especially precious or holy, in contrast to USAians, who regard their Stars and Stripes as the supreme symbol of their nation. And this, of course, is the crux. The thing about the flag that USAians always seem to forget is that the US attitude towards it is actually a substitute for a monarch. In the USA, schoolchildren (for example) daily swear allegiance to the flag, and their national anthem is even “The Star-spangled Banner”. In the UK, we swear allegiance to the monarch and our national anthem is “God save the Queen”. Personally, I think that our attitude is considerably more healthy; I’d rather trust a person than a symbol But that’s why USAians see flag burning as an actual attack on the country – it’s much the same as how we would see burning the monarch in effigy.

This article, though, is classic cultural imperialism – simply assuming that US attitudes are the same as those of another culture and ignoring anything that doesn’t fit. The author should be ashamed of his superficial piece of puffery. Meanwhile, in the real world, we can at least learn one more detail of how countries differ in these odd little ways. And learn not to let them divide us.

pax et bonum

Google Moon

Google have added new map data to their Google Maps service – the Moon. Having been put up in honour of the first manned landing on the moon, which happened on the 20th July 1969, the map also includes the landing sites of the Apollo craft.

However, zoom right in and you’ll see something that NASA never told us…

pax et bonum

Secret identity

Waiter Rant is in good, laugh-out-loud form today

Ecological footprint

Ever wondered what proportion of the world’s resources you’re using? MyFootprint.org gives you a short questionnaire to fill in, and then estimates for you what your ecological footprint is in terms of the number of hectares of productive land and water you need to support what you use and what you discard. I was pleasantly surprised by my result, but there’s obviously still some work to be done. Primarily, eating less meat and less imported food.

Global Hectares – Category
1.5 – Food
0.1 – Mobility
0.6 – Shelter
0.4 – Goods/services
2.6 – Total footprint
In comparison, the average ecological footprint in your country is 5.3 global hectares per person.
Worldwide, there exist 1.8 biologically productive global hectares per person.
If everyone lived like you, we would need 1.4 planets.

Oh, and there’s also a great version for children, although it does assume you’re from the USA! (It gives a result in acres – multiply by 0.4 to convert to hectares, as used in the adult version.)

(_Thanks to Maggi for the tip_)

pax et bonum

Disposable PCs?

Staggeringly, the New York Times is reporting (registration required) that people are getting so overwhelmed with Windows malware (viruses, spyware and so on) that instead of cleaning their computers up, they’re actually starting to throw them away and buy new ones!

Tucker, an Internet industry executive with a doctorate in computer science, decided that rather than take the time to remove the offending software, he would spend $400 on a new machine.
“It was cheaper and faster,” he said.

Apart from the terrible environmental impact of throwing away all those old computers, what does this say about the parlous state of the Windows world? Fortunately, the Guardian has run an article about the excellent Knoppix. If you’ve got an old PC, or even a new one, get hold of the Knoppix LiveDVD. You put the DVD into your PC when you start it up and it configures itself and gives you a full running Linux system without touching your hard disc at all (in other words, it’s totally risk free). It comes with desktops that are prettier and easier to use than Windows, office suites (plural!), email and web browsers (including Firefox), graphics software, hundreds of games, everything you could possibly want (5300 programs), including proper firewall and anti-virus software. You can even update your software online with little more than a mouse click, and save the new versions onto a USB memory stick for next time. If you run a business, it’s even got a full LAMP stack (linux, Apache web server, MySQL database and PHP/Python/Perl scripting). And despite all this, it’s extraordinarily easy to use and totally free – no cost and no restrictions. The Guardian article finishes with this question.

When you have instant access to 50,000 free programs, why bother paying extra for a proprietary operating system that only comes with 50?

Why indeed?

(_The new Knoppix 4 will be out very soon – currently, it’s only available via BitTorrent download. A little patience could reap a great reward_
Thanks to GROKLAW for the tip)

pax et bonum

Guilty?

Caroline has some good thoughts on the speed with which the apparent bombers of London have been identified.

Drummachine

Here is a cool Flash thing – keep your sound working and click on words with your mouse, because it’s in Japanese.
(_Thanks to Caroline for the tip_)

Beethoven and sharing music

I’m sorry I missed this – apparently the BBC recently offered all nine Beethoven symphonies for free download, together with introductory commentaries. That would have been really nice to get hold of, especially the introductions.

The silly part is that the BBC are actually being lambasted by the classical music record companies for doing this. Apparently, it “devalues” the music, and leads people to believe that it’s OK to download and keep these tracks. Well, given the BBC own the copyright to these tracks, it is OK to download and keep these tracks. The record companies will just have to deal with it! And as for devaluing the music – perhaps, but why should the BBC care? The BBC has a remit that demands that it further public appreciation of the arts, so making some of the finest music in the world more widely and easily available is something it ought to be doing. If the record companies can’t compete, that’s too bad. There’s no law saying they have a right to earn money. Indeed, remember that these are the same companies that used to make money selling sheet music, and made a huge fuss when radio and, later, television were invented and brought to the public.

Music is for entertainment and enlightenment, not for profit. Musicians need to earn a living from their art. If someone can make profit by acting as a middleman, good for them, too, but the music doesn’t exist for them. It exists for the performer and the audience.

pax et bonum

Funny spam

OK, this blog is being hammered with comment spam and trackback spam. OK, Pivot-Blacklist is doing a fine job of keeping the dross out. OK, I get hundreds of spam emails every day. But sometimes, just sometimes, spam lets me smile.

Like this spam title that popped up in my Junk folder today. I don’t think this is quite what they meant originally

pax et bonum

Fridge choruses

You know those fridge-poetry kits? Well, here is a kit to produce some of those Christian choruses we all know and, erm, love.
(_Thanks to Dan for the tip!_)

Bombs and poverty

There are bombs exploding in London this morning – as I write, 6 confirmed explosions on the London Underground, one on a bus. Two confirmed deaths, many more injured. The Underground network has been closed, and buses are stopped. Central London mobile phone networks shut down owing to overload as everyone tries to phone everyone else to check whether they’re OK.

No announcements yet on what exactly is going on but, if it is bombs, I can think of two possibilities.

(click for more)

Special people

Waiter Rant has a piece (excellent as always) on how we relate to the mentally disabled.

More labels

scribblingwoman has another take on the idea of labels and how we use them to describe ourselves (‘feminism’, in this case).

Greenscore

Ever wondered how green your lifestyle is? Take the Greenscore Questionnaire. I was pleasantly surprised by my results, although there’s still room for improvement (my energy score was only 51% – we need to be more careful turning off the TV, for example, and it would be good to put foil behind the radiators).

Congratulations! Your overall GreenScore is 74% out of a possible 100%.
The average score of other participants is 60%.

pax et bonum

Normal service resumed

Apologies if you’ve noticed oddities in this blog today. I got hit by some trackback spam – 40 or so trackbacks to old posts pointing readers to online poker games. So, I had to waste time deleting all those trackbacks. As a result, I’ve now installed the Pivot-Blacklist extension to this blog’s software, which blocks comment and trackback spam. I’ll try and keep an eye on how it’s doing but there don’t seem to be any problems.

While I was fiddling with the software, I decided to install another extension, to allow readers to rate each post – the rating is displayed in the titlebar of each post, with the rating button at the bottom. Even if you don’t have time to leave a comment, please do rate posts to let me know what you like

pax et bonum

Who pays for the ID card?

The Register has a discussion of the costs of the UK’s proposed ID-card scheme. Following the recent LSE report, which said that the costs of the scheme would be 2-3 times what the Government had been claiming, the Government has been rubbishing the report. Unfortunately for them, most of its figures actually come from Government documents – so they are effectively rubbishing their own experts. The current way to keep the apparent costs down is to focus on the price of the card to the individual – neatly hiding all the other costs in charges to Government departments (i.e. in taxation). In other words, capping the price of an ID card at £30 just means that we’ll pay the rest of the true cost in tax.

(click for more)

Deep Impact

NASA’s Deep Impact probe has made an impression on the comet Tempel-1.

Bush rejects climate deal

GW Bush is being stupid, again – he’s ruled out, in advance, any deal in the G8 meeting that involves limits on CO₂ emissions.

Slow Lightning

Since my last book reviews, I’ve read another of the books I bought for my birthday – Slow Lightning by Jack McDevitt. McDevitt has written some very good books, including one of my all-time favourites, A Talent for War. So, I had high hopes for Slow Lightning. This book tells the story of a missing person, a missing ship and a missing answer, investigating a mystery three decades old in the story world. Kim Brandywine’s sister went missing nearly 30 years ago after getting into a taxi on her return from a deep-space mission looking for aliens (despite hundreds of years of searching, no alien life of any sort has yet been discovered). The question of how and why she disappeared takes Kim far from her comfortable life as a PR rep for a scientific research institute. She investigates, goes into danger, steals spaceships and, yes, eventually finds the answer, which is well laid in advance but nonetheless surprising.

(click for more)

PostSecret

PostSecret. Postcards with secrets on. That’s all. But it’s moving, honest and scary.

Jesus and the porn star

A very moving story, with an ending that you might not expect. (8 parts)
(_Thanks to Kinesis for the tip_)

Atonement again

Sven returns from a web-free world with a good post revisiting the atonement, explaining why the commonest evangelical understanding is faulty.

Focus

There’s been some interesting debate on this post from Leaving Münster. The original post was asking the question, “why aren’t Christians better people?” That is, not only aren’t Christians necessarily any better than other people – they’re often actually worse. Churches can be hotbeds of bigotry, hypocrisy, exclusion, arrogance, judgement and moralising. Bob’s conclusion was: “It’s not the Christians that are the problem; it’s their ‘Christianity.’“

In the comments, Caroline said:
“I tend to notice that I get things wrong when I start focusing on the truths of Christianity rather than the implications of Christianity. I can get wrapped up in the ‘whats’ and ‘whys’ of my faith and forget the ‘so whats’. This is not to say that the truths are any less true, but to suggest that they should become a window through which we can see our future actions or be a provocation to new acts of grace and mercy.“

Very true. Perhaps we should view theology in much the same way as the Orthodox view their icons – as a way to illuminate the truth and draw us to worship. That is, theology should not be an end in itself but rather a means to an end – in the old phrase, “faith in search of understanding”. The truths of Christianity are merely expressions and explanations of the experiences of Christians, from the earliest days to the present and ourselves. If they do not motivate us to action, to change and growth, then they are not “truths” to us at all. The reality is Christ and, unless we make Christ our reality and our centre, we will not be truly Christian at all.

When we become focused on dogma, on defining our faith and determining who is “in” and who is “out”, then we have lost our focus on Christ, the Person who demolished certainty, transcended all boundaries and was more concerned with including the outcast than in conforming to religious expectations.

If a Christian is someone who is focused on Christ then we should be more concerned with that focus than with our labels. If someone does not show the effects of that focus (the fruits of the Spirit in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control) then we can legitimately ask whether their focus is truly on Christ. If a church does not show that fruit, we may ask whether its focus has drifted from Christ to something else – whether that’s politics, dogma, the pastor or nothing at all.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether we call ourselves “Christian” or not. What matters is whether we are travelling with Christ.

pax et bonum

Welcome to a friend

Steve H has started blogging, over at On Earth as in Heaven. This should prove to be a blog to watch – Steve works in the CofE but, if you have a stereotype of an anglican priest, it wouldn’t be him His writing is always insightful and he doesn’t mind rocking the boat. One of his inaugural posts is some thoughts on Mary Magdelene, femaleness and debating styles in the 21st century.

[P]eople today want a faith that holds a view of the female that is equal to the male, and of the physical that sees it as good. we ought to be at the forefront here with women as much as men made in God’s image, with sex as a gift of God and our bodies as temples of his spirit. this is not to deny that all is not good with how we are and the need for salvation in all it’s dimensions, but to say we need to learn afresh the message of God’s misison as starting with creation and ending in new creation.

pax et bonum

The Opposite of Free Love

Trafficking in human beings for the sex trade is The Opposite of Free Love. The article’s been around for a while now but remains as true as ever it was.

Among the most common, and blatant, offenders are members of the U.S. military and international peacekeeping missions. For several years UN peacekeepers, including those on U.S. government contracts…trafficked women and children as young as twelve years old from other parts of Eastern Europe to Bosnia and Herzegovina…supervisors worked with Serbian organized crime rings to import girls for sexual servitude. Employees who raised questions were fired…“the sex slave trade in Bosnia largely exists because of the UN peacekeeping operation”...the sex trade in Bosnia received at least 30 percent of its revenue from UN and U.S. peacekeeping forces.

Trafficking in persons is not a women’s issue – it is a human issue. And it is not an issue that lends itself to a single “Christian response.” The truth is that there are many necessary Christian responses.

(_Thanks to Maggi for the tip_)

pax et bonum

Dishonest steward and grateful debtors

Storyteller’s World has a good article on the parable of the dishonest steward . Among the rest, he drops in the comment that we always seem, in this parable, to identify with the steward. Why, he asks, do we not identify with the debtors? And this is an excellent thought. If we are the debtors, the parable becomes a story of debt and redemption, not of honesty and dishonesty. It’s still not completely easy to understand, but it shines new light into what is often a dark place.

pax et bonum

Freakonomics on Abortion

I am a Christian Too has a good post about why it’s hard to discuss abortion.

Reaching out?

WorD contrasts the reaction in the UK after the recent bombing with that in the USA after the events in 2001.

Extremists

Richard White writes about who the extremists are.
(_Thanks to maggi for the tip_)

Junia and other women

After the recent General Synod of the Church of England voted by a two-thirds majority to remove the obstacles to women becoming bishops, I’ve seen more of the usual debate about whether women can lead a church. What always surprises me about this debate is that the two ends of the spectrum of church (the high and the very low) are the ones who object to women priests, for different reasons – tradition, a sense of rightness, an interpretation of the Bible.

However, both might do well to re-read their Bibles and to re-examine the traditions of the church. Women held leadership roles in the early church, and for quite a while thereafter. Indeed, we even have evidence that a woman was included among the apostles (not the 12, obviously, but the larger group that included Paul and that he included in his list of ministries) – Junia, mentioned in Romans 16:7, although her name is often mistranslated “Junias” or “Junius” in an attempt to make it seem more male. Still, my NIV Study Bible at least honestly mentions in the footnotes that it’s “a feminine name”, despite the absence of any indication in a normal NIV that the “Junias” given in this translation is feminine.

Kathryn Riss has lots of interesting information about Junia and other women in the New Testament acting as pastors, prophets, martyrs, evangelists and teachers.

pax et bonum

Becoming the monster

‘A terrible thing has happened in the city of London. This song is our prayer that we don’t become a monster in order to defeat a monster…’
Bono, Paris 10 July 2005

Can anyone gainsay this? Surely, this must be a prayer for all of use in these coming weeks and months.
(_Thanks to WorD for the tip_)

pax et bonum

Light and darkness

Kathryn at Good in Parts has posted a lovely story of how the light makes itself known.

Reply to Falwell

Jerry Falwell, that stalwart of the Religious Right in the USA has declared in a letter that those who disagree with his politics are ‘hardly “Christian”.‘ Well, thanks, Jerry. I wasn’t aware that Jesus came to preach the Gospel of the Republican Party of the USA. I always thought that he came to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to release the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour (Luke 4:18-19). Father Jake has written a reply to Falwell’s letter at the Christian Alliance for Progress. I’m not always in tune with the Progressive message, but Jake’s letter reply deals point by point with Falwell’s attack, insisting that Christ’s message was far more than the narrow one of “heaven for me when I die” that is too often preached by the Right.

pax et bonum

The pain of the world

Kathryn recalls a tale that illustrates the pain of God in the world.

Modernism and Postmodernism

Those confused by what Modernism and Postmodernism are, who are confused by the ideas of subjective and objective truth, who don’t understand why people get so worked up about the notion of absolute and foundational truths could do worse than read this article by Ken Archer. Indeed, those who think they understand the differences could probably also gain by reading it. Framed as a critique of a recent book, Ken deals with important issues of how we came to think in the categories that we do.

(click for more)

God unchanging?

Words that often get bandied around when talking about what God is like include “omnipotent”, “omnipresent”, “omniscient” and so on. So far, so good. These attributes are derived from the Biblical narrative, in which God is described as being all-powerful, being present anywhere and everywhere, as knowing everything since the beginning of the world and to the end of the world. However, there’s another description of God that’s often used – unchanging. The idea here is that God does not change Her mind, does not regret decisions, cannot be affected by outside influences. And this idea does not come from the Bible.

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Black and white

The papers are full of reports of violence in Edinburgh today. And what’s sad about it is that they seem unable to draw a clear line between the MakePovertyHistory/Live8 campaign to deal with world poverty and the anarchist/antiglobalisation movement resposible for the violence.

It should be as clear as night and day – the violent protesters, those whose aim is to derail the summit and who oppose all globalisation, are dressed in black; the peaceful protesters, those whose aim is justice for the poor and who actually want global action, are dressed in white. It’s as simple as black hats and white hats in the old Western movies. That might seem corny, and it’s mostly a coincidence, but it is true.

MPH/Live8 actually want and need global action if their aims are to be achieved. This makes them totally different to those who oppose globalisation. If only the media could see this.

pax et bonum

Real religion

Sven wrote today about how our religion, if it claims to be based on the Bible, must look to the Bible’s values. The real values, not the ones we are told that it teaches. Which reminded me of the prophet Amos. Translation can sap the life out of the text, so here it is in a form you might not be familiar with.

God says, “Can’t stand your religion – it turns my stomach. I detest your meetings. Yeah, fine, you bring me your offerings by the book, but I’ll throw them back in your smug faces. You bring me your peace offerings, but they mean nothing; so I’ll ignore them. Oh, and your songs: just shut up: they’re doing my head in! If I hear one more tambourine, I’m going to scream. What I want to hear is the roaring river of justice sweeping through your towns. What I want is for the right things you do to wash away the dry, hard, crusted build-up of evil.”
(Amos 5:21-24, from The Street Bible.)

pax et bonum

Virtual G8 Rally

Couldn’t make it to the Edinburgh rally for MakePovertyHistory? Then join the virtual rally and campaign for trade justice!

pax et bonum

ACC meeting reports

I’ve not heard much about the meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council, which was on a few weeks ago. So, I was glad to find today a couple of good reports about the meeting – one from
Anglicans Online and another from AskThePriest.org. Sounds like, contrary to some expectations, the conservatives didn’t get things to go their own way. Apparently, not even all the delegates from the Global South (a group presumed to be opposed to homosexuality in the church) voted for the measure censuring the American churches for their tolerant attitudes. Indeed, the motion only just passed, with 30 votes for, 28 against and 4 abstentions – but there were over 70 delegates, so well under half of those eligible to vote apparently did so. Sounds like that’s an end to the argument that the vast majority of the Anglican Communion want homosexuality treated as a serious sin.

pax et bonum

Eight men in a room

This week sees the G8 summit – eight powerful men in one room, making decisions that affect us all. So far, so normal. Thus is the world run.

However, this morning’s Thought for the Day on the BBC Radio4 Today Programme (by Revd Dr Angela Tilby) surprised me somewhat. She began by talking about the huge protest rally and march in Edinburgh on Saturday, and her impression from all the raised arms that it seems like prayer. She said that these eight men were, however, not gods but only men. It is too much, she said, to expect men to change the world.

I disagree with her. Whatever these men decide will change the world. Whatever every person decides will change the world in some way. Yes, these eight leaders are only men – but they are still men. We can and must hold them responsible, as men, for the decisions they make on our behalf. We cannot hope for miracles, but we can hope for change.

The three pillars of the MakePovertyHistory Campaign are Trade Justice, Drop the debt and More and better aid. We already have promises of more aid, so that’s half a pillar. We have promises to drop some debt, so that’s another half. The big one, it seems to me, though, is trade justice. This is the one with the potential for truly long-term results. This is the one that changes the way the system works. And this is the one that’s least likely to happen – it costs a lot. The others just cost money; this one costs political capital, because it involves removing the subsidies we give to our own farmers and industries that let them compete unfairly in the “free trade” world.

And, oddly, there has actually been some progress on this one, too, from an odd source – the World Trade Organisation. There have been a few reports recently about the WTO actually ruling as it’s supposed to, that the huge subsidies given by the US and EU to their farmers act to distort the market (for cotton and sugar, in these cases) so that poorer countries cannot compete.

So, we do have hope for this week. Things can change.

pax et bonum

LIVE 8 - What can you do now?

I’m watching the London Live8 concert on BBC1 (actually, I’ve just slipped out to post this!). If you’ve not done so already, please sign the Live8 List and add your name to the millions calling for justice for the poorest in this world.

pax et bonum

Christian Carnival

The latest Christian Carnival is up at ChristWeb. Looks like some good stuff there, as always!

The Living Word

slacktivist reminds us that words (whether in the Bible, the US Constitution or anything) are living things to be related to, not dead, static things to study only.