None righteous, no not one...

New Horizons in Infamy, as the Telegraph reveals that one Labour MP tried to claim £5 to put in the plate in Church. The whole country is now one seething cauldron of self-righteous rage and scorn, aimed at MP’s. Now we know all about their garden gnomes, tennis courts, staplers, dictation machines, chocolate santas, envelopes, and dogfood. Hang on, staplers dictaphones and envelopes, are legitimate office expenses. But what the hell, they’re MP’s and they should pay it all back anyway.

MP’s allowance fraud is a really significant story, and it was very important to draw it to public attention, and all dishonest politicians everywhere should be held to account, espeically the ones who have been playing hooky with houses. That said, Some of our boldest crusaders for righteousness have their own dirty underwear, and I don’t just mean their lunch expenses.

The last owner of the Daily Telegraph, for example, has been inside for fraud, having charged such items as FDR memorabilia and Cardinal Richelieu costumes up to his expenses. The way in which various present Fleet Street owners flip their homes for tax purposes is not as well known as it could be. It takes one to know one, I suppose. Squirming under a shower of filth, England tried to cheer itself up by following the antics of breakdancing East End pensioner Fred Bowers:

But now we learn, allegedly, Fred has been claiming £70 a week Disability benefit. He says his left leg is in fact disabled, a kind of still point in a turning world thing. This is giving me some misgivings about flooding parliament with unknowns and retired celebs.
People who aren’t atually MP’s can apparently be as bent as people who are. The Fall turns out to be stone cold sober truth; to quote the late great Noel Coward “Everybody is bent, Camp Freddie.”

Here’s the heart of the matter. We could develop yet more labarynthine and draconian regulations, guidelines and allowances to stop this kind of behaviour, but I’ve another suggestion. Brits have gotten into the habit of treating the ten commandments as obsolescencies in our Secular Brave New World, but they do have a certain resonance just now. “Thou shalt not steal.” “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” “Thou shalt not covet.”

Not exactly rocket science, are they?

But they do seem to reach some of the parts that regulations, guidelines and codes of practice don’t.

Intercommunion: finding a way home

Interesting personal coments on Eucharistic exclusion as a tool of ecclesiastical diplomacy. I take Steve Hayes’ useful point about the dangers of Church Consumerism, about which I generally agree with him, but I need to say that Dr Steffensky was coming from somewhere entirely different in Bremen.

Steffensky was emphatically not saying “You should have it because you want it and have a right to choose.” He was starting at the other end, with the nature of the Eucharist, as that which constitutes the Church. To have a category of Christians who are grudgingly acknowledged to be so but excluded from table fellowship is a wrong answer to St Paul’s fundamental question “Is Christ divided?” By his death and resurrection Christ has broken down every dividing wall; then we go and build a few of our own. Steffensky objected to anything that turns unity into a human and institutional achievement, rather than something Christ has made by his death and resurrection. He was trying to take fully seriously the forward-looking and sacramental meaning of Communion. A modern Club mentality was exactly the thing to which he most deeply objected. His ground conviction was that the Eucharist makes the Church, far more than the denomination defines the Eucharist, and that’s why, he would say, real liturgical terrorism is making a holy Sacrament into a weapon in the ongoing historic game of denominational cowboys and Indians — unworthy and destructive behaviour.

I’m reminded of words that struck me years ago, about a correspondence between Henry Westall and the Bishop of London as the Church of England attempted to enforce an insitutional ban on the use of reservation, portable lights [candles accompanying Gospel processions] and Incense, in 1900. Bishop Creighton had said:

I always wonder what horses think about a coachman. I imagine that they think him stupid, unjust, particular about unnecessary trifles, and always checking them needlessly. But his business is to get the coach along without upsetting it. He is on the box and he sees more than anybody else. He is not responsible for the obstacles in the road, and if he could regulate all the traffic, he could make things easy all round. But alas he is limited to the obscure and ignoble duty of steering his own vehicle to the best of his power.

Bishop Mandell Creighton to Henry Westall, 3 April 1900.

‘True, My Lord,’ Mr Westall might have replied, ‘but in a fog the coachman, from his box, sees no further than anyone else can, while the horses (poor unreasoning beasts) can at least feel the solid ground under their feet, and sometimes their instinct will lead them safely home.’

W.Scott, “An ‘advanced’ view of the ‘Church Crisis’,” Nineteenth Century, April 1901, p 692.

The other great discovery of this post and comments has been students at Lampeter are being introduced to Dom Gregory Dix, whose classic Anglo-Catholic view of the Eucharist I have often reflected about ever since I first came across it 30 years ago:

[Jesus] had told his friends to do this henceforward with the new meaning ‘for the anamnesis’ of Him, and they have done it always since.

Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuges of fugitives in caves and the dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetish because the yams have failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so, wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the think June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc – one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundred part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei – the holy common people of God.

Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, (London 1945), p744.

Liturgical Terrorism or the future?

Fifty years ago, most denominations had some degree of closed communion — people were generally nice about it, but the denomination was the gatekeeper. Since the 1950’s this rather Brethren way of doing Church has largely broken down in the West.

People who are not personally excommunicated are admitted on the basis of baptism, and the whole Church, not the denomination is the medium of the Sacrament. The institutional denomination is only trustee for the Lord, to whom the Sacrament belongs.

In the good old days saying the Lord’s prayer with other Christians was a mortal sin for Roman Catholics, but that was many years ago. Conciliar theology has a structure to support Eucharistic hospitality, which is only offered in certain closely defined circunstances.

In Hanover in 2005, my eyebrows raised as the (now retired) Cardinal Archbishop of Mainz described the current restructions in his denomination as a “thorn in the flesh.”

In Bremen I stayed with a delightful Catholic host, who told me the hot ticket for Saturday morning’s Bible Study was Fullbert Steffensky, Professor Emeritus at Hamburg.

He was now a Lutheran, having started out as a monk of Maria Laach — the place Adenauer found sanctuary from the Nazis in 1934 (though that’s not quite the whole story of the monstery at that time).

The Bible Study considered Genesis 16 and Hagar the slave woman. She is not entirely outside God’s blessing, and we were led into considering the probem of religious absolutism and the inability of some Christians and others to believe God has blessed anyone but their in-group. He leapt straight from there to an incident at the Berlin Kirchentag in 2003, where large crowds had been banned from intercommunion. What right had ecclesiastical authorities to try and deprive the people of God of hope? As I mentally fell off the seat, given the style distance between the presentation and our customary stately Englsh ecumenical quadrille, the preacher continued.

The basis of Communion is the mercy, gift and call of God, not what he scathingly called “die Einheitlichkeit in einigen Sätzendes Bekentnisses. (loosely, “the oneness of a sit-down of acquaintances”) It was pointless for ecclesiastical authorities to say the Church wasn't ready for such a thing, if all they meant was that they weren’t. Now, Ecumenical diplomats, sit down somewhere comfortable and pour a stiff drink, as I quote the published text:

Wir können nicht darauf warten, bis die letzten fußkranken Mitglieder von Kirchenleitungen angekommen sind und das Mahl für erlaubt. (very loosely, “We can’t wait for the last lame duck Church leaders to catch up and join us at the table...”)

Dr Steffensky very much hoped that at future Kirchentage people would just go ahead and eat as the Lord commanded, concluding

Auf Dauer werden die Bischöfe schon fördern, was sie nicht verhindern können. ( loosely, “The Bishops will soon enough require what they can’t prevent.”)

Boooom! Right, my English Ecumenical Chums. This is certainly Provocative stuff that you wouldn't hear in a gathering of 125,000 Christians in England.
Is it “Liturgical Terrorism” or the Future?

At home in the real world?

Being an ordinary Kirchentager is an amazing, but overwhelming experience — as well as the formal sessions there were fascinating conversations with hosts and others. It is amazing how insular English concerns are, and separate from the mainstream of European Christianity. In Germany 125,000 people come together to explore Christian faith and life in the real world for four days, and the word “Homosexuality” occurs once, I believe, in the whole 560 page programme. It’s amazing how different, and hopeful, Christian engagement looks without US Hot Button snarkiness, and English hypocrisy about sex, both of which easily render everything, including themselves, ludicrous.

Whilst mulling over what further to write up here, I’m contemplating

Players from Sam Javanrouh on Vimeo.

The Gospel: Ethics or Hope?

Challenging sermon this morning at the Kirchentag closing service. Looking forward to dong a proper write up of it in the next day or so. For now the Peacher, Dr Danielle Garrone, a Waldensian from Rome, called us to hope in Christ, not Christendom, or ourselves. He suggested that a Church losing the script comes off the message of the gospel, and starts banging on about collateral moral issues that it thinks will engage people outside, but never seem to:

I fear ethics has become the area that we hope will attract people's interest, because we do not have enough hope to expect such interest in the gospel itself. Protestants tend to prefer to do social ethics, and Evangelicals to concentrate on sexual ethics, whilst Catholics engage in both. All of us are open to the temptation to use ethics as a way to gloss over our own lack of giving account of the hope that is in us...

The Not-very-magnificent Seven

Good Bible Study yesterday with Jim Wallis: His trumpet’s sound is not uncertain. Don’t waste a good crisis. We need to remember things we have been lightpedalling, if not ignoring or even forgetting hard these past 20 years: Gandhi’s Seven Social Sins:

1. Politics without Principle
   
   
2. Wealth without Work
   
   
3. Commerce without Honour
   
   
4. Pleasure without Conscience
   
   
5. Education without Character
   
   
6. Science without Morality
   
   
7. Worship without Sacrifice

so that’s the next year’s sermons looked after, anyway...

Westminster Götterdämmerung...

An interesting reaction to the Speaker’s forthcoming resignation on the front page of one of the morning’s German papers:

Man and Superman with Richard Rohr

Thursday begun with an excellent Bible Study on Gensis 3 by Bishop Wolfgang Hüber, (Ratsvorsitzender EKD, Berlin). The afternoon was taken up with some rather extraordinary learning about the meaning of gender and life with Richard Rohr, Franciscan and all round good guy from Albuquerque, USA. In addition to establishing a reputation as a weltberühmt Enneagram Wonk, he has done some serious thinking about the meaning of being male. I listened up and I learned this, I think.

As a priest, the young Fr Rohr noticed around him, inside and outside Church, men with a desperate need for father figures, and a sense of spiritual hunger and disconnectedness.

A rather listless and irresponsible, shallow sense of maleness pervaded the US tribe. Responding to that as a Catholic priest and a Franciscan, he has developed a way of understanding what this is about, and what to do about it.

So here’s the deal. We all have to grow up, as mind, body and emotions learn from reality — experience that yields increasing wisdom. Women have the same learning to do as men, but it helps instill realism within them that physical processes, menstruation, child-bearing, and menopause, entail regular inescapable engagement with corporeal reality. It’s harder for women to kid themselves they are superman. This doesn’t mean all women get it all the time, but it makes it easier for most of them to get it, most of the time. Men have to learn the hard way what their lives are about, and who they are, and how to live in a way that is understanding, confident, truthful and fruitful.

The meaning of men’s lives falls into two necessary phases, a survival dance to establish themselves and a sacred dance, to express fulfil the purpose for which God created them. In basic societies challenges are all around to enable young men to show off whilst becoming increasingly aware of how to handle the business of life as men. Male role models at hand show the way. The process is often expressed, sealed and celebrated by rites of passage in which the young man is wounded or humiliated, and has to show he can handle it — forgive me, Richard Rohr, for putting it this way, but a kind of Lion King process is how people learn to accept responsibility and move from survival dance to sacred dance.

The effect of living in Western societies, with their high levels of detachment from nature, easy availability of information, spiritual immaturity and fantasy, with material abundance and ease, is to prolong male adolescence. Average ages for achieving its goals are rising fast, currently to a mid thirties average. A few are forced there early by traumatic experiences like loss of a parent, chronic illness, or poverty. Some never make it.

Most sail on, playing the games of the survival dance, posing for anyone silly enough to be impressed, sometimes until their fifties and beyond, as though the one with the most toys at the end of the game wins. Life is consumed in emotionally immature, driven, acquisitive, and ultimately irresponsible behaviour. Hearts and minds are not connected up right, if at all, and men become anxious and withdrawn from life — vain and shallow, incapable of being what God created them to be. A young man who cannot cry is a savage, an old man who cannot laugh is a fool. We have plenty of both out there. Often the transition from survival dance to sacred dance comes from a mid-life experience, and is sealed by an experience of loss, such as career collapse, first marriage failure or bereavement — some place where the game breaks down, and men become aware of their limitations, capacity to feel and humanity.

Most men engaged in the survival dance are disdainful or disconnected from religion; they get by in life pragmatically on limited wisdom. Their lives exhibit spiritual emptiness, insensitivity, and an occasional will to acquire (as fast as possible) secular or sacred ideologies in shallow ways that shore up the ego temporarily but are ultimately silly, meaningless and unreal. Men with a streak of cruelty know how to acquire power, but not how to use it. This is the way to gross abuse. All great spirituality tells you what to do with your pain. If you cannot transform it, you will transmit it to your wife, children and others around you; and you'll be the last to know what you're really doing. If anything disturbs you, you cover up and lie.

Religion can articulate and enable people to access human and spiritual reality — a supreme expression of the sacred dance. Unfortunately it also provides games and routines which are easy to take as the metier for survival dances. Rather than engaging with reality, religion can be made an insulation against reality. People can enter into religions and use them to shore up personal insecurity, in a passionate but immature way. This is desperation and paranoia, more than connection with God or creation.

In this state, Devotion becomes immature, driven and even paranoid; this is the world of parade ‘n trophy religion with its manifold opinionated fundamentalisms. Most men shun such religion, but a few embrace one of its many forms in absolutist ways. You can tell this process is going on, not by the content of their belief systems, but by the unreflective, obsessional and immature ways in which young men follow such faiths. One tell tale sign that this is going on is a disconnect between religion and spirituality.

Men who make it through the survival dance to the sacred dance have met their fears and fantasies and achieved, in the main, a state of realism where they mostly know their strengths and know themselves. From that unfolds deeper knowledge of God. Men engaged on the sacred dance become increasingly open to wisdom, and do not have to prove their validity to themselves all the time, because it is real enough to them to be able to own it joyfully and truthfully. Faith which integrates spirituality and religion is an articulation of this sense of belonging, and a framework to support real living.

I find Rohr’s hypothesis fascinating. Is he right, or is he right?!

K2:Sincere Politician Shock Horror

There I was, minding my own business with a party of eight from our diocese, being a humble Kirchentager, when who should come waltzing up to me but my friend and colleague Bishop Nick Baines, all round esteemed colleague and Meissen Commission wonk? Unlike me, Nick actually speaks proper German. I’m very much looking forward to his contribution.

I’m not underestimating any of us here when I say that Church of England participation in what is, overwhelmingly, the largest and most significant Christian gathering in Europe, if not the world (125,000 people here this year) is light, to say the least. The only frustration so far has been the failure of the organisers to connect up to the fast Wi-Fi system at the Messe, forcing humble (and penurious) souls to hang around the station typing furiously into space, to the general mystifaction of assorted travellers, drunks and evangelists... It's a great life.

People talk about Kirchentag moments, and this morning contained one or two very significant ones. I have no time to say how joyful it was to be only feet away from the head of Government of the largest nation in Western Europe, as she provided Ronettes style backing for a renidition of Swing Low Sweet Chariot. Anyway, that would be telling.

But I was greatly impressed with Angela Merkel’s session this morning. She talked modestly and realistically of life in the East for 35 years before the wall came down, and of the challenges involved in maintaining a free society — Freedom, Order, and Responsibility. She explored what freedom and democracy mean, and how it is possible to maintain some sense of momentum in a complex and diverse liberal democracy.

Then, right on cue, came a demonstration by local farmers. She engaged calmly, and gently reiterated the value of dissent, and the primary importance of everyone being able to express themselves in a way that had not been possible in the old DDR. However, she warned, there is a danger of creating a society where everyone has something angry to say, but nobody’s listening on anyone else. The answer is to feed the roots of civil society so that people can get together to refine and press their various points of view in ways that test them and engage with others who differ, rather than just sloganising resgardless, with everyone shouting past each other.

And for the first time in a very long time I realised I was near a politician who was enacting, only feet away, exactly principles of tolerance she had been commending in theory minutes before! Alignment! Gott sei Dank!

The Ascent of K[irchentag Day] 1

A smooth and easy journey across Europe, including a curried sausage in Köln! It's amazing how train connections in Northern Europe snap together to the minute over hundreds of miles, in a way they don't always in the UK. It’s also good to see the back of the Mrs Thatcher memorial slow patch on Eurostar.
I am deeply moved by the hospitality of ordinary people who open their homes to complete strangers for Kirchentag. My delightful and engaging host is a Roman Catholic, originally from the South, with a passionate interest in art and Thomas Merton. It’s really moving to be treated with a Benedictine warmth, hospitality and generosity. I’d like to think we’d do the same. I hope so.

I’m trying to develop my desperately bad German a bit, and this is certainly one way to do it. The main headline events are available in English, but how far my language skills are up to some of the more interesting but abstruse events here remains to be seen. This morning we meet in the International Centre to plan the campaign. The clever bit will be grabbing internet access and time to blog in a complex and fast-moving scene; so if nothing more is heard this week, that’s why.

Ministry Reality Checkpoint

A very busy weekend, mainly because of five presentations in 48 hours! Great pleasure, but it does restrict time a bit. Today brings a leavers session at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford. Putting it together, I remembered these words from an ordination address delivered by Hensley Henson, Bishop of Durham, in 1936. Some of the ways of putting things may have dated, but I think the main point is worth considering, even today:

Nearly fifty years have passed since I was myself ordained in Cuddesdon Parish Church on a lovely summer morning in 1887.

How well I remember the tumult of conflicting thoughts which raged in my mind, and perhaps hindered me from entering as fully as I would have entered into the solemn yet exalting service! How little I guessed what lay before me! 
The immense failures 
which would overtake my too-ardent beginnings; 
the disappointments which would shadow 
my later course; the growing sense of inadequacy 
which would become a settled resident in my mind...

The happiest years of my ministry were those in which, as the vicar of a great industrial parish, 
I was nearest to the people. Faces look out at me from the past — toil-worn faces radiant with love and confidence. Nothing of what men foolishly call success is worth comparison 
with the experiences which those faces recall...

I say to you then — love God and love your people. Count nothing excessive that you can do for them. Serve them in your office for the love of Christ, 
and they will surely give you back more 
than you can ever give them.

Birds of a feather?

ASBO Jesus frequently hits interesting nails on the head with cartoons such as this morning’s. I've been reading Bill Bishop’s book The Big Sort: How the clustering of like-minded America is tearing us apart. This shows the devastating effect on social cohesion of gated communities in many areas of American life. But this is not just a sociological problem; it’s a missional issue. What hapens when we do Church like this?

Well, I suppose, we are saying that we believe we can only do our Christianity with real people if we get the option to pick the kinds of people they are. And that doesn’t include all the people whose homes we drive by on our way to Church.

Drive-In Church seems ludicrous, but this is Drive-by Church. We proclaim the reconciliation of heaven and earth by the power that raised Jesus from the dead working in us, but then hedge that process about with an insistence that we get a veto over who’s on the bus. If we believe we need to be like this, we’ve pretty much made it happen anyway. Doesn’t make it true, though. Thank God he doesn’t take that attitude.

And however convenient it is for birds of a feather to fly together, consider the missional credibility issue this attitude and behaviour raises:

“God is putting together a new reconciled humanity in Christ, and you could wake up and embrace your part in this glorious process. Come and join us!”

“How do I do that?”

“By ignoring and excluding at least 6 out of the following groups of people: the old, the unsexy, the Radical, the emotionally needy, people without cars, the sexy, the poor, the young, Classical Music wonks, the rich, the over-excitable, the Conservative, Rock music wonks, the married, the divorced, the people with buggies, the people without buggies, the people who like/ don’t like the Vicar, people with big houses, people with small houses...”

And people on the street, many of them looking for ways out of their own ghettoes, may be illiterate about religion, but they’re not all idiots, and most of them can spot this one for a pup from a mile off...

Or have I missed something?

Grim Reaper picks up sticks

Last of this year's Stick Insects has now curled up its toes. MacLeay’s Wraiths weren’t discovered until 1828, but if they had been, they’d have been popular in the Middle Ages, as reminders of slow and constant mortality. They develop papery, blotchy skin, lose their grip, and finally start falling to pieces, when, in the course of nature, something would snaffle them up, no doubt.

Bits of Tinky Winky II started falling off a week or so ago, and she ended up doing a kind of Byronic deathbed scene on leaves at the bottom of the tank, because she couldn’t hang from brambles any more but was obviously still just alive. We hope she died happy.

We should have provided piped Mahler for a kind of Death in Venice effect. Try that next year. Woodland burial out the back was this morning. We have 600 eggs for next year, expected to start hatching this autumn. MacLeay’s Wraiths live just under a year, so anthropomorphically minded fans will be glad to know that each Stick Insect Year is about 4 days....

MP expenses Chocolate Bunny Rage

Amidst a storm of understandable public anger about MP’s expenses, I think we need to remember that all these Spanish practices have been going on for years; their real heyday was probably under Thatcher, Major and Blair. When the roll is called up yonder we will doubtless discover far more heinous activity than 59p chocolate bunny allowance...
Perhaps we need to triage these scandalous revelations.

(1) Stuff that isn't really bent (but involves prominenti).
Was Gordon Brown sharing a cleaner with his brother then paying for his half actually wrong? I have met journalists claiming far more bizarre things... not to mention owners of the Daily Telegraph. That such revelations should emanate from Fleet Street, home of Spanish Practices, proves at any rate that it takes one to know one, though some will detect a faint whiff of hypocrisy.

(2) Makes a good story, but trivial.
Manure is funny stuff but people do actually use it to maintain gardens. Honestly. If I went to see an MP in their official home I'd expect it to be furnished to a decent standard, and this might indeed include a Laura Ashley Sofa.

Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn about some of the colourful minor stuff people are expostulating about. Envy is also a sin.

(3) Second homes juggling
Furnishing properties when you're leaving parliament anyway soon, redesignating properties twice a year, etc. This sort of activity is just obviously completely bent, and the sums involved would get you sacked from any other job. As we discover people who already owned three houses in London juggling the system to maximise their values, for example, the scope of what we are talking about financially really is that of major fraud.

What's interesting is that some MP's have obviously interpreted the rules using tuned moral instinct about what it was right or wrong to claim, whilst others have had no scruples about anything, however bizarre, as long as it didn't actually contravene the rules. The “What I did wasn't against the rules” response sounds completely different from those who did have a moral compass than it does from those who didn’t.

Speaking as a voter, the remedy surely lies in our own hands. If we don't like the MP's we’ve got because they seem grasping and amoral, why don’t we all just vote for others who are less selfish and have better adjusted moral compasses? Easy. In a way the gap between what the rules allowed and what was moral helps us voters decide who’s who. When we've all stopped huffing and puffing, next election, we can take the responsiblity that belongs to us all as voters to put in people we believe in as our representatives... democracy depends on that, at least as much as it depends on robust parliamentary expenses rules.

SPCK / SSG: Brewers Skewered

Time for a provisional Te Deum, as the UK Charity Commission takes formal action about the mess surrounding the former SPCK Bookshops & the St Stephen the Great Trust. More details from Mark Bennett here. You may have followed the unfolding tale on the SPCK/SSG Blog feed here. It’s good that law is now taking its course.

As well as saluting the courage and refusal to give in to bullies of Dave Walker, Phil Groom, David Keen and Matt Wardman (among others), we will hope and pray, above all, that some good comes to employees whose lives seem to have been damaged in all sorts of ways by the way the Brewers have conducted their business. USDAW is involved but, as Hochstaplers down the ages have been inclined to say, “No court in the land can extract from me money I no longer have,” so all may not be plain sailing.

And should Texas T-Bone nouveau Orthodox ever again announce that Christianity is all washed up in England and offer to save it by buying up Christian boookshops and old churches, we will be able to say “thanks, but no thanks,” knowing this notion for the mendacious twaddle it is — what Texans might call a prime Crock o’ Faeces.