Category Archives: Politics and sociology

Last week was, in my view, rather remarkable for the release of at least five massive tales of corruption and deception simultaneously. Most have attracted less attention than they deserve. All are profoundly depressing.

Soon after the Epstein files were released, the MSM tried, apparently unsuccessfully, to launch a story that Epstein was actually employed by Russian Intelligence to create a honey-trap to uncover Western secrets.

This morning the price of gold broke the £4,000/oz level. Even the Beeb news has had charts this week showing the exponential rise in bullion prices. I don’t think they were so upfront in drawing the main lesson that the accelerating rise in price over the last few years teaches: that it indicates the abandonment of confidence in the world financial system, which is built on escalating debt and rapidly depleting trust.

A Christian apologist on YouTube suggests that (American) public schools no longer teach children how to think, but instead what to feel. Which is a recipe for disaster. I think the same is true of churches over here in Britain, which is a recipe for spiritual shipwreck.

I wrote back in December about the distrust, by Christians of all people, of the present working class movement towards Christianity. The veritable Who’s Who of Christian opponents to this groundswell, as it was manifested in Tommy Robinson’s Christmas carol concert in Whitehall, is typical of this distrust. I think I showed in my piece on the latter that there is no evidence whatsoever of cynical racist motivation, though of course pockets of almost any kind of corruption will be seen somewhere in any mass-movement.

My last-but-one post was prompted by my reading of a book on C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series. I’m just completing the inevitable follow-up exercise of re-visiting the series itself, for the first time since I read them to our kids forty years ago. I should add that my parents unaccountably failed to introduce me to the books when I was a kid, so this is only my second time through.

Back on the Charismatic theology wagon, a podcast I did with John Collins of Leaving the Message is now out on YouTube, and seems to have mainly positive feedback so far. It’s here. I’m actually recording a follow-up in January, so we’ll see what that’s all about when we get there.

The Church Times’s downbeat report of the evangelistic carol service in Whitehall last Saturday, to which I’ve addressed the last two posts, quotes “the C of E’s co-lead bishop for racial justice, suffragan Bishop of Kirkstall Arun Arora”: Referring to Mr Robinson by his real name, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, Bishop Arora said that he was “delighted” that he had “recently come to faith in prison”, but suggested that “having embraced and accepted God’s welcome he can’t now restrict it from others who may be equally lost.