Category Archives: Politics and sociology

The curse of care homes

Posted on 30/04/2020 by Jon Garvey

Internationally much has been said in the last week about a wave of COVID-19 in care homes. My Canadian cousin said it showed how dangerous they are, though of course it just shows that they are full of the elderly, the main target group of SARS-CoV-2.

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | Leave a comment

Fie on your experiments!

Posted on 25/04/2020 by Jon Garvey

The title is a (mis)quote I used back in 2011, here. I’m reminded of it by a typical headline in the Telegraph today: “Watch: Will Sweden’s coronavirus gamble pay off?”. But as a spokesman from Sweden said not too long ago, the real gamble – or unevidenced experiment, to be more precise – is being conducted by the other nations, including America and Britain. Sweden has just based its response on universal precedent.

Posted in History, Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | 2 Comments

Style over substance

Posted on 15/04/2020 by Jon Garvey

One group to do badly out of COVID-19 is the guild of celebrity charismatic prophets, who have uniformly both failed to predict it (except in the “Last September God gave me a secret message I can now reveal” manner), and who even got their false retrospective words from God wrong as they decreed instant death on the virus by Easter (or Passover, for some reason). Particularly instructive to watch on YouTube is Kenneth Copeland, whose spuriously authoritative curses on the thing, and demand for an instant vaccine NOW, almost tip him into apoplexy (though as he has also prophesied he will live to 120, I guess he’s safe). He dug … Continue reading →

Posted in Music, Politics and sociology, Theology | 4 Comments

Exit strategies

Posted on 13/04/2020 by Jon Garvey

Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, COVID-19… we seem to have developed a penchant for embedding ourselves deeply into situations without fully considering how to get out of them.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Science | 6 Comments

Good Friday

Posted on 10/04/2020 by Jon Garvey

I’ve noticed something interesting in Britain during this COVID-19 crisis – perhaps not that surprising, but maybe a significant sign of the times.

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Hedging and ditching

Posted on 09/04/2020 by Jon Garvey

Here in rural Devon, most of the field boundaries are traditional “Devon banks,” which are banks of earth and stone originally capped with hedges, in order to contain livestock. Down in our valley, many of the banks are mediaeval. The parish boundary just down the lane, dated by counting the number of tree species that have colonized what was originally holly, probably dates right back to Saxon times. But up here on the hill most of them, including the boundaries of my own property, probably date to around 1820, when the common-land “turbary” was enclosed: a mere two hundred years.

Posted in Creation, History, Politics and sociology | Leave a comment

It’s the same the ‘ole world over…

Posted on 03/04/2020 by Jon Garvey

It’s the poor wot gets the blame. I’m increasingly of the opinion that the “precautionary principle” that’s so prevalent in the current crisis, and in many other recent public applications of science, is a highly dangerous one.

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | 4 Comments

By nature objects of wrath

Posted on 02/04/2020 by Jon Garvey

I’ve belatedly realised one plausible reason why Paul places homosexual acts at the head of his list of the sinful results of denying the true God in Romans 1:18ff. On the face of it, that particular activity doesn’t seem obviously to follow on from idolatry, nor to be uniquely evil.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | 2 Comments

Cancelling society to save lives

Posted on 18/03/2020 by Jon Garvey

A wise retired surgeon said on a radio phone-in yesterday that, just a few years ago, we wouldn’t even have known about COVID-19 until the pandemic was past its peak, and we would probably have concluded that it was just a particularly bad winter for elderly deaths from respiratory disease. Maybe ignorance is bliss.

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science, Uncategorized | 6 Comments

God’s River of Love

Posted on 16/03/2020 by Jon Garvey

Long ago God formed a River of Love. It flowed from the foot of the cross of Jesus Christ, and ran with the clear water of life, a water so powerful that when it washed against those who bathed in it, it turned their rebellion and enmity against heaven into a love that reflected God’s own, and poured out from them to share the good news of forgiveness and healing to other people. As for those who drank of that water, they were enabled to live forever in the very presence of God.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | 2 Comments