Ian Rees's Blog, page 5

Foreigners and exiles

There is a painful similarity between the roots of the Christian and Jewish faiths and the current refugee crisis caused primarily by the ongoing civil war in Syria, and it seems that some who claim the label Christian do not wish to remember it. David Cameron has been keen to stress that this is a Christian country and that we should all get "a lot more evangelical" about it, but does not seem to understand what that means when it comes to welcoming the stranger. And the Hungarian Prime Mini...

Logan’s Run returns

With MP Rob Marris’s Assisted Dying (No. 2) Bill (to give it its official name) due to come up before Parliament in ten days’ time public attitudes to end of life care have come to the fore. I saw an online poll in a newspaper that asked whether assisted dying should be legalised, so clicked ‘No’. The system then gave the outcome to the poll thus far and revealed that about three-quarters of the respondents thought it should be legal. I’m not surprised by that, since our society’s thinking on...

Please don't let me be misunderstood

You increasingly get the impression thatour politicians, among others, just don’t know what to make of Christians. At the beginning of August Mark Spencer, Conservative MP for Sherwood, responded to a constituent’s question about whether the proposed Extremism Disruption Orders would be used against those holding traditional views. These orders are designed, as the name suggests, to combat extremism, especially of the Islamic variety. But there have been fears that they are so broadly define...

A public platform for faith

You don’t usually get to choose the most convenient time to talk about your Christian faith. If an opportunity comes it often does so in a way that just hits you in the face. A question comes out of the blue. Maybe others are listening in and you feel that you are suddenly on a platform. Perhaps it’s a controversial issue you are being asked about. And then you lose all your capacity for coherent speech.

Tim Farron was very definitely on a public platform for his faith last week when he was in...

Rejecting the easy language of faith

If you believe the headlines Julie Nicholson is the vicar “who couldn’t forgive” and who “lost her faith” after the 7/7 bombings. Her daughter Jenny was killed in the bomb at Edgware Road tube station, one of four suicide attacks on London that day in 2005. Subsequently she felt unable to continue in the Anglican ministry, but wrote “A Song for Jenny” as a memoir of her daughter and her struggle to deal with her daughter’s murder.

A dramatization of those events was shown on Sunday evening on...

Authentic, principled and flawed

Authentic, principled and flawed. That's how a BBC journalist described Charles Kennedy who was buried on Friday 12 June and who had stood out among the political figures of our time. He had led the Liberal Democrats to their greatest tally of seats in Parliament of post-war years, probably because people recognised that he would speak up for what he believed. Going against advice of senior party leaders he stood against the Iraq war, and also disagreed with Nick Clegg on the wisdom of the Li...

I think I am an extremist

With the General Election here in Britain behind us and an unexpected Conservative majority government now in power, we have Prime Minister David Cameron making statements like this:

“For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone. It’s often meant we have stood neutral between different values. And that’s helped foster a narrative of extremism and grievance. This government will conclusively turn the page o...

Still Alice

It is not at all surprising that Julianne Moore should have won the best actress Oscar for her performance as a university professor who discovers she has early onset Alzheimer's. It is a courageous and moving portrayal of a woman who progressively loses everything – not in a material sense, of course. She has no shortage of money and possessions, whether we are talking about her significant personal income and that of her hospital consultant husband, or a sizeable flat in the city and a hous...

Chained speech

A judge at Bristol Crown Court yesterday told Taunton street preacher Michael Overd yesterday that he should not have quoted Leviticus 20:13 when speaking about homosexuality. In fining him 1,400 for using “threatening” language, the judge told him he should not have used that text because it uses the term “abomination” (in certain versions) and that there are other verses he could have chosen to address that subject. He was acquitted, however, on charges of "causing racially or religiously a...

That's the way the money goes

As I write Chancellor George Osborne is at the despatch box outlining his pre-election budget. Remarks on Twitter seem to suggest that he is doing rather a lot of tub-thumping, while the opposition are doing a lot of yah-booing. British politics is all a bit of a circus at times; it's a wonder that anything gets done. But by the end of the day we will have the complete summary and analysis from the experts (I always look out for Robert Peston) on how much various parts of the community will b...