February 2006
After the successful Operation Noah conference last year in High Wycombe ‘Climate Change: How Christians Respond’, this year Sage and others brought ‘Climate change: What can Christians do?’ to Oxford today, 11 February 2006, with about 150 people attending. The main venue is Wesley Memorial Church, with some workshops at St Michael-at-the-Northgate.
Read the rest of this entry »
The last time Mike Ciul complained to me about the depressing negativity of Adbusters, we decided that there should be an equally radical, relentlessly positive activist magazine: Happiness Pony.
I’ve posted too many negative things of late. In the spirit of Happiness Pony, here is some happiness.
Read the rest of this entry »
Military recruiters get the personal info of all American public high schoolers, unless the students “opt out.”
It’s like being on the nation’s largest teen junkmail list.
Worcester Indymedia has been investigating the opt-out rates of local high schools, and trying to understand the variations from school to school.
Some of us at Pie and Coffee have joined in the effort by putting the information on the website optout.pieandcoffee.org.
If you live outside Central Massachusetts, and are interested in collecting and submitting opt-out information from your local schools, contact optout.admin@gmail.com.
This is a privacy issue. It’s about not wanting to be pestered. It’s hard to recruit kids for the military these days, and in response some military recruiters are behaving more like used-car salesmen or telemarketers than soldiers.
David Zirin has an article about the disparity between the revelry of the Super Bowl and the deplorable conditions on the street in Detroit.
He writes of
the homeless being taken to a three-day ‘Superbowl Party,’ where they’ll get the actual food and shelter they need until the big game’s over, after which they’ll be kicked back out on the streets.
Today’s Guardian brings this report “British Muslims protest over cartoons” which had a placard slogan: “free speech go to hell”. It provides a microcosm of the whole dispute, and brings into sharp relief the failed attempt of our times to reconcile ourselves (as I understand) within the dialectic of what Herman Dooyeweerd would call the nature–freedom ground motive (or are we dealing with one of the even “earlier” dualistic motives?).
Jack Straw (perhaps surprising to some) made the most intelligent comment on this matter I have read so far: “There is freedom of speech – we all respect that – but there is not any obligation to insult or to be gratuitously inflammatory.” (There may be other good analyses, as I have not read extensively on the matter: Kofi Annan’s and Peter Mandelson’s are not bad either.) But has he got to the “bottom” (ἀρχή) of it?
From now on, all tips from readers will be treated as anonymous unless the tipster requests otherwise.
Read the rest of this entry »
36 queries. 0.433 seconds.
