Oxford

Ash Wednesday sermon at the chapel of Mansfield College, Oxford, based on two earlier blog posts: ‘What keeps me awake at night’ and ‘Brecht’s Galileo, or, Against Macho Science’.

Luke 15:11–32 (Prodigal Son).

May I speak in the name of God: Creator, Christ, and Comforter. Amen.

A few years ago, I went to the National Theatre in London, to see Bertolt Brecht’s play The Life of Galileo, in a version by David Hare. With 20th-century hindsight, the German playwright Brecht retold the life-story of the 17th-century scientist Galileo Galilei. Today, on this Ash Wednesday, I want to talk about the nature and motivation of scientific pursuit: this play happens to provide some hooks for my thinking. So, at the risk of substituting a theatre review in the place of a sermon, here I go.

If you recall, Galileo championed the theory of Copernicus that the Earth orbits the Sun. The Church forced him to recant this view. The famous British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking says, ‘Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science.’ Is this modern science a good thing in the round? Was the Church right to slow Galileo down after all? Galileo’s 17th-century contemporaries did not have the benefit of hindsight and retrospection: They were riding the wave of the Renaissance, pregnant with the prospect of rationalism’s triumph in the 19th and 20th centuries. Read the rest of this entry »

At one o’clock Monday morning, I counted the votes to select a parliamentary candidate for the Green Party in the Oxford East constituency, to replace Peter Tatchell who had to stand down due to health reasons. Announcement to follow in due course, soon.

From one o’clock to three in the afternoon, I attended the Green group of councillors to discuss budget proposals for Oxford City Council and Oxfordshire County Council, and election strategies.

From seven to about nine o’clock in the evening, I was glad to be at the launch of the inaugural issue of the Oxford Left Review. There I talked with three journalists (among other radical right-on comrades), from Aamulehti of Tampere, Corriere della Sera of Italy, and Samoa’s Environment Weekly. Very nice people they were.

Here is the table of contents for the inaugural issue of the Oxford Left Review (Issue 1, February 2010):

• Samual Burt: Equality and Republican Ideals
• Peter Tatchell: Voter Reform and the Left
• Stuart White: An End to Labourism
• Cailean Gallagher: Call to Scottish Labour
• Matthew Kennedy: The Putney Debates
• Jeremy Cliffe: A Fourth Way for Labour?
• Brian Melican: Germany’s Fragmented Left
• Christopher Jackson: The Return of Keynes
• George Irvin: Time for a Tobin Tax
• Kaihsu Tai: The Science of Copenhagen
• Sophie Lewis: COP15 – Activist’s Perspective
• Matthew Kennedy: Žižek review
• Roberta Klimt: Bennett review
• Noel Hatch: Today’s Lost Generation

Pace Radford, it was typeset in Palatino, to good effect dare I so say. All references to non-L——r party affiliation were cautiously scrubbed, for which I am (to be frank) a bit miffed. Despite that, it was an excellent effort by the editorial team in setting off this worthy initiative.

Near midnight, I refined my letter to the Oxford Times about public ownership of assets, after email-shots to follow up all the interesting discussions I had for the last 24 hours of politicking.

It is amazing that I am not getting paid to do any of this, but certainly it has been more fun than staring at molecules on the computer. Citizenship is a full-time job, and the work of a citizen is never done….

This week in England, we were asked to ‘Remember, remember the Fifth of November’, and this Sunday – Remembrance Sunday – to remember the soldiers. It is well that we remember these; but I wonder whether it would have served us even better to remember that there had been three Anglo-Afghan Wars, before getting ourselves into a fourth one. The Encyclopædia Britannica has them thus: ‘The first war demonstrated the ease of overrunning Afghanistan and the difficulty of holding it. The second war proved to be a Pyrrhic victory for the British.’ So remember the poppy fields in Afghanistan, as well as those in Flanders, when you see the poppies this autumn.

Brief for Council of World Mission’s Mission Education School IV ‘All Creation Groans: The Eco-crisis and Sustainable Living – Understanding the Implications for Mission’

Kaihsu Tai, United Reformed Church, United Kingdom, 2009-06-05/21

The following sketch is written from my personal impression, based on several years of non-professional but serious study, observation, and discussion of the issues. Due to time constraints, I am not supplying references to the statements I make, but with modern resources it is not difficult to verify (or disprove as the case may be) most of them. I try to be frank and fair at the same time, but some might take this account to be polemical.

1 Identify the major climate change concerns and challenges for your region.

Primarily, for the United Kingdom (UK), climate change is less a physical hazard than a moral one. The UK is usually categorized as a ‘developed’ country, as measured in indices such as gross domestic product per capita. For the next decade or so, it is not difficult for those well-off (perhaps around half of the population) to adapt to the physical effects of climate change. However, the moral implications are more dire: as the first country to spark off the fossil-fueled Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, and one of the first to have the scientific and political capacity to realize the consequences of climate change since the 1980s (during the premiership of Margaret Thatcher), it cannot escape the moral responsibility about climate change. To complicate the matter, the intention to protect the competitiveness of London’s status as a major financial centre in a globalized world – the rump of an imperial past – hinders the political will to face down this moral hazard. Read the rest of this entry »

Here are some notes written in preparation for the panel discussion about the history and future of free churches in England, held at Wesley Memorial Church, Oxford, on 1 July 2009. This is just a sketch, to be further developed, and these are not polished conclusions. However, they have been published in Saint Columba’s church newsletter. Incidentally, today the Bishop of Reading echoed my earlier comparison between churches and supermarkets; I insist our (free) churches should be like co-operatives.

To set the background: Gordon Brown in late June announced more of his ‘choice’ agenda, which now has the added flavour of ‘rights and entitlements’. Unlike its namesake and predecessor, which ‘owed more to Methodism than Marx’, New Labour’s agenda is to turn citizens into consumers, but then the market-oriented ‘society’ is one without social coherence. All of a sudden, the Government needed to introduce tests for Britishness and Armed Forces Day, measures that paper over the symptom but not the problem. On the other hand, Michael Sandel’s Reith Lectures, broadcast in the same month, advocated a society of citizens, not consumers. Read the rest of this entry »