Simon Says ...

The verdict in the Stave Chalke heresy trial is here . It's almost anglican in urging him to 'think again'. Commission on communion in the Evangelical Alliance anyone?

Philip Pullman has an excellent piece in today's Guardian . It's about reading as a democratic activity, and how it resists totalitarian and theocratic government. For Pullman the danger of theocracy is that it tries to over determine the way in which we read texts. He shows how in the USSR and in Iran reading was a political act, especially when texts were 'apolitical'. His suggestion that America is going in this direction seems to me a less helpful approach, betraying a liberal failure to understand why Bush is so popular. It is true that government imperialism has elements of this, but then so do elements of the British government. Reports of the war, in particular, are subject to propaganda and lies. It is dangerous to dismiss the whole of America just because their government lies about war, especially dangerous for a Brit to do this! Pullman's conclusion is that "The democracy of reading exists in the to-and-fro between reader and text, whe