Simon Says ...

A Sermon for Evensong Baruch 4.36-5.9 ; John 2.1-11 A policeman stops a car which is driving erratically. When he approaches the driver, he sees that he's a priest. 'Excuse me Father', says the policeman, 'but have you been drinking?'. 'No', says the priest, 'I only drink water'. The policeman spots an empty wine bottle on the passenger seat and says to the priest 'So why do you have that?'. 'Well I never', replies the priest, 'he's done it again!'.             One the third day, Jesus is at a wedding with his disciples.  It’s not his wedding.  He doesn’t seem to be at the centre of things.  I picture him on the fringes of the party, quietly enjoying himself with his friends and family.  And then the wine runs out – disaster.  So quietly, in a way that only the servants and those sitting with him know about, Jesus turns one hundred and twenty gallons of water into one hundr...

Review of Nicholas Shaxson, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World (Vintage, 2011). Of the books I read over my Christmas break, one made me cry (Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? ) and one made me angry.  Nicholas Shaxson takes the dry and complex subject of tax and turns it into something with the energy of a thriller.  The first page of chapter one contains some worrying figures – 85% of world trade passes (on paper) through tax havens; small island financial centres have a balance sheet of $18 Trillion (a third of the world’s annual production); 99 of the top 100 companies in Europe have an offshore subsidiary.  Tax havens profoundly affect the way that we live – they enable large companies to make huge profits without contributing to the society in which those profits are made.  They have contributed to a huge transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, both globally and within the richest countries. One...