Simon Says ...

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...

Walter Wink died on 10th May .  He was a great scholar of the New Testament, but more than that he helped others to read the Bible and to model their lives upon it. I was fortunate enough to hear Walter Wink at the Greenbelt Festival in the early 1990s.  He spoke about the powers and about how Christians should read the Bible.  He offered his party piece Bible study on the sermon on the mount, involving someone stripping down to their shorts, was a powerful demonstration that the Bible has a social context and a radical meaning.  I bought the first two books on the Powers at that Greenbelt and devoured them.  Sometime later, I bought a copy of Engaging the Powers , and found a superbly written synthesis of biblical theology informed by a massive range of sources. Wink was often misunderstood.  His audience at Greenbelt halved, once some realised that he wasn't speaking of the Powers in a way that accorded with the Frank Peretti school of de...