Simon Says ...

Review of Benigno P. Beltran, Faith and Struggle on Smokey Mountain: Hope for a Planet in Peril (Orbis, 2012). If all the books on the Michael Ramsey Prize shortlist are as good as this, then I’m in for a treat!   It is good to have an author on the shortlist who is not from the UK or the US.   Beltran is from the Philippines.   A Roman Catholic priest, and a teacher of theology, Beltran has also been the chaplain to the most notorious rubbish dump in the world – Smokey Mountain in Manilla.   Here around 25 000 people lived as scavengers, and became a symbol of both poverty and the ecological degradation of the world. This is a deceptively short book.   It is both moving and challenging.   It also covers several different genres.   Most obviously, it is autobiographical.   Benigno Beltran was a Pilipino priest who was sent to study in Rome.   He returned to the Philippines to train seminarians.   On h...

The fantasy US President Jed Bartlett seeking re-election, finally found a three word question to ask his republican challenger - 'And then what?'  It's a question that I've found myself asking a lot over the past week as Presidents and Prime Ministers have sought to advocate bombing as a response to the use of chemical weapons seemingly by the Syrian government. Let me set out a few things that seem to be clear.  Some are obvious, others appear to me to be in danger of being forgotten. The use of chemical weapons is abhorrent, immoral and quite clearly outlawed by international law.  It appears that they have been used by the Syrian government against their own people.  This is rightly a matter of international concern. Since the genocide in Rwanda, there has been a renewed international determination (at least in some quarters) to prevent such terrors happening again. There has been military intervention in conflicts in Kosovo, the Congo and Libya inspired ...

A Sermon for Corpus Christi One of the joys of having children is reliving bits of your own childhood, and my son and I have been enjoying an I-Spy book – The I-Spy book of History.   As we go around new places, it gives us things to spot and claim points for.   This weekend, we went to Cresswell Crags on the border with Nottinghamshire, and ticked off some of the things related to caves and hand axes and so on. You get ten points for a cave that people used to live in, and twenty for an axe and so on.   In the gift shop, however, there was a new I-Spy book – The I-Spy book of Dinosaurs.   Good luck with that one! I mention this because today, as we celebrate Corpus Christi, we are involved in learning to see Jesus.   Corpus Christi offers us, if you like, the I-Spy book of Jesus.   There is an important spiritual task here – learning to see Jesus.   The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote that “I greet him the days I meet him, and bless whe...

A sermon for Easter 7. Acts 16.16-34 ; John 17.20-26 ‘I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.’  Today is the seventh Sunday of Easter.  In old money, that’s the Sunday after Ascension Day.  And the themes of Ascension Day continue to echo through the readings we have heard this morning.  The power and authority of Jesus are found in both of our readings this morning. In three stories, we hear of the power of God – the power of God to free a woman being used; the power of God to break open a prison; the power of God to unite us with God and reveal his glory.  In all three we also see the power of the name of Jesus – it is in the name of Jesus that Paul commands the spirit to leave the slave-girl; Paul and Silas tell their jailor that he must believe on the Lord Jesus and you will be saved; and Jesus tells his Father that he has ‘made your name known to them’.  The Ascension Day theme of Jesus sitting a...

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...