A meme from Paulie:
Q1. How would you define “atheism”?
The dogmatic certainty that God does not exist, and that His non-existence really matters. Like Paulie, I prefer ‘agnostic’ as a label.
Q2. Was your upbringing religious? If so, what tradition?
Church of England; I described it here. We were quite big on the story about feeding the hungry [...]
One from the book of lost posts:
Here are some of Graham Greene’s judgments on Frederick Rolfe (‘Baron Corvo’), a writer who seems to have had a definite fascination for him:
The greatest saints have been men with more than a natural capacity for evil, and the most vicious men have sometimes narrowly avoided sanctity. … Rolfe’s [...]
Counting films on TV & video, the last five films I’ve seen (from most recent) are
The Spiderwick Chronicles
Pride and Prejudice
High School Musical 2
High School Musical
Vantage Point
You may sense a theme emerging. Spiderwick is certainly a film I wouldn’t have seen if I weren’t a parent, but as such it was much better than I’d expected [...]
11 February 2008 – 11:37 pm
Like Splinty, I am not inconsiderably annoyed at Private Eye. Oh yes.
In the recent ruckus between Newsnight and the Decent Right thinktank Policy Exchange, the Eye (or at least the enigmatic ‘Ratbiter’) has unaccountably chosen to side with the latter.
Newsnight alleged that Policy Exchange or its researchers had forged the receipts which showed you could [...]
I agree with Andrew Anthony, up to a point:
My book is a polemical memoir. It’s not ‘The Truth’. It’s part of a debate. I may be wrong. It could be that if the troops are withdrawn from Iraq and we turn a blind eye to Islamic extremism at home, Jihadist terrorism will disappear. I happen [...]
Some years ago, John Harris (not the pundit) proposed a thought-experiment called the Survival Lottery. The premise was that the supply of organs for transplant is currently inadequate to meet the demand. Moreover, the whole business of harvesting organs for transplant is fraught with practical and emotional difficulties, putting both the bereaved and potential recipients [...]
Welcome back* to Imprecise Song Lyrics Club.
This evening our featured lyricist is Mr Paul Weller, one-time tunesmith with popular beat combo the Jams. In his song “Porcelain gods”, Mr Weller writes:
Too much will kill you,
Too little ain’t enough
On first reading both propositions advanced here seem intuitively valid, but – I put it to you – [...]
Time for a bit more Potter. (Past time, in fact – my Rowling-rereading-and-reviewing schedule is way out. I blame life.)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, like its precursor, was big but not that big, a success but not yet a phenomenon. While we’re aware now of the continuing and repeated elements in successive books [...]
Ellis:
[Podhoretz]also barks:
As with Finlandization, Islamization extends to the domestic realm, too. In one recent illustration of this process, as reported in the British press, “schools in England are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils . . . whose beliefs include Holocaust denial.” (ellipses in original)
Now when you use apostrophes like [...]
As a genre, fantasy has something in common with utopian fiction. Utopias begin with a challenge – Let’s say that everyone’s happy – and then set about answering the questions that challenge provokes. The interest of a utopia is precisely which questions the author believes need to be answered: is it “Who will do the [...]
Jamie:
Back in the eighties when China was inviting “foreign friends” over, mainly to teach, as a means of preparing the locals for the forthcoming golden horde of businesspeople they weren’t too scrupulous about checking credentials. There was an absolute infestation of evangelicals, often in posts at fairly prestigious universities for which they had no qualifications [...]
David, of all people, points to a fascinating lecture by Rowan Williams. Who writes, among much else:
Take Scripture out of this context of the invitation to sit at table with Jesus and to be incorporated into his labour and suffering for the Kingdom, and you will be treating Scripture as either simply an inspired supernatural [...]
30 October 2006 – 5:12 pm
I undertook last night to defend Torchwood against its critics. Having seen last night’s episode I’m less enthusiastic about this task than I was – about the kindest thing that could be said about episode 3 is that it was a load of old tosh. Still, I feel much more kindly disposed towards the series [...]
I recently read Alison Lurie’s New York Review of Books article on C.S. Lewis and Narnia. It’s worth reading, if you haven’t seen it; her Guardian article includes some of the same material but is much shorter.
This, in particular, leapt out at me:
Many readers have been infuriated by Lewis’s final condemnation of Susan Pevensie, the [...]
There’s a lot to dislike about Serenity, but…
Actually, no – there’s not much to dislike about Serenity. (Joss Whedon’s address to the fans, now, that is dislikeable. It’s three parts you-guys-are-great motivational pitch, two parts my-mental-horizons-are-expanding-right-now! Emersonian wonderment and one of saving irony; it’s very American, in other words. But you can always ignore it [...]
It’s been a bad week for deaths. Arthur Lee died last Thursday. If you drew a line from Brian Wilson’s ice-cream symphonies to Dylan’s lyrical manifestoes, you’d meet the Arthur Lee of Forever Changes right in the middle. Arthur Lee was a great artist, responsible for some of the strangest and most beautiful moments in [...]
Go and sit upon the grass and I shall come and sit beside you…
Back in the early seventies a couple of forward-looking sixth-formers at my school booked a series of acts, with varying degrees of success; Hatfield and the North were very nearly booked at one stage, but they ended up with Keith Christmas. I [...]
11 February 2006 – 10:13 pm
I agree with Michel Houellebecq, up to a point.
Atomised became a bestseller at home and abroad. It won the Prix Novembre, though it missed out on the Goncourt. The publication of Platform saw him prosecuted for incitement to racial hatred, after describing Islam as ‘the most idiotic religion’ in a promotional interview. (His exact words [...]
6 February 2006 – 9:43 pm
Thanks to a post at Burningbird – and in particular some thoughtful comments from Yule Heibel – I saw the Danish cartoons today. I won’t say I was shocked, but I was surprised. If offensiveness has anything to do with intention to offend, these are strikingly inoffensive images. Certainly the widespread comparison with hate speech, [...]
29 December 2005 – 9:07 pm
I quite liked the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, although I have to admit to a certain bias in favour of any film featuring Tilda Swinton – particularly Tilda Swinton riding in a chariot, wearing chain mail and a lion’s mane (spoiler, sorry), brandishing two large swords and glaring, always glaring
Sorry, I seem to [...]
