In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk

Category: Community

  • High Noon this Easter

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    Let’s recall the film “High Noon,” that great Western. The outlaw and his hoodlum cronies are riding into town. They want revenge on the sheriff, the keeper of the law. The sheriff scours the town looking for support, a posse of townspeople who will help him defend their community from the outlaws. The townspeople know…

  • The Rule of the Rough Beast

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      The “Rough Beast” is a phrase from “The Second Coming” by YB Yeats. Written in 1919, it is a poem that becomes more topical with each passing day. The last three lines of the poem above are a deliberate reference to TS Eliot’s lines from “Four Quartets” – “Humankind/Cannot bear very much reality.” And…

  • HATRED : A SESTINA by Robert Friend

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    Hatred is wanting to hurt and its fulfillment dancing on someone’s grave.   Because the insult was grave, I must repay hatred with hatred, abandon all pleasure: the dancing, the flirting, the wallowing wantings of every day. How drab their fulfillment when compared with the pleasure to hurt.   I plan to avenge the hurt…

  • Shavings from The Rainbow

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      What is God, after all ? If maggots in a dead dog be but God kissing carrion, what then is not God ?   And when the war began it seemed that the poles of the universe were cracking and the whole must go tumbling into the bottomless pit.   You feel an agony…

  • A Drawing of Conclusions

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    It is surely still natural to respect a conclusion that is reached through cogent argument. Each stage of the argument leads to the next stage, like a series of links in a chain. The conclusion is given its authority, its right to be heard and accepted, by the strength of the links that have led…

  • The Brain’s a Tunnel

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    Owl sculpture by Dorothy Love… continue reading

  • If the People is Sovereign, Lying to the People is High Treason

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    As 2016 comes to an end, I want to present an argument which I believe follows from the year’s events. Different elements of the argument have already been touched on here in recent posts. I must begin with language and those first words of St John’s Gospel. In the beginning was [and was always] the…

  • The Dance of the Emperor who Wears no Clothes

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    The Brexit dance continues. And in London, a court case has just come to an end, in which lawyers have been debating whether or not Parliament should have influence over the Brexit process. We shall hear the result of that court case in the near future. But its implications are profoundly important and the discussion…