In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk

Category: General

  • Presidential Election Night November 2016

    Posted:

    All night, the great tree raged outside our windows. It wanted to give way to the wind, but could not. It wanted to fly over the hill on the wind’s crest lashing our house as it passed, smashing the roof, bursting each window. What agony to be pinned like this, bound by the feet, earth-bound…

  • Dorset in View

    Posted:

    From above, this region is a quilt of all colours, covering a vast and restless sleeper ; each week the colours have shifted, wrapped in season. No pause here. No holding still. The tractor driver spends all the daylight hours and more, lonely in his cab, changing a field’s colour inch by inch, precisely row…

  • The Dance of the Emperor who Wears no Clothes

    Posted:

    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…

  • Autumn UK 2016

    Posted:

      Today our skies evicted the swallow and the swift was banished weeks ago and in Dorset the house martin whose tiny mud globes once crammed the eaves was simply absent all year.   And last week Putin, unrestrained, bombed hospitals in Aleppo and Trump continued his debasing of America and Theresa May declared the…

  • The late David Jenkins, Bishop of Durham

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    Following the death of David Jenkins on September 4th, I want to bear witness in my own small way to his great stature as a man and true priest. The first obituaries I read gave prominence to his Virgin Birth and Resurrection “denials.”  And of course, in his time, he was called “The Red Bishop”…

  • Poems for… Self at Sea

    Posted:

    Go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmtDPbcyves for a new collection of 30 poems on mental distress. Various authors have contributed, some of them psychiatric in-patients, one a prisoner. The video is a recording of my voice as I read each short poem. You can see the text of the poem onscreen at the same time. It has taken…

  • Sayings

    Posted:

    Reaching for words is like searching the earth for stones and then shaping them one after another into a path.     Your words took my breath away. They killed me with their song. They made my womb turn over. Sing to me again.   The words I must speak will sentence me to death.…

  • Can Liberal Democracy Survive our Tumult ?

    Posted:

    Can liberal democracy survive our tumultuous, bewildering, frightening, dangerous times ? Can it surmount them ? Can it contain and even direct the flailing social forces at work towards positive solutions, a viable human future ? As things stand, it seems not to be coping at all. It is surely in great danger of allowing…