In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk

Category: the skills of love

  • Rome Burning

    Posted:

    I run a charity called “Hyphen-21”. The charity holds and manages funding for a project which publishes bilingual poem-posters. Since the Spring of 2017, this project has been called “Poems for …the wall” (before that it was called “Poems for…). Since it first began in 1997, “Poems for…the wall” has been funded by the UK…

  • The late David Jenkins, Bishop of Durham

    Posted:

    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”…

  • The Inn this Advent

    Posted:

    Photograph by Robert Atanasoski/AFP/Getty Images. Expulsion I heard this song tonight from the desert the shelters below ground there and the wrecked homes and I heard it from the grey waters just south of Europe, with winter coming on and the boat leaking and from the guard posts and barbed frontiers that now cover a…

  • Dignity and Light

    Posted:

    Two new poem collections are about to be uploaded on the website of the project I run, called “Poems for…“. One of them is on Learning Disability and is called “Poems for… Bridges to Learning Disability”  The other is on mental ill-health and is called “Poems for…Self at Sea“. The poems in both collections bring……

  • Poems for United Response

    Posted:

    United Response is a registered charity which supports people who have disabilities. It aims to help them fulfill themselves and be less isolated in our community. It seeks to ensure they receive their basic human rights. In mentioning this particular organisation here, I am not seeking to advertise it at the possible expense of others…

  • What’s a “Carer” ?

    Posted:

    Each of us surely wants to be acknowledged as a “caring” person, even while so much that is uncaring is happening all round us – perpetrated presumably by aliens. The Head Rude-boy of Blingland has presided over changes in the Benefit system that disgrace us all, even while they continue sufficiently popular with his constituency…

  • What are the “Skills of Love” ? Is it worth trying to name them ?

    Posted:

    Last December,  I ran an arts evening which needed professional actors to perform a short new play. At the audition stage, one of the candidates wrote to me as follows :  “If only the theatre world was run entirely by social workers and mental health professionals ! I hope I can speak for all of…