I was asked to be a guest on The RE Podcast. We used Happy Valley as a springboard to all sorts of questions about the nature of humanity, good and evil and all that jazz. It was a lot of fun. Listen to the other episodes too! Lots of great discussions about the meaning of life.
It is also available on other platforms but I can’t link them here on my site.
If you have hung around for long enough, you will know that I have strong opinions about poverty and how it is created within our society. As the world re-emerges from the last 18 months of Covidtide, we are seeing a sharp snap back to a narrative of the undeserving poor. With universal credit being slashed in the coming week affecting 6 million people, we are once again seeing an ideological drive to level up the wealthy at the expense of the poor.
At the heart of it all is the narrative we tell ourselves about who we are as a community. This clip is well worth two and a half minutes of your time.
Read moreThere has been a lot of ink spent on Dominic Cummings in the last few days. One curious aspect of the debate is for his right leaning apologists to silence the voice of Christians by citing “forgiveness”. “You are a Christian. That’s not very forgiving”.
At the heart of the Christian Faith is repentance, or in Greek, metanoia. Turning your life around. Giving up the old ways and pledging to take a new, better path in the future. This is where forgiveness is transformative.
So what has this all got to do with Cummingsgate? Here we have someone who broke the social contract that we share with one another. We keep it because we are protecting not ourselves but others. And Cummings has highlighted that there are an elite among us for whom the rules do not apply. Their social contract is different. It is a contract that applies to others but not themselves. In this case, it is a social contract shaped by Cummings that was applied to the rest of us. And this is the rub. Rules created by the elite but not for the elite. And when exposed and challenged, this disingenuous cabal of the ruling classes close ranks to protect one of their own.
In tonight’s Yorkshire Evening Post there is a moving letter from a bereaved woman who has lost her brother. Her story is one of betrayal. A betrayal by the ruling classes who who have the brass balls to flat out lie through press briefings rather than hold their hands up and admit to making an error.
“All I wanted and needed from the government was an acknowledgement and apology that this trip was made with poor judgement.”
So yes, this is a point at which we need to examine the Christian values of forgiveness and repentance. We need to regard how they provide us with a lens through which we can examine the actions of those who govern us. For repentance, that life changing metanoia holds us all to account and shapes the future we walk into.
Please read Josette Ward’s letter in full at the YEP. It is a moving read.
On my mammoth to do list is a half written blog post about how this current crisis is disproportionately affecting the poor. Fortunately, this thirty second clip sums it up far more succinctly than I was managing.