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.
Our national narrative is once again being steered by those at the top towards one of the “undeserving poor”. This is a narrative we must stand against at all costs as a church. It doesn’t fit. It’s not Christian. We must shout loudly and proudly about the inherent worth of every single human being, created in the image of God and beloved. If we don’t rise to this challenge, we have failed to live up to our call as Jesus apprentices.
“Blessed are the poor.”
Jesus
~Fin~
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.
If you watch something today, watch this.