I still think WWII vets are all about 89-but-sprightly, when I probably did my last funeral for someone who served in the war back in January and he was 98 and hadn't seen active service (but was then sent to Palestine, lucky lad...).
Tbf, as someone who grew up in the USA but have lived here for 20 years, I just assume that Vietnam vets are deeply disgruntled and around age 60 or so, whereas a lot of them are pushing 80 (and probably still deeply disgruntled).
And yet, given subsequent economic trends, they've never really known life without it...
Some exciting news about my ministry! @mthrjo.bsky.social and I will be moving to Lichfield from June. www.lichfield-cathedral.org/news/news/po...
The masculinity of Christ in question:
The majority of the UK traditional press being hot for involvement in a hot war without clear ends and purposes is sheer cringe.
Newspapers are not well.
If long-term gyre widening trends continue, we think there is a high likelihood of the centre proving unable to hold
Tbf, Oriel College Oxford was left behind by the foreign policy discourse a long time ago, and it's about time that those who set our foreign policy objectives offered them something.
(I may, as the husband of an Orielensis, be relying a little on stereotypes here.)
Well yes... but I would think that folk do struggle to get through the opening gates and get a law degree with that hermeneutic. Even in America [insert English legal snobbery here]. Though anything is possible in these magical times when Article 2 can mean something that might make Louis XIV blush.
I don't know, the 1000+ year long tradition of legal interpretation might also have something to do with it.
*off
Indeed it is! But harrowing is the right word for it. Especially the way it starts of with 'village that has been that way forever' and you know it's going to get worse.
I didn't know that! And that would be subject to faculty jurisdiction:
"Installed by the Luftwaffe. Received retrospective permission from the FAC in 1946."
I want to know whether that shell in Genoa Cathedral fired by HMS Warspite(?) would have needed a retrospective faculty when they plinthed it after the war.
And a late medieval catholic preacher. See, some people are too complex to just be typecast.
And tbf the only time I’ve actually heard a British Muslim locally go on at length about foreign politics anywhere apart from the Holy Land, it was a taxi driver telling me at great length how he was a Trump fan because he blamed Biden for the fall of Imran Khan…
Well quite. I mean, expressing fervently held views on politics in Pakistan, quite believable for some British Muslims. Having any time for those Shia heretics in Iran? Not so much.
Because fwiw, there is a good story to tell about what it means to be British here which we rarely tell. And it is not just a story of the last fifty years either, but one which goes back much further.
Reflecting on this and the fact that the UK is actually very good at economic and social outcomes for immigrants…
What if we built our immigration policy around the fact we’re GOOD at this stuff? And used the lessons of what has worked well to talk about national identity, welcome and integration?
Its genuinely mad that we are, arguably, the most successful multicultural state on earth and instead of celebrating that we...
...keep trying to copy nations who have very evidently done worse at it than us
It also wound me up no end when people said the Greenland crisis was a 'distraction'. Some folk had their lives on the line there too - even if it all ended peacefully.
Absolutely. I mean, the Epstein files matter and point to the rot that a lot of important people were either involved in or looked the other way from... but the taking of human life is more important.
And for goodness sake, I'm a priest in England. I'm no more responsible for American Christian nationalism than you, as an atheist, are for the Chinese Communist Party.
And I've said that this sort of nominal religious affiliation from childhood doesn't seem to have translated into regular religious engagement as an adult and that this contrasts with other presidents which suggests... wait for it... that Donald Trump doesn't care much about Christianity.
It's not like he's Joe Biden going to mass 2 or 3 times a week. In fact, he went to church less than almost any president, as far as I'm aware.
I mean, what proportion of Americans were confirmed back then? And where's he gone to church since?
No, it's both: the MAGA coalition is a big one. Trump himself? Post Christian. Man has virtually no idea about Christianity at all. J D Vance? Christian. He's one of ours, like it or not. Pete Hesgeth? Heterodox.
It also speaks loudly to people who are being tortured and killed. You know, like the people for whom Revelation was written. Because context exists.
And you seem particularly unwilling to acknowledge that decline is more important than prevalence in explaining why Trump was elected and why his ideology is the product of a post-Christian or heterodox Christian way of thinking.
That is part and parcel of Christianity, as you say. But a particular reading of the book of Revelation which isn't very old with features like the Rapture and which is focused solely on individual escape from the world is a distinctive feature of American evangelicalism.
