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| Home » Writings, Speeches, Broadcasts » Thought for the Day » 2004 |
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| Children of the World |
| 14/12/2004 |
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Thought For The Day - 14 December 2004
There are some news items so shocking that they make you sit and weep for humanity. On Thursday of last week, UNICEF, the United Nations children's organisation, published a report on the children of the world. 640 million of them lack shelter. 400 million have no clean water. 140 million have never been to school. One in six goes hungry. These are mind numbing figures; a tragedy on a scale almost beyond imagining.
Another report, this time fr... |
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| Chanukah - The Candle of Hope |
| 7/12/2004 |
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Thought For The Day - 7 December 2004
Tonight we begin to celebrate Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights. And though its history goes way back, to two centuries before the birth of Christianity, I think it has a message for today.
What happened was that Israel came under the empire of Alexander the Great, and one particular leader, Antiochus IV, decided to force the pace of Hellenisation, forbidding Jews to practice their religion and setting up in the Temple in Jerusalem a stat... |
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| Gifts and Giving |
| 30/11/2004 |
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Thought For The Day - 30 November 2004
I’ve just come back from Leeds where yesterday we held a memorial service for one of the members of the local Jewish community. His was an interesting life. Born into a working class family, he took over a small family business and turned it into a large concern. He was active in Jewish affairs, but he was dedicated no less to the wider community of Leeds. He worked for its art gallery and the Yorkshire cricket school and helped create the Leeds p... |
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| Terror and Politics |
| 21/9/2004 |
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Thought For The Day - 21 September 2004
Still we await news of the fate of Kenneth Bigley, the British hostage in Iraq, and our thoughts are with him and his family today. But the violence and terror continues. Yesterday we heard of the shocking murder of an American hostage; and hardly a day goes by without some new tragedy.
Too often these days religious justification is given for terror, which is why we must never forget that there is no excuse for terror. No society was ever bu... |
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