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| Home » Writings, Speeches, Broadcasts » Credo » 2010 |
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| To defend a country you need an army, but to defend an identify you need schools |
| 4/12/2010 |
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History itself has a history. What events seem to signify at the time is not how they are seen in the full perspective of hindsight. Take Hannukah, the festival we are in the midst of celebrating today.
Open the First and Second Books of Maccabees and you find yourself reading a story of military courage. Since the days of Alexander the Great, Israel had been under the rule of the Greeks, first under the Ptolemies based in Egypt, then a century later under the ... |
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| Regular worship is the mortar of the Big Society |
| 6/11/2010 |
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Where is the Big Society when we need it? Where will we find those reservoirs of volunteering, mutual aid, good neighbourliness, philanthropy and altruism on which we are going to have to draw in the lean years that lie ahead?
A fascinating answer has just emerged, across the Atlantic, from the Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam. Putnam became famous a decade ago for a phrase he coined to describe our loss of all these things. He called it “bowling alone.” More people,... |
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| Labour of love which was the apple of King James’s eye |
| 9/10/2010 |
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It’s one of the best sellers of all time, dwarfing even the formidable achievements of J. K. Rowling. It’s a supreme monument of the English language. More than any other book it shaped the birth of the modern, giving rise to two revolutions, the English in the seventeenth century, the American in the eighteenth. It is, of course, the King James Bible, whose four hundredth anniversary we celebrate next year.
The medieval Church had forbidden translations of the Bi... |
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| When people lose faith in God they lose faith in humanity also. |
| 11/9/2010 |
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It’s decidedly odd. The higher human scientific achievement has risen, the lower human self-esteem has sunk. I can find only one explanation. When people lose faith in God they lose faith in humanity also.
Consider the past five centuries. First came Copernicus and Kepler and Galileo and taught us that the earth, our habitation, is not at the centre of the universe. It is not even at the centre... |
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