The Church Times has a leader about human rights: So, how safe are human rights? This refers to the recent address by Pope Benedict to the UN General Assembly, which is here.
And at Ekklesia Savi Hensman writes about Developing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Giles Fraser in the Church Times focuses more narrowly in Take these Nigerian taunts more seriously.
Christopher Howse writes in the Daily Telegraph about suicide bombers in A human bomb does not distinguish.
David Lunan Moderator-designate of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland writes in The Times about The words and the beliefs that determine our lives.
Jonathan Romain writes about faith schools in Face to Faith in the Guardian.
And Andrew Brown wrote last week in the Church Times about what happened at the Daily Telegraph, in Victim of the Telegraph cull.
Regarding Giles Fraser’s piece in Church Times I notice this morning (reading an un-mentionable place) that it did not fall in good earth there but on a hard rock – they even refused to quote from it!
The news about Jonathan Petre and the end of another religious correspondent’s position is shocking, and as Andrew Brown correctly reports, a sad reflection on our broadsheet media. The Church should indeed be concerned that the only time it merits news these days is when the story can be spun into a ‘clash of civilisations’ or ‘disintigrating church’ narrative. More positively, this may all be part of a shift towards new media outlets – I use blogs as much as newspapers to check on news of interest to me these days, since they often cover issues in more detail and… Read more »
Needed to be said again, as by Giles Fraser.
I thought Jonathan Petre well informed and as Andrew Brown says well connected. In the last year I rang a couple of times just to congratulate him on a scoop – even if I remonstrated that the angle was somewhat skewed to the “conservative” side, he just said that was where his paper was coming from … and I suppose he was right.
He kept confidences and didn’t play games with you – he was happy to say what he knew while respecting his sources. I wish him well
Many thanks to Giles Fraser yet again, for so briefly and clearly summarizing our subtle yet powerful sense of the possibly vigorous and dynamic connections between the nastiest ways that traditional believers talk about their fav target trash talk target of homosexual sin, and the violence that runs through, sometimes erupting as in Jamaica or Nigeria or Togo, sometimes near enough to the surface to be heard and felt and weighed, and sometimes running silent and deep in closeted, straights only believer or secular venues. Nigeria is now outing itself as one fount of misunderstandings, and indeed offers us fine… Read more »
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/25/us/25bishop.html?fta=y