Today we're hosting a party at our house for something between 30-55 people (depending on who turns up and when). It is ostensibly to celebrate American Independence Day and to say thanks to Hannah Williams our Young Adult Volunteer from the PCUSA, who has been with us at Dundonald for the past year. We had a great time in Michigan for Independence Day last year, but I continue to have difficulty with any heavily patriotic festival (believing with Samuel Johnston that far too often "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel") and nationalistic flag-waving of any flavour. And whilst I can understand the reasons that the USA might want to celebrate their independence from British colonialism (even though the founder of Methodism, John Wesley would not have agreed), the myth of "independence" has seeped deep into the American psyche and mutated into a stubborn individualism, which, over the past century they have, in turn exported to the rest of the world, in th...
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