I'm in London as part of my sabbatical and found myself in a time warp last night and this morning watching the news of the riots in my home city, with a friend and colleague caught up in the midst of them, trying to make a difference. I'll leave it to others back home to comment on things on a deeper level. My prayers are with those involved in the original attack that lit the blue touch paper, and those picking up the pieces including the emergency services and those in East Belfast Mission... But this is my initial, emotional response to the whole mess with credit/apologies to Paul Brady . Four decades ago I sat in a city not my own, listening tearfully to a song that sang about the skies of Lebanon burning, with television pictures of women and children dying in the street, whilst back home we were sacrificing our own children and leaving twisted wreckage on the roads... carving tomorrow from a tombstone. Many tomorrows have come and gone, and too many tombsto...
As many of you know I'm currently on sabbatical and largely staying off social media and other sources of news, but the coverage of this week's English local elections and the Welsh and Scottish devolved assembly votes has been hard to avoid. But whilst rootling around on my blog to find material for a writing project I am working on about Christ as King and the Kingdom of God, I came across this dialogue that I posts almost exactly 10 years ago in the wake of elections that week and thinking about issues of sovereignty that were looming with the Brexit referendum the next month... how little did we realise how much the results of that would still be rumbling on after a decade! So I thought it was worth another post, with a slight amendment... As I said then, I'm not entirely convinced by the fetishism of democracy, especially given it's tendency to be subverted by tribal interested or the undue influence of those with vast amounts of money, which has been emphasized o...