Ruth Gledhill - Times Online - WBLG

Persecution Index 8: United States

It appears that the pig is being persecuted in the United States. Please don't laugh. A regular reader of this blog has sent me the following from Front Page Magazine: 'The practice of political correctness may soon be tallying another casualty: the pig. Increasingly, as America and the rest of the Western world continue accommodating Muslim religious demands, pork food products are being singled out for removal from dining tables and pig-related trinkets banished from the desks of office workers.'

Read the rest here.

Meanwhile, some blogs have picked up the AP report that leaders of Ireland’s main Christian churches were barred from praying at Jerusalem’s Western Wall yesterday because they refused to remove the crosses they were wearing. 'Roman Catholic Cardinal Sean Brady, Church of Ireland Archbishop Alan Harper and Presbyterian and Methodist Moderators John Finlay and Roy Cooper arrived at the wall, Judaism’s holiest prayer site, without giving prior notice to Israeli authorities, Brady told the Irish broadcast network RTE.'

I look forward to hearing how they got on when they tried entering the Al-Aqsa Mosque without taking their shoes off.

 

Woe, woe, thrice chocolatey woe

I must feast my eyes on these, because that's the only way I can feast on them again. Like many, if not most inhabitants of these British isles, I'm a chocaholic, and my chocolate-of-choice is Guylian. Altogether, we Brits spend about £4 billion a year on chocolates. But now the Archbishop of York, who a couple of days ago was awarded the title of Yorkshire Man of the Year, has decreed in his William Wilberforce lecture in Hull tonight that we chocolate lovers must buy only Fairtrade chocolate. Read our news story on the Faith Page. And also in the paper on Wednesday.

On making fudge

Returning with great relief to my desk after a long summer of funerals, committals, rain and holidays, it seems to me that too many in the Anglican Church have forgotten how to make fudge. This was a staple of my childhood. Idyllic days were spent squabbling good-humouredly with my siblings under the cherry tree in the large, wild garden of our rambling and decrepit Queen Anne vicarage in the heart of the English countryside. We settled out differences by making and then consuming fudge. If there is a demand from readers, I'll dig out the recipe and post it here. The art of perfect fudge was in the beating. You had to get it just right. You had to add the butter, milk, cocoa and sugar and then beat and beat and beat it with a wooden spoon until your arms ached. And then you had to beat it some more. But you had to know exactly when to stop, so it set into one piece, with that delicious, squidgy fudgy consistency, not too hard, not too soft, just right in the middle somewhere. Oh the times I wished the ingredients would learn to beat themselves up. Oh the sweetness, oh the texture, meltingly soft and firm at once, when the beating was done properly. If I were Rowan Williams, I would invite everyone to Lambeth. Martyn Minns, Gene Robinson, Bill Atwood, everyone. I would let them all be there, arm them with long wooden spoons and tell them to give each other a jolly good beating. That way, the Anglicans might remember how to do what they were always best at - making fudge.

Atonement

Yes, I've changed the title. This is because Atonement, the film based on the book, is topping the search list of Times Online and I want to piggy back on Ian McEwan's novel, which I didn't enjoy, to get my own readers back again and some new ones after the break. Previously this post, which is actually about atonement for our environmental sins and the launch of a new Catholic Eco-Confessional by Dom Anthony Sutch, was titled 'I'm begging you please, on my knees.' This is the phrase that has supplanted the ubiquitous 'I need' among five-year-olds in Kew. I can't resist it, perhaps because of the Prayer Book overtones of kneeling humbly on my knees to confess my sins. But now a new form of guilt has come into my life, a guilt that I have in common with surely every other literate Westerner. It is the guilt of living an eco-unfriendly lifestyle, a guilt reinforced by the 'green lies' we all tell to convince our friends and neighbours we are greener than we are as our green eyes take in their water butts, solar panels, their city-bonus-black £40000 Lexus 3.0 congestion-charge free hybrid 4by4's and their dim, expensive (like them) but ultimately eco-lightbulbs.

Missionary 'not poisoned' says Anglican group

This has been forwarded to me by a friend. I thought it merited reproducing in full. I would also like to draw readers' attention to this report in the Nation. And a further update. Andrew Brown writes in his latest Church Times column that the problem with the original Times story is that there is 'no evidence' that Canon Hunter was poisoned by anyone. If that is the case, why did police arrest and charge two people with his murder, including his cook, last December? But do have a look if you've time at Andrew's latest, where I've been drawn into a debate about the ethics of journalism with none other than Raspberry Rabbit, and Andrew of course. It's what I call an AFGO. For an explanation of what that means, you'll have to go there!

Subject: Diocese of Lake Malawi - More news on the sad death of Canon Rodney Hunter
Date: Friday, April 27, 2007 09:10
From: anglican.information <anglican.information@dsl.pipex.com>
To: "Mail - anglican.information" <anglican.information@dsl.pipex.com>
Conversation: Diocese of Lake Malawi - More news on the sad death of Canon Rodney Hunter
 

Doubts over results of Post Mortem tests concerning the late Canon Rodney Hunter.

Chocolate Jesus

With only two days of Lent left, this may be enough to make you give up chocolate all year round. This statue of Jesus, cast in chocolate, was meant to be in New York's Lab Gallery this Good Friday but protest from Christian groups called off the exhibit. 

Birth, rebirth, resurrection

I think the idea might have  been to come up with a story that would somehow connect the supermarket chain Somerfield in the public mind with buying chocolate eggs while celebrating the sacramental mystery of Easter. But it all went a little bit wrong. The Church of England is predicting the best attendances since the millennium this Easter. Sales of chocolate are also soaring. But I fear it might have been a mistake to try to connect the two.

'The First Supper'

Needing some sustenance for the soul, I decided to hold a dinner party. Somehow, within a few hours I had invited 12, all good friends and true. There was just one problem. I can't cook. I was sitting at my desk, praying about it, as one does, when a pressrelease landed in my inbox. It described how Father Stuart Lee, Vicar of St Matthew's in Raynes Park, Wimbledon had given away £1,600 to his congregation, £20 to each, with a sermon on the Parable of the Talents. Each one had to go forth and multiply the cash. I asked him what he was doing with his £20. He was hiring himself out as a cook. 'Come and do my dinner party,' I begged. And even though this was the busiest time of the liturgical calendar, with his Anglo-Catholic parish just going into Holy Week, he agreed, on condition that he could bring a sous-chef. That was how he and Father Martin Powell, vicar of St Edward's, New Addington in Croydon, ended up in my kitchen on Saturday night. When the guests arrived, each one speechless to find two kosher clergy cooking in my kitchen, I introduced them as 'my trusted servants'. It was such unadulterated fun. Father Stuart is on the right in the picture. Photo by Sylvan Mason.

'I need to lose weight' says Archbishop

Strolling through Richmond upon Thames at Christmas, my heart was melted by the hungry eyes of the Big Issue seller outside Tesco. I bought the festive edition, and was rewarded by the unexpected bonus inside of an article by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, revealing all about his New Year resolutions. And the one that surprised me most was his wish to lose weight. Perhaps he has this in common with the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, who as we report wants Catholics to return to traditional practices such as eating less on Fridays in common with the world's poor. Even if Lent doesn't start for another six weeks or so, this is a good time of year, after the seasonal excesses, to remember the traditions of fasting that exist across all the religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism.

Bishop of Southwark on TFTD (updated)

Tom Butler does his next Thought for the Day on Radio 4 on 19 December. I expect he'll have lots to say to help listeners through the consequences of their seasonal excesses when he does TFTD on Boxing Day and 2 January as well. Please feel free to add your own suggestions of topics he could cover. (Update: here is the story from Wednesday 20, the day after his 'Thought' and also interview with Humphrys on Radio 4. Meanwhile, his excuse that no drunk could have made the journey he did doesn't wash with me, as it didn't with the Guardian's Steve Boggan, who had some wine and took the same journey himself, to see if it could be done.)

Many thanks, meanwhile, to the 'evil-minded parishioner' who sent me this wonderful picture of what I understand to be the Southwark Advent Calendar this year.

Bishop of Southwark: 'Bished as a newt'

Mass at my heavenly church of St Anne's Kew this morning was chacterstically high and, after the children came back in from Junior Church, noisy too. Then at the end Father Nigel gave his flock a little unexpected bonus track. He lowered his eyes and said: "Now I want you all to say a prayer for our Bishop, Tom Butler, and his wife, who as some of you may realise have been in the papers recently." He didn't elaborate on why, just urged caution before any of us rushed to judgment, and, with characteristic generosity of spirit, repeated his admonition to pray. Never before have I known such silence in our beautiful church, packed as usual with standing room only. It was a silence of stunned profundity and wonderment. Father Nigel had left them all flummoxed, wondering indeed at what on earth had happened. Because as became clear from the number of people who discreetly probed me over coffee afterwards, few in Kew read The Mirror (from whom my headline is borrowed), The Sun or The Mail on Sunday. And if they read The Sunday Times, as I would hope, they clearly do it only after church. Definitely worth reading though is Stephen Bates in The Guardian. I also did a piece with Sean O'Neill, who is Irish and was actually at the Embassy party in question. "I don't know the Bishop of Southwark personally," he told me. "But there was a very garrulous clergyman there, walking around saying: 'I am the Bishop of Southwark'." Was he slipped a glass of poteen? This is something being considered at Lambeth Palace. One member of staff there, who barely drinks, found himself laid out flat on a sofa and with memory loss after having one glass of this 90% proof drink while out for dinner with three Irish bishops. Read Joe Joseph's wonderful leader on Butler. Maybe this is something our own Dr Tom should look at soon. And you just must have a laugh at Wannabe priest's interpretation of events. Even I had not thought of this...