Ruth Gledhill - Times Online - WBLG

Ben Elton: BBC 'scared' of Islam.

Comedian Ben Elton has accused the BBC of allowing 'vicar gags' but not 'imam gags'. In an interview with James Cary of Third Way magazine he admits to believing in almost nothing, even though his kids attend a local church school. His recent novel Blind Faith explores some of the issues around faith in the post-modern age. He believes people should be taught the essentials of Christianity, even if only for cultural reasons. But he also believes 'lack of faith' should be taught in schools. I've posted some of his quotes below.

A short history of the Church in England

This is a typically irreverent look at religion in England from Eddie Izzard, I love the Anglican shoulders. Posted by Joanna.

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but

  After yesterday's Anglican Communion trauma, I am posting this which a colleague has just given me just to help us all lighten up. It is a list of questions asked by lawyers in court and the responses, taken down by court reporters and published in a book, Disorder in the Court. There is a tenuous link with religious news, in that an Anglican clergyman is in one of the new, secret tribunals in Leeds for alleged conduct unbecoming involving alleged adultery. But that's all. I just wanted to make everyone laugh, for a change. (Or maybe not as much of a change as I imagine. Who knows?) And as this is a humourous post, it is also a chance to publish Dave Walker's excellent cartoon about the recent Back to Church Sunday.

Here's the first one:

Q: What is your date of birth?
A: July fifteenth.
Q: What year?
A: Every year.

Read on for the rest.

Reaganisms

A friend has sent me these. I've posted them because they seem so relevant  to Anglican wars.

"Here's my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose."  - Ronald Reagan

"The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help." - Ronald Reagan

"The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant: It's just that  they know so much that isn't so." - Ronald Reagan

Read on for more.

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.

The 'struggle between Good and Evil'.

'Inside every man is a struggle between Good and Evil, which cannot be resolved.' So says Homer Simpson in an episode, 'Whacking Day', used by the Church of England as part of a new study guide for young people, published on the eve of the general release of the Simpsons' movie at the end of this week. Here is a trailer:

Dow, Decadence and the Deluge

I had a little fun yesterday revisiting the past to write about the Bishop of Carlisle, Graham Dow, who has been making headlines by linking the recent floods in Britain to the moral decadence of our society. In my piece I referred to a booklet, Explaining Deliverance, which was sent to me in 1992 by a friend after he became Bishop of Willesden. However, when I looked through my dusty book collection here, some barely touched in my 20 years at the paper, I dug up all kinds of extraordinary eschatological fossils but not the Bishop's booklet. So a hat-tip is owed here to Andrew Brown for a piece he wrote about it in 2003 and which I was able to access online.

Blair to focus on interfaith work

As Tom Baldwin and I report today, Tony Blair on leaving office is to get involved in interfaith work. The Prime Minister, a devout Anglo-Catholic whose pilgrimage to Rome has long been anticipated, has for years been fascinated by this area. He wants to set up a new foundation to foster greater understanding between the three great Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Just for a bit of fun, though...

Will this save or break the Communion?

This is Anglican TV's video of Martyn Minns' installation by Peter Akinola to serve as a missionary bishop in the US. Bishop Martyn is English by birth. Read Father Jake on how aspects of this controversy are now being fought out with pies. And MadPriest is getting madder. Read him for the latest Anglican jokes.

GodTube

By Joanna Sugden

It was Internet Evangelism Day yesterday and techy Christians were encouraged to use their own version of the video sharing site YouTube to spread the Word. But this video from the site looks more like Beadle's About does church.

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.

The joke's on me

Things have been getting a little heavy lately, so just a couple of days after we've entered the Christian season of fasting and penitence and I don my sackcloth and ashes for sins committed over the past 12 months, 12 days even, I thought it time to lighten up a little with a look at the Church of England's Love Life Live Lent campaign. Alan Hamilton reported in The Times that the site would be inviting and listing jokes. Sadly, I couldn't find any yet, but maybe they will be coming soon, or maybe I'm just looking in the wrong place. So here's one on me. Any other contributions gratefully received.*

Jesus and Satan were having an on-going argument about who was better on the computer. They had been going at it for days, and frankly God was tired of hearing all the bickering. Finally fed up, God said, "THAT'S IT! I have had enough. I am going to set up a test that will run for two hours, and from those results, I will judge who does the better job." So Satan and Jesus sat down at the keyboards and typed away. They moused... They faxed... They e-mailed... They e-mailed with attachments.. They downloaded... They did spreadsheets! They wrote reports... They created labels and cards... They created charts and graphs... They did some genealogy reports.. They did every job known to man... Jesus worked with heavenly efficiency, and Satan was faster than hell. Then, ten minutes before their time was up, lightning suddenly flashed across the sky, thunder rolled, rain poured, and, of course, the power went off! Satan stared at his blank screen and screamed every curse word known in the underworld. Jesus just sighed. Finally the electricity came back on, and each of them restarted their computers.. Satan started searching frantically, screaming: "It's gone! It's all GONE! I lost everything when the power went out!" Meanwhile, Jesus quietly started printing out all of his files from the past two hours of work. Satan observed this and became irate. "Wait!" he screamed. "That's not fair! He cheated! How come he has all his work and I don't have any?" God just shrugged and said:

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...