Disturbing news about the exclusion of Religious Education from the English Baccalaureate
Report & a petition [Here]
A few more comments on the civil partnership / religious ceremony fracas from the Archbishop of York [here] and, more combatively but substantially in agreement , from Melanie Phillips [here]
But it would seem, according to the LibDem 'Minister for Equalities' (one wonders exactly how all this became the business of government), that it is now the Coalition's policy to "push to open both marriage and civil partnerships to both same-sex and mixed-sex couples," something which, she says, is "an issue close to my heart."
A good suggestion about reading for Lent from Fr Z [here]
But this has to be my quote of the day.
From a novel by Alice Thomas Ellis - darkly cynical, but perhaps all too true as things have turned out, at least in terms of what has become the 'established' method - see William Oddie's comments [here]
"'What is ecumenism?' she asked Rose in an undertone.
'It is as though a dying man were to tie himself to one already dead in the hope of setting in train a process of revitalisation,' Rose told her, also in an undertone, low but carrying."
Ah, dear Alice Thomas Ellis, cuius animae propietur Deus. She may have been a cynic, but in the authentic Diogenean sense - the "small dog" snapping at the heels of received wisdom. Or, as Bierce put it, "A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be."
ReplyDeleteI doubt that she would be taken in by the Forestry Commission fuss, however.
As a genuine lover of woodland comments:
The Forestry Commission is, after all, the body that for decades disfigured, denatured and closed off vast swathes of the British landscape with its huge conifer plantations (on which they are barely able to turn a profit). I suspect that, so long as there's some regulatory framework in place, almost any system of woodland ownership would be preferable to the Forestry Commission's dead hand.
http://nigeness.blogspot.com/2011/02/wildwood-nostalgia.html