SDcamps•演辩营全国英语演讲与辩论赛
Risk is endemic in human affairs. To say to someone "I love you" or to say in church "I believe" can never be risk-free undertakings. They are to make investments in things that are not fully under one's control. The other person may not love you back. The God in whom you stake your trust may turn out not to exist. The French philosopher Pascal famous...
The Bible's boring, everyone knows that. Phares begat Esrom and Esrom begat Aram and Aram begat Aminadab. When I was teaching public bible reading in our church, I made the lesson readers practice with a telephone directory, to learn how to make it interesting. Suddenly entrance, ancestry has become fascinating, as anyone gripped by Britain's DNA Project on this prog...
Perhaps it's only when we fully accept that we will die that we can fully accept how alive we are right now.Death brings perspective, then. It brings us back to life and it asks of me, how, now, will I live? A friend works at a hospice, and recently she cared for a man who just had days left. They talked about his childhood, she tells me, and then she asked him what make...
Few of us want to appear dependent: witness the rugged determination of many older people to resist support to which they're entitled; and the intense frustration of some who've spent a lifetime caring for others who now find it painfully difficult to accept that they're the ones who must be cared for.The Christian faith, like others, commends the good life as on...
In a more agnostic culture than the one I grew up with it's a challenge to know how to talk meaningfully about something so enormous when we don't really understand it. There is scepticism about the afterlife these days. But however sceptical people may be about heaven and hell, it always feels brutal to speak of the total extinction of personality, when the personal...
The Passover season is well and truly on us.We're preparing our homes for the festival of freedom, with its special foods and elaborate rituals, one of the oldest religious rituals in the world, and one of Judaism's most sacred moments. What's special is that it's observed not in the synagogue but at home, around the table, as a family. The starring part is a...
J. K. Galbraith once said, "Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." He could have been speaking of the decisions we keep putting off about how we pay for future care of the elderly. Yet the urgent need for decisions was underlined this week by the Office for National Statistics. It revealed that ...
These well-informed young people had a very modest interest in the print media. Unlike me, they didn't feel their day was incomplete without reading a newspaper.Total newspaper circulation has been declining by roughly a million copies each year. And yet a review of the main stories in the national papers continues to be a regular feature of this programme. Items in broa...
The government and the Labour Party disagreed yesterday about what sort of enquiry there should be into the Libor scandal, but they both agreed there're needs to be such an enquiry. Something went wrong and it's important to find out why. What interests me, however, is a very much bigger question. Something's gone profoundly wrong, not just with the banks, but wi...
Surely nothing tests the faith of the believer as much as this – the sudden, frightening, violent death of those we love.There have been many attempts to reconcile intellectually such unbearable tragedies with faith in a loving God. They range from the not wholly convincing to the quite appalling. The Book of Job has both. When it says that we are mere mortals so could...
The British propensity for non-deference militates against special treatment to anyone, unless of course you're the official underdog. "The last shall be first" is a biblical theme which could just as easily have been written by a British attitudes and motivation committee. We really can't cope when it turns out that "the first shall be first."I s...
Some time ago at a buffet lunch in a church hall – not quite a fine dining event – I recall a lively conversation between an unemployed man in early middle age and an older, wealthy industrialist. The younger man commented that unemployment was hard work. He complained that everyone imagined it was like being on holiday. But he worried constantly about money and ...
I'm hesitant here to quote anyone from the Bible because recently when I mentioned a saying of Jesus someone objected that he had never run anything in his life. The same's true of St Paul. But writing to the well-off in the city of Corinth about helping the poor in Jerusalem, Paul said, It's a question of a fair balance between your abundance and their need, as ...
The trouble about money is that it is often linked to power. Money well used can do great things which benefit many people, anything from funding the arts to bringing food and water to a starving nation. It has great pragmatic possibilities. But there is another power which has to do with the presumption that enough money should buy influence and assure control to the benefi...
More recent and disturbing history will be reviewed this week by a court in Oslo. While Anders Behring Breivik will present his own warped view of reality, victims and bereaved families will confront again the terror of what actually happened. To resist simple vengeance, pursue justice and to relive the pain is a brave thing to do and shows in the words of the commentator Li...
Two weeks ago while at a soccer match in Houston, the woman beside me said she was in London last year and "the Olympics will be a mess", or at least that was a polite paraphrase. It had been clear from my pink freckled skin and my lack of enthusiasm for using the word "awesome" that I was from elsewhere. Asking me if I was a Brit, the woman then shared h...
Living in harmony with nature is so essential to our well-being that it is the first lesson of scripture. The account of creation in the book of Genesis tells of the idyllic Garden of Eden where man lives amid beauty and new life. Rather than be contrary to scientific explanations of the origins of the world, Genesis can be read as a parable about the need for man and woman,...
A burglary is often described as being a violation. And it's a good word for it because it's not just about what is physically taken, it's about what is emotionally done to the person being robbed. I had suffered no physical assault, but when I sat down to describe what I could to the police over a strong cup of tea, I felt as though I'd been beaten up.The up...
It's hard enough to describe the synergy between the idea of a soul and the material world. Talk of eternity is even more difficult. How does a person gain the whole world and lose his soul? And how does a soul die?Is the soul the phantom me, which floats off to heaven or is it inextricably who we always are?These are huge questions. It's so much easier to limit soul...
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said love your neighbour as yourself. But how can we do that practically? Well, maybe there is an elderly person in your street who's got no family. Maybe you can help them with their shopping or simply spend some time with them, listening. You don't have to look hard in our country to find those in real need. When we start to love o...