For the sake of anyone still keeping an eye on this journal, it's time I wound things up - and directed you towards my new blog, Changing the World (and other excuses for not getting a proper job)There are various reasons for moving on, not least that having left the BBC I feel freer to write under my own name. But that doesn't get to the core of ( Read more... )

Blair's off to the Middle East this weekend - presumably for some peace and quiet...

Some sanity from the editorial column of today's FT:...no system is perfectly secure, and even if the world's aircraft could be made secure at a reasonable cost in time and money, terrorists will always have other options as simple as truck bombs or explosives on trains and buses. There will be more attacks, perhaps deadly and dramatic ones ( Read more... )

Some time ago, in a discussion on here, someone called JJ asked me a question: 'If you do dismiss literal interpretations of religious stories, how do you deal with the language of "belief" and "faith" that so pervades religious discourse?' I have been slow to reply, because the series of posts that led to the question were riddled with assumptions ( Read more... )

I had a little rant on here some time ago about 'the nonsense we take for granted and call education'. There were a couple of comments I wanted to pick up, summed up by csn:I tend to think that working within the system to change the structure is more effective than attempting to demolish it from the outside, though...
I wanted to come back to this, ( Read more... )

Long time, no post ( Read more... )

There are many things in life which seem perfectly sensible until you think about them. School, for example.

Today's Observer features an example of the kind of "new research" without which newspapers (and radio news bulletins) wouldn't know what to do:Hundreds of thousands of parents are risking hefty fines by taking their children out of school ( Read more... )

This so-called concern with human rights, that bombs the hell out of the citizens of Kosovo or Baghdad, ignores so many things. Above all, the ingenuity with which people manage somehow to live, and help each other survive. And this ingenuity is very close to what I mean by tenderness.
(John Berger, interviewed in the Daily Telegraph, 23rd July 2001

What are we going to do about this?

I had a riff going a while back about how Bush, Blair and Berlusconi represent the dawn of the post-democratic era. I thought I was being a little over the top. I was wrong.

On tomorrow morning's Radio Sheffield Breakfast, we have a local RE-teacher-turned-academic who apparently 'sees many parallels between Jesus and Superman'. This, the Daily Torygraph informs me, is her idea for making RE relevant to kids who've never been to Sunday School ( Read more... )