A sort of thought for the day
A short reflection on the Church of England’s refusal to allow women bishops “in the spirit of thought for the day”, for Radio Four’s PM programme.
ReadTag: Politics & society
Humane confrontation
It is the policy-maker’s job to work out solutions to problems. The writer’s role is to direct the reader to the most important problems and make them worry about them. So it does not matter that some of Sven Lindqvist’s past pessimism, about third-world debt and ozone depletion for instance, have not been borne out. “I am not a fortune teller,” he said, and nor should any artist pretend to be.
ReadHow travel limits our minds
The real problem with air travel is not the carbon footprint, the hassle of security checks, the tedium of the boarding gate, the soulless sprawl of the hire car lot, or Ryanair’s excessive excess charges and unavoidable fees for allegedly optional extras. The deeper issue is that how we travel reflects and shapes the way we think, and we have become a society of airheads.
ReadWhy have we fallen out of love with organic food?
The question I wanted to chew over with the chief executive of the Soil Association, Helen Browning, is whether “organic” as we have known it has had its day. For all the good the movement has done in challenging the most egregious practices of modern industrial farming, take any key issue on food and farming today and you will find that it’s never simply a case of conventional bad, organics good, or even better.
ReadIndividuals? Or members of society?
Infractions of personal liberty can be justified when they improve the welfare of individuals on the whole, even when they on occasion diminish the welfare and freedoms of particular people. The argument against assisted suicide on these grounds is not that your doing it directly harms others, but that your having the right to do it requires changing the social ecology in such a way as to diminish the ability of all individuals to thrive in it.
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