Category: First Thursday Archive

Ilan Pape was a Senior Lecturer at the Middle Eastern History Department and Political Science Department of the University of Haifa, Israel, from 1984 to 2006.  Following his endorsement of the boycott of Israeli universities, he left Israel in 2007/8 to work as a Professor at the University of Exeter.  His major 2006 work “The…

Gaza today is reminiscent of the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, when the Red Army stood back and allowed the Nazis to massacre the Polish Home Army- today Israel’s “allies” mouth calls for “restraint” while they arm the bombing and slaughter.  The UK shares in this with £300 million of parts manufactured in Scotland for US…

Summary of the discussion In October 1893 the Chicago Evening Post journalist Finley Peter Dunne, in his weekly column, quoted his fictional Mr. Dooley that, “The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”.   We might say the same of the Church.  But we have to recognise that people who…

Summary of Discussion The Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Centre in Jerusalem (combined since 2017 with Kairos Palestine) works for human rights, justice and equality for Palestinians (see its website https://www.sabeel-kairos.org.uk/category/about-us/about-sabeel-kairos/).  After nearly twenty years’ work in Galilee, Naim Ateek came St George’s Cathedral in 1985, and when the Intifada broke out two years later, people…

First Thursday- summary of the discussion Gaza and Ukraine are still top of the international news.  They reminded us of the title of Bishop James Jones’ report on the Hillsborough disaster: “The Patronising Disposition of Unaccountable Power”.  Here in the UK the electoral cycle is beginning to dominate everything, with politicians seemingly afraid to speak…

This is more of a reflection on our discussion than a summary, which would be far too long.  Is it possible for Israelis and Palestinians to find a solution for how to live together?  The 1948 United Nations “settlement” which set up a two-state partition of Palestine (despite warnings that this would cause continuing conflict)…

In his book “Value(s): Building a Better World for all” (published by William Collin in 2021, and in paperback in 2022), Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of England, argues that “the embrace of markets and their ‘subjective’ valuations has led to a society that has been robbed of its capacity to express…

The collapse of the Soviet system in 1990 created a vacuum filled with illusions of Western “victory”.  “Liberal democracy” (with free-market capitalism) was now “the only game in town”.  The Russian economy was re-organised under Yegor Gaidar (and western “support”), with drastic consequences, including oligarchs buying up formerly state-owned industries.  But the present century has…

Rishi Sunak’s proposal to grant more licenses for oil and gas development, in the light of all the debate about Global Warming and Fossil Fuels, was our first topic of discussion.  The world demand for oil and gas is higher now than it was half a century ago-  production was nearly 2.5 million tons in…

One of the Kirchentag Bible studies asked “When is the Kingdom of God coming?” (Luke 17:20).    Does God work only through people, or in other ways?  (At least we should perhaps be grateful it is not only through us as members of the Church!).  In the Gospel of Thomas Jesus says that the Kingdom is…