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…
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First Thursday May 4th summary
Artificial Intelligence (AI) had been in the news every morning before the First Thursday. Monday: AI scans were used at Royal Marsden Hospital and Imperial College- algorithms used to diagnose cancer had proved super-effective, more efficient than any current methods. Tuesday: Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather” of AI quits Google and warns of its danger-…
Piketty’s proposals
The last mailing summarised Thomas Piketty’s account of how we got into our present position. This looks at his final chapter, where he puts forward proposals for a better economy and society in the future. He says: “New forms of social ownership will need to be developed, along with new ways of apportioning voting rights…
Thomas Piketty: Capital and Ideology
My Lent reading this year has been nothing explicitly “religious”: it was Thomas Piketty’s new book “Capitalism and Ideology”, published in French last Autumn and translated into English earlier this year. Though not religious or “spiritual” I would argue that it is at least as theological as some other books I was urged to read….
First Thursdays
Summary of First Thursday discussions Nov. 7th 2019 and Jan. 2nd 2020 The story of a 10-yr old boy who claimed that his ambition was to become a drug lord https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-50317250 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7656687/Boy-aged-TEN-dreams-County-Lines-drug-dealer.html provoked a discussion about the ideals offered to young people and the pressures put on them in society today. In the not too…
First Thursday, October 2019
Summary of the discussion October 3rd 2019: Zechariah talks about false prophets (13:4 to 6), people who wear hair shirts and beat themselves up to pretend they have a message from God. Our media and politics today are flooded with accusations of “Fake News”. In 1920s and 1930s Germany Joseph Goebbels knew the power of…
Primo Levi Centenary (part two)
Extracts from some of Levi’s other books: “The Periodic Table”, “If not now, when?” and “The Drowned and the Saved”. THE PERIODIC TABLE In this book Primo Levi takes some of the chemical elements as illustrations of people or situations he has known and experienced. The following are is a small selection of those portraits….
Primo Levi Centenary
July 31st was the centenary of the birth of Primo Levi in 1919. We read and discussed extracts from some of his writings- here from “If this is a Man”, his description of life in Auschwitz, and “The Truce” his liberation and journey home. IF THIS IS A MAN In 1943 Primo Levi joined an…
First Thursday, June 6th, 2019
We met on the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, which perhaps began the final phase of the Second World War- though it must always be remembered that the main burden of the struggle against Hitler’s Fascism was borne by the Soviet Union, which lost some thirteen million of their armed forces killed…
First Thursday, May 9th, 2019
Our first reading was Deuteronomy 7:1 to 9, where the people recently set free from slavery in Egypt are commanded to commit genocide on the inhabitants of Canaan, their new “Promised” Land. It was an injunction faithfully followed by Europeans, who similarly saw themselves as “God’s People”, when they invaded and settled in the Americas…