Tristram Hunt, who is the UK Labour Party’s shadow education
secretary, managed to land himself in a second public controversy this week.
Shortly before his announcement that Labour will, if elected, make sex
education (including “equality act” sex education) mandatory in schools
starting at age 5, Hunt appeared on BBC 1’s Question Time. When another
participant said that her “most inspiring teachers were not out of teacher
training college, and taught real values, not British values”, Hunt replied,
“They were nuns, weren’t they? … There is a difference between having a state
education system with qualified teachers and nuns.” When he later appeared on the
Andrew Marr show, Hunt was challenged by Marr to say if he thought nuns could
be good teachers. Hunt repeatedly avoided answering the question and Marr kept
asking it again and again, until on the seventh time of asking, Hunt grudgingly
(and rather narrowly) replied “I’m sure there are brilliant teachers who are
nuns who are doing a fantastic job.”
Last year, two Catholic midwives who asked to be exempted,
under the conscience clause of the Abortion Act, from supervising staff who
performed abortions were told by the Supreme Court that, because they did not
participate in abortions in a hands-on way, the clause did not apply to them.
While Christian groups remain disappointed by the decision, further analysis of
it reveals some rays of hope. Firstly, the conscience clause exempts those with
moral objections to abortion from “participating” in “treatment” leading to
abortions. The midwives sought a broad interpretation of both “participation”
and “treatment”, while the Royal College of Midwives (which opposed them in
court!) sought a narrow interpretation of both terms. The Supreme Court decided
on a narrow definition of “participation” but a wide definition of “treatment”,
including care before and after the abortion. And secondly, the Supreme Court
made it clear that their decision was based only on the Abortion Act, and advised
the two midwives that their employer ought to make “reasonable adjustments to
accommodate their beliefs” under either the Equality Act or the Human Rights
Act. This is the first time that a Supreme Court decision has applied the
concept of “reasonable adjustments” to religious belief.
A Buddhist woman from a slum in Cambodia, who did an hour of
Buddhist worship every day, became a Christian after experiencing a dramatic miracle.
She and her family moved to Phnom Penh to find work, but her husband died of
typhoid, so she took her three children to live in a slum “full of taxis,
vegetable sellers, drug addicts, prostitutes, robbers and bad people.” She
contracted a mysterious illness and was sent home to die by doctors who could
not find a cure. A Christian woman came visiting and told that Jesus could save
her; if she believed in Him she would go to heaven when she died; and He had
the power to heal her. She reacted strongly against this: “Jesus is an American
god, a foreign god!” But that night she prayed to be healed, and woke up the
next morning with no trace of the disease. Her son is now a youth pastor, and
described how God gave him the ability to love others, even those who falsely
accused him, or those who burned down all the slum homes one day in an attempt to
buy the land for redevelopment.
There are a number of stories emerging from Malaysia of
Christian school students either being forced or tricked into converting to
Islam. The trick involves getting them to join in the general prayers but then including
some declaration that officially -- and irrevocably – declares them to be Muslims.
An MP is calling for schools to take action against the wardens of the hostels where
many of these students live.
A bishop of underground Catholic churches in Hebei, China, who
spent a total of 54 years in prison, and has been imprisoned with no contact
with his family since 2001, has died at the age of 93. However, the
authorities, who never told the family where he was being held, continue to
deny any official knowledge of his death or to release his body for burial. His
family believe that the authorities are afraid of mass demonstrations at his
funeral (since he was held without charge for 14 years), or that he died from
starvation or torture, or both.
The BBC recently aired a programme in which participants
from the Aetherius Society and the British Union of Spiritist Societies participated
in a serious debate about whether Jesus and Buddha were aliens. The Aetherius
Society believe that Jesus and Buddha came from Venus, Sri Krishna from Saturn
and Saint Peter from Mars. Two Christians – a scientist and a bishop – were
also present, and unsurprisingly they disagreed with the other participants.
The “Big Question” program was broadcast as part of the BBC’s religious output.
The fact that politicians sometimes say what people want to
hear rather than what they believe may hardly be news to many people. However,
one such incident was considered newsworthy this week – because the offender
was Barack Obama; because the incident was reported by his former top political
advisor, David Axelrod; and because Axelrod claimed that Obama consciously lied
rather than bending the truth or changing his mind later. The issue was Obama professing
opposition to gay marriage, particularly when the audience included members of
black churches, when he sought election in 2008. Obama has disputed Axelrod’s
account, but his public statements in support of traditional marriage in 2008,
and claiming he had “always been in favour of gay marriage” in 2012, are on
public record.
In technology news, blunders where emails are sent to the
wrong person are nothing new, but there was a particularly egregious example this
week from St. Andrew’s University. An email that was intended for a handful of
students who have already been offered a place at the university, inviting them
to visit, was accidentally sent to 760 Scottish applicants who were waiting to
hear if their applications were successful. An apologetic retraction was
emailed out just half an hour later, but even that included a hint of inability
to organise the data sensibly; a spokesman said “The emails were sent by
alphabetical order; we believe that only applicants whose first [sic] name
begins with the letters A to D were affected.”
And finally, a woman from Salisbury (and sister-in-law of a
friend of mine) has created a highly unusual work of art – a copy of the Magna
Carta on top of a cake. Christine Jensen wrote all 4,000 words of the mediaeval
Latin document in food dye on fondant. It will now go on display at Salisbury
Cathedral alongside one of the four surviving original copies of the document.
Christine said, “One of the things I really love doing is making a cake that
accurately tells a story. The only way I would do that in this case was
literally writing it all out word for word.”
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