If you have to choose between being right and being kind, be kind
Akhandadhi Das, Thought for the Day, BBC Radio 4, 7 July, on personal responsibility and face masks
It will be a pity if mask-wearing becomes a skirmish in the culture wars. Better would be to follow the science. So, if (as Chris Whitty said) we wear our masks for other people, not for ourselves, then I’m wearing mine in public
Paul Bayes, Bishop of Liverpool, Twitter, 5 July
Public health officials I have spoken tell me that since the Euros started and the pubs have opened, they have noticed Covid infections have risen among male 18-44 year olds. In other words, letting football fans off the leash in situations where they are gathered together and drinking alcohol leads to a spike in infections, yet it’s been allowed to happen by a Government obsessed with football and [having] little time for churchgoers
Catherine Pepinster, The Daily Telegraph, 29 June
Lay-led churches release the Church from key limiting factors. When you don’t need a building and a stipend and long, costly college-based training for every leader of church . . . then actually we can release new people to lead and new churches to form. It also releases the discipleship of people. In church-planting, there are no passengers
David McGinley, speaker at the MultiplyX church-planting conference, 24 June
The establishment of 10,000 new, non-expert-led laboratories in the next ten years is among the ambitious targets that will be discussed by the Welcome Trust. It also envisages the doubling of the number of children doing brain surgery by 2030. The initiative has been christened “Brilliant” by Prof Branestawm, of the Institute of Dodgy inventions and Groupthink
Archdruid Eileen, The Beaker Folk of Husborne Crawley blog, 3 July
As a mushroom cloud formed over Chipping Pagwell behind him, Prof Branestawm said, “We must avoid this initiative being seen as ‘just another initiative’. Which is why we’re calling it a ‘vision’ which is entirely different. Not the same thing at all”
Ibid.
The Church of England is in a far different place now than it was [in 1961]. It is inconceivable that a Ramsey today would become a bishop at all, never mind an archbishop. Yet his voice still speaks at a time when people are desperate for some kind of compass in their understanding of God and what it is to be human: “If the Easter faith is to prevail in the world it will not be through a ‘triumphalist’ Church, but a Church which has the marks of sacrifice”
Peter Townley, Archdeacon of Pontefract, on the 60th anniversary of Michael Ramsey’s enthronement as Archbishop of Canterbury, The Times, 3 July
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