Papal authority and human rights: Thinking Aloud by Simon Barrow

From the desk of admin ·April 30, 2008 at 9:12 pm · Filed under All WW, Columns, Comment, Ethics - Religion, Thinking Aloud

Simon Barrow has been thinking about the tensions within the Roman Catholic Church between a traditional vision of authority, and a desire to engage with human rights and the modern world.

Whose rights, whose wrongs?

Benedict XVI’s recent, high profile visit to the United States highlighted the coincidence of two anniversaries. The first was his own inauguration on 24 April 2005 as 265th reigning Pope, Bishop of Rome, spiritual head of the 1.2 billion strong Roman Catholic Church, and Sovereign of the Vatican City State. The second, to be marked fully later this year, was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted and proclaimed by UN General Assembly in resolution 217 A (III) on 10 December 1948.

The pontiff embodies three kinds of combined headship – the ecclesiastical, the spiritual and the political. As such, his office is the supreme expression of a Christendom vision of the relation of heavenly and temporal authority in one inherited throne, invested in locus Christi. Here is a universal claim to supervening moral authority, one that causes considerable controversy within and without.

The United Nations declaration, by contrast, is the result of an agreement among states and their peoples (what is somewhat vaguely deemed “the international community”) arising from a long historical struggle, involving people of many faiths and none. Its aim is to give practical expression to an inalienable sense of human dignity, worth and mutual obligation which can be seen to be grounded (though not without disputation) in significant strands of Jewish, Christian, humanist, secular and Muslim thought.

Global ethics and institutional inquisitions

For some, the UN declaration is part of the quest for a truly global ethic arising from major points of inter-religious, inter-cultural and cross-political convergence among those “of good faith”, believers and otherwise. Such an ethic invites cooperation through consent, self-limitation and relationship (covenant) as well as regulation (contract).

One of the key figures in this quest is Professor Hans Kung, the prominent Catholic intellectual. There is, of course, an irony here; one which points to the underlying tension between some institutional religious interests and the search for universal human goods within a plural framework. For this is the same Hans Kung who, after forming a collegial academic relationship with one Josef Ratzinger (they shared a reforming agenda as advisers at the great Vatican II Council) ended up being stripped of his official teaching office by the Church in 1979, after he questioned the doctrine of papal infallibility and the functioning of the magesterium. Meanwhile, the man he had known for nearly 35 years (at that stage) went on to become the Vatican’s prime theological ‘enforcer’.

In that capacity Cardinal Ratzinger denounced not only Hans Kung. He also disciplined and condemned a range of creative thinkers ranging from Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff (for his advocacy of a grassroots church) through to the late Jacques Dupuis (who wrote with enormous depth and humanity on the theology of religions) and Roger Haight (whose Jesus, Symbol of God seeks to express concerns conceived through ancient metaphysics in terms of modern thought).

Dupuis, a deeply faithful scholar, died a broken man as a result of the harsh way he was treated. Meanwhile, the Catholic Theological Society of America, the European Society for Catholic Theology and committee members of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain went on to complain about what they called an “unjust, theologically questionable and unnecessary” 2007 notification against Fr. Jon Sobrino, whose writing and work has been done against a backdrop of poverty, violence and threat to his personal safety in Central America.

Critics of the Vatican, both within and without the Catholic community, often observe that the Church is in the habit of affirming human rights, fair treatment and intellectual and religious freedom in the world at large, while acting rather differently towards those inside its own institutions - using a hierarchical doctrine of the Church as a privileged instrument of God to justify this.

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Top UK websites, and does Google have potential to dominate?

From the desk of admin ·April 30, 2008 at 1:54 pm · Filed under All WW, Internet / Technical, Media, Political Blogging

Google websites account for more than a third of all traffic to UK websites. It also has a strong presence in a large number of Internet market segments. Do we need to worry?

Yesterday I asked the question:

Which do you think is the most visited website in the UK?

I asked because I ran across a post on Robin Goad’s Hitwise UK blog analysing the source (i.e., referrer) of UK internet traffic , and as a follow-up to my Economist post at the weekend.

A few people replied (thanks, guys). This is the detailed list from Hitwise:

Rank / Website / Market Share

1. http://www.google.co.uk 7.77%
2. http://mail.live.com 3.1%
3. http://www.ebay.co.uk 2.75%
4. http://www.facebook.com 2.07%
5. http://uk.msn.com 1.76%
6. http://www.google.com 1.7%
7. http://www.bebo.com 1.45%
8. http://www.youtube.com 1.31%
9. http://news.bbc.co.uk 0.99%
10. http://www.myspace.com 0.88%
11. http://www.bbc.co.uk 0.87%
12. http://www.microsoft.com 0.85%
13. http://uk.mail.yahoo.com 0.84%
14. http://uk.yahoo.com 0.79%
15. http://www.orange.co.uk 0.72%
16. http://www.wikipedia.org 0.61%
17. http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport 0.59%
18. http://images.google.co.uk 0.58%
19. http://www.amazon.co.uk 0.48%
20. http://www.msn.com 0.47%

These are the points that I note:

- The dominance of google.co.uk over google.com. I’ll make my traditional point that many UK Political Websites targetting UK traffic would be better off on .uk domains, since google.co.uk gives an extra weighting to these domains in search results. The diagram indicates that google.co.uk accounts for more than a quarter of “upstream” (i.e., referrer) traffic to UK websites. That was my point from last spring.

- I’m surprised how far down the BBC are on that list - albeit they are still the top “content” site.

- The appearance of images.google.co.uk at position 18 is interesting. For some time web-design commentators have been pointing out that using descriptive names for images is a good contributor towards ranking in the search engines - this is one reason why that is the case. On this site we receive a small but significant group of visitors via the Google images search.

I’d be interested to hear your further thoughts, but in the meantime Hitwise also provided a list of the top 10 “owners” - combining different Internet “properties” into a single figure.

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Suicide Squirrel: Sony and Ofcom

From the desk of admin ·April 30, 2008 at 10:06 am · Filed under All WW, Cartoon, Humour, News - Current Affairs, Video

First, have a look at these snippets.

Skydiver

Egg Mexican

Ofcom has decided that this is not suitable for viewing before 9pm on Television:

Sony Television came forward to us voluntarily and independently of the complaint
with a full disclosure of the incidents and admitted these scheduling errors. As Sony
Television recognised immediately when the compliance issues with this series were
pointed out, the subject matter of this animation was not suitable for broadcast before the watershed. Although the character shown was a cartoon squirrel, the content was darkly comic and adult in tone with a sharp contrast between the macabre and violent death scenes and the light-hearted music which accompanied them. The series was a cartoon and therefore more likely to attract children. Despite the fact that this channel is targeted at an adult audience, it was broadcast on an unencrypted service during the day, and children could have come across the series unawares.

What do you think?

I think they are hilarious.

Via.

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Food and Farming: Pigs in a Poke

From the desk of admin ·April 29, 2008 at 5:20 pm · Filed under All WW, Audio, Comment, News - Current Affairs, Politics

This is a short segment from Farming Today at the weekend, throwing a different light on what is happening with our possible “food security” problem. The national breeding pig herd is down by almost a tenth since Christmas; get a British pork chop while you can.

The irony is devastating. Just think about it.

The British pig industry has some of the highest welfare standards in the world:

The British pig industry is unique, producing pork, bacon and ham to standards of animal welfare which are not regularly matched outside Britain. The loss of the British pig herd will mean consumers lose the choice to buy pork, bacon and ham from a high welfare, assured supply chain, that deploys sustainable production methods.

And - even so - significant losses are made on every single pig:

Stewart Houston, the BPEX chairman, led a delegation which delivered a 10,000 signature petition to Number 10 calling for help for pig farmers.
“We have been struggling with losses of £26 per pig for over six months,” Mr Houston said.

Meanwhile, the Animal “Rights” campaigners are calling for even higher standards and prices, while accepting that British Pigs are already better looked after than imports:

British pigs are already experiencing better welfare than much of imported products, thanks to
the UK ban on sow stalls, but there is still room for improvement, particularly the provision of
straw, a reduction in tail-docking and stopping the use of farrowing crate.

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Wardman Wire Election Coverage: Testing the Chat Room

From the desk of admin ·April 29, 2008 at 2:26 pm · Filed under Announcements

More on this later, but I just turned on the Wardman Wire Election 2008 Chatroom for testing if you would like a sneak preview.

It lives here this year: http://www.mattwardman.com/blog/chat-room/

On the night I will add all the relevant news feeds from Live Bloggers to the right hand sidebar, so it will be easy to keep track of the Election from that one page.

I’ll post more substantive detail later on today.

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The Final Countdown: A Defining Moment in the Lives of Gordon and Dave - Politics Decoded with Garbo

From the desk of garbo ·April 29, 2008 at 11:40 am · Filed under All WW, Columns, Comment, Politics Decoded

Boris or Ken; YouGov or Mori: We’ll have to wait and see…

It’s the final straight to the big day: May 1^st. Will it be Boris, will it be Ken? We’ll have to wait and see…

What is sure is that the pollster YouGov is either going to be the only credible pollster left in the UK or its reputation is going to be in tatters. How it can predict a landslide for Boris when the other pollsters are saying it’s too close to call, I just do not know. The fact that YouGov has been polling people outside London makes me suspect they will be wearing a rather fetching shade of egg on their faces come Friday morning. I also suspect that Ken is going to knick it right at the post… but I won’t be going to the bookies to back that up!

The Local Elections too

The other big battle of course, is the local elections around many parts of the rest of the country. I suspect once again that things won’t be going as bad for Labour as many might think. Make no mistake, they are not going to be making gains – but expectation is so low that even if they can poll above the 30% it will be seen as some sort of success. This Thursday is a big for Gordon Brown, but it is in many ways even bigger for the Tories and in particular David Cameron.

Success and Failure: A fine Line

Firstly the Mayoral elections. The Tories are leading Labour by about 10 points in the polls at the moment – nationwide. London and the South East is the Tories back yard, their stronghold. If Boris cannot win with the home advantage what does it say about the Tories? In theory they should be battering Labour in this election. Livingstone is helped by the disassociation he has put between himself and New Labour; but still, if the Tories cannot win in London can they win anywhere?

Then there are the local elections. The Government has been under the cosh now for six months. Absolutely battered from all angles: the press, the media, the opposition, the electorate, even by its own backbenchers and the odd frontbencher too. Cameron and the Tories have had all the ammunition they need to not only wipe that creepy smile of Brown’s face, but also Labour off the political map – not only in London but in the regions too. Now is the time for the Tories to stand up and be counted and this Thursday is when we will see for the first time in about fifteen years whether the electorate are ready to consider handing them power.

The Tories Must Taste Success This Week

In simple terms, if the Tories do not poll in the 40s and beat Labour by a good 12 to 15%, then they will not have capitalised on the mess Gordon Brown has been making of running this country. If they do not beat Labour by more than 10%, then the spotlight will shift very rapidly from the Prime Minister on to David Cameron. And that will spell very bad news for the Tories.

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Britblog Roundup #167 by Amused Cynicism

From the desk of admin ·April 29, 2008 at 10:37 am · Filed under All WW, Audio, Blog Roundups, Britblog Roundup Podcast, Media

The roundup is a compendium of last week’s outstanding posts in the British Blogosphere.

Britblog Roundup No. 167 (27-Apr-07) is hosted at Cabalamat.

For the full Pods and Blogs Roundup to download, visit Chris Vallance’s site.

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