Between curacy & incumbency in Wilts. Part-time @UniOfOxford doctoral student. Formerly @AllianceParty Exec Director & @DioSalisbury Director of Communications.
Jan 9 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
The C of E has been strangely convinced since ~1990 that its crisis was caused by poor management. But what it actually has is a narrative crisis, which it shares with Christianity throughout the West for reasons that have little to do with it specifically. 1/x
Asking an organisational psychologist to offer suggestions as to how to fix the C of E's crisis is like asking a plumber to tell you how to fix your crashed hard drive. These people have no particular insight as to what besets the C of E and Western Christianity generally. 2/x
Aug 18, 2021 • 31 tweets • 6 min read
The Soviet Empire was undone by three things – firstly, overstretching itself, especially through the acquisition of a series of Global South satrapies from Nicaragua through Ethiopia to Vietnam in the 1970s and 1980s. 1/31
Secondly, misrepresenting realities to itself so as to fit Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy; thirdly, because its leaders no longer believed in that political religion even as they presided over a system that permitted no alternative. 2/32
Jun 11, 2020 • 31 tweets • 8 min read
1/31 The most significant protest movement in the UK at the moment has received minimal media coverage, despite a tale involving fascists, Islamists, grooming allegations, death threats to journalists, and the town with the UK’s worst COVID19 outbreak losing faith in the police.
2/31 The media disinterest is because it isn’t taking place in London or Bristol but on the shores of Morecambe Bay; and despite excellent reporting by the Guardian’s north of England correspondent, @HelenPidd, and local journalism heroes @MrsVanessaSims and @AmyFentonNWEM.
Jan 3, 2018 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
The same mix of nationalism & bombast and noises of economic interventionism in Modi's India, Abe's Japan, Duterte's Philippines. In India establishment centre-left Congress is in criosis while Modi goes full Trumpite with the BJP.
Similarly, in Japan the centre-left melted (surprisingly) in the face of Abe even as centrists left the LDP to find open political water that turned out not to exist.
