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Christianity Magazine ArticlesThe Perdition of Happiness
But first I need to tell you something: I’m a ‘Tigger’. The culture of outrage
Opening Doors and Opening HeartsMark Greene discovers the power of badges and titles to open hearts in surprising places. I’m in a car on my way to Whitworth with a friend. We stop at a crossroads in Rochdale. There on the far side of the road stands The Cemetery Hotel, sombre in its black and gold paint. Given that it’s right across the road from a cemetery, I’m sure the locals don’t give the name a second thought, but to an outsider like me, it has a macabre ring to it, the kind of place you check into, but never check out of, like the motel in Psycho. Who, apart from a vampire, would fancy a night at a Cemetery Hotel, particularly a Cemetery Hotel that is located on the Bury Rd? They probably promise you the longest night’s sleep you’ll ever have. And don’t have a breakfast menu. An Atheist’s Atonement?Mark Greene finds much to admire in a fine film adaptation. Ian McEwan has come a long way since the days when his menacing, somewhat morbid tales of deviancy and dysfunctionality earned him the nickname ‘Ian MacAbre’. Today, ten novels and five film adaptations later, he is regarded by many literary critics as one of Britain’s finest living novelists. Amsterdam won the Booker Prize in 1998 and his new novel, On Chesil Beach, is shortlisted for this year’s award. Harry Rises to the OccasionMark Greene is enchanted by Harry’s last hurrah. We have perhaps now got used to it but as cultural events go, there’s very little to match the launch of a Harry Potter book. It’s not simply that 2.6 million copies of the UK edition were sold in the first week, it was the palpable sense of expectation, the ubiquitous speculation about which characters would live and which would die, and the determination by so many people to get a copy as soon as possible and to read it as rapidly as possible. Indeed, whilst hundreds may turn up to watch stars arrive for a film premier in London’s Leicester Square, thousands of kids all across the land queued in droves, and often in fancy dress, outside bookshops counting down the seconds to midnight like revellers in Trafalgar Square on New Year’s Eve. Furthermore, the primary engine for this interest has not been a well-oiled publicity machine or a huge marketing budget or a Jesus-was-a-space-man controversy but simply the compelling nature of the stories themselves. Chicken soup and cappuccinosMark Greene takes a refreshing look at what we drink and why. It’s a truism that different foods and different drinks have different meanings in different cultures. In most cultures chicken soup is just chicken soup but in the Jewish culture I grew up in, chicken soup wasn’t just chicken soup, chicken soup was the cure for all ailments, the universal panacea. And more than that, chicken soup was what your mother made you when you were ill. It was liquidised mother love. If you were ill and your mother didn’t make you chicken soup, the question was: did she really love you? It was a serious question. Telling Tales of Truth & TransformationLet me tell you a story. And I will in a moment. Several tales actually. A tale of a woman who smiled. A tale of the man in the white van who stopped, a tale of the ten year olds who changed the culture of their primary school. Not tall tales, small tales you might call them, but true tales – of wonder and surprise. But before I tell you those tales, let me tell you another tale, a tale I may have told you before. And if I have, perhaps you will not mind, or stop reading. After all, the best tales, or the most important tales, are always worth telling again. For the tales we tell are the voices of our values and the wind in our sails.  |
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