Connecting with Culture - more by Nick Spencer

Charles Darwin

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:55:58 +0000

Most people have an opinion of Charles Darwin. And those that don’t will have by this time next year.

As the Natural History Museum opens its doors to a new Darwin exhibition, a year of lectures, events, publications, debates, and exhibitions gets underway. Even the most devoted Darwinist might be a little tired by December 2009.

Neither Private nor Privileged

Thu, 29 May 2008 14:18:42 +0100

What’s the best way to win an argument?

You might think it would be to discredit your opponents’ facts or undermine their logic but, in fact, the best way is simply to deny them a voice in the first place.

Although few people openly seek to silence their adversaries, when those adversaries happen to be religious (as has often been the case with the HFE bill this week), it is so much easier to deploy the “religion is private” card than actually to engage with their arguments. Hence Jackie Ashley in Monday’s Guardian: ‘There is no sensible conversation between the opposing views to be had… live according to your beliefs, but don't try to impose them on the rest of us.’

This will not do. Christian and other religious opinions should be permitted to engage in public debate, no matter how fruitless some people think that debate is. Moreover, who is the ‘us’ here? If Jackie Ashley imagines the rest of the population thinks the same way she does, she should think again.

Seven Ways to Change the World

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 14:55:47 +0100

God, according to Alastair Campbell’s diaries, is a political ‘disaster area’.

‘British people are not like Americans,’ he wrote on 20 March 1996, who ‘seem to want their politicians banging the Bible the whole time.’ In Britain, by contrast, those ‘who didn't believe didn't want to hear it; and the ones who did felt the politicians who went on about it were doing it for the wrong reasons.’

This can be frustrating for those British Christians whose faith leads them into politics. But before we start yearning for a culture in which we can talk openly about God in public, we should read Jim Wallis.

darwin’s angel

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 23:29:13 +0100

Richard Dawkins has long been recognised as Britain’s grumpiest atheist, our very own Darwinian Victor Meldrew, screeching ‘I don’t believe it’ at anyone who will listen. Readers of his recent God Delusion will have enjoyed him harrumphing his way through modern religion, vanquishing the faithful by the power of ridicule and rhetoric alone.

welcome to everytown

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 12:58:49 +0100

Is there an English philosophy? Do the English see the world in a particular way?

These were the questions that the philosopher Julian Baggini set out to answer in his book Welcome to Everytown. Identifying the most typical postcode in the country – that is, the one that most accurately reflected its demographic and economic mix – he ended up going to live in S66 in Rotherham for six months.

the affluenza epidemic

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 13:56:41 +0000

Are you feeling frustrated? Listless? Despondent? If the answer is ‘yes’, it’s possible that you have contracted the affluenza virus.

Affluenza is the subject (and title) of the psychologist Oliver James’s new book, which charts the ills of modern, ‘Western’ culture. It’s defined on the cover as ‘a contagious, middle-class virus causing depression, anxiety, addiction and ennui’.

journeys and stories

Fri, 15 Dec 2006 11:34:20 +0000

Why would anyone become a Christian in Britain today?

Why, when God is dead, religion a cause of global conflict and the church inflexible, illiberal and irrelevant, would anyone in their right mind embrace the Christian faith?

borat: cultural learnings

Thu, 10 May 2007 13:56:09 +0100

Rarely has such a silly film been so clever.

For the uninitiated, Borat is a ‘mockumentary’ charting the journey across America of the Kazakhstani TV reporter Borat Sagdiyev (played by the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen) in pursuit of ‘cultural learnings’ – and, latterly, Pamela Anderson.

beyond the veil

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 23:55:35 +0100

Life may be more important than food and the body more important than clothes, but both food and clothes have a strange habit of raising the big questions of life.

Just as halal and kosher foods highlight the tensions between particular, religious cultures and public norms, so too, today, do the veil and the necklace.

childhood’s end

Fri, 13 Oct 2006 11:57:54 +0100

Do you remember those lazy, hazy days of your childhood? The long afternoons spent scrumping for apples and catching sticklebacks in a jar? Then finding some smugglers in their secret hideaway and alerting the local policeman before cycling home for tea and crumpets?

eating out

Fri, 25 Aug 2006 11:17:11 +0100

You will be excused for having missed it.

Somewhere between the bombardment of Lebanon and the collapse of the fourth test, the Office for National Statistics published its 2006 United Kingdom Input-Output Analyses Report.

rebuilding trust

Mon, 21 Aug 2006 10:27:06 +0100

Last month, Ken Lay died of a heart attack.

The former president of the US energy giant Enron – a self-made millionaire, a friend of George W Bush and a committed Christian – had been convicted only the month before of most of the crimes he was charged with relating to Enron’s collapse. His death brings to a close one plot-line in America’s most celebrated tale of corporate greed, mismanagement and corruption.

spiritual fitness

Fri, 21 Jul 2006 11:06:39 +0100

If readers of Connecting with Culture are typical of the British population – and surely they are?! – then around a thousand will be members of a gym. (And if they are really typical, most of them will rarely use their membership.)

penny lane

Fri, 14 Jul 2006 11:49:26 +0100

A Liverpool councillor this week suggested renaming some of the city’s streets that were connected with its slave trading past. A number were nominated and it was only the fact that one of them, Penny Lane, had other, more positive, associations that stopped the plan in its tracks.

christianity and social service

Fri, 12 May 2006 11:22:44 +0100

Like many of my generation, I grew up ‘knowing’ that the Victorian era was supremely hypocritical. ‘Victorian values’ meant false piety and sexual repression. It meant men parading their honour in public while prowling the streets for illicit sex at night.