Gender-based violence: a UN statement

The following is a statement sent out today from the Anglican Observer at the UN, Ms Helen Grace Wangusa, at the beginning of the 16 Days of Activism against gender-based violence:

From 25 November to 10 December every year, the United Nations is joined by the international community in observing the 16 Days of Activism against gender-based violence.The 16 days fall between two important international days namely, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women (25 November) and International Human Rights Day (10 December). These 16 days are set aside as a campaign period to emphasize that all forms of violence against women —whether at local, national, regional and international level[1]— is a violation of human rights.

For 2010 the theme of the UN-led campaign is “Structures of Violence: Defining the Intersections of Militarism and Violence against Women”. Militarism has been defined as an ideology that creates a culture of fear and supports the use of violence, aggression or military interventions to settle disputes and to enforce economic and political interests.[2] Such militarism has been responsible for acts with impunity, sexual violence and especially rape that have earned the Democratic Republic of Congo the title of "the Rape capital of the World".

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Paul Nimmo on Schleiermacher

Once again it's been a while since I blogged anything, but I thought I would flag-up this clip from the increasingly successful Modern Theology Timeline created by Tim Hull at St John's College Nottingham, UK. This is a recent interview Tim did with the Edinburgh based scholar Paul Nimmo on Friedrich Schleiermacher. It is a really good interview, and will go a long way to rehabilitating FDES for those who mis-read Barth and reject him outright. Happy watching!

When religion stops us seeing clearly...

I spent a few minutes after morning prayer on Saturday wandering around the church building, enjoying the silence. I also had a look at the stained glass windows - most of which are Victorian. It's something I don't get to do very often because I'm too busy. My favourite window in our church building is very recent, only three years old, and is a brightly coloured rendition of Jesus welcoming children to himself. It is in the baptistry, an appropriate place for welcoming children into the family of God. I discovered another window today too, which I've never really noticed before - something that surprised me because ours is not an overly large building. It is a large plain window, with clear glass. You can see straight through it to the outside world: across the grave yard to the A-road that runs through the middle of the parish, and on to the homes beyond. I stood for a while watching people heading to the shops, the saturday morning traffic held up by the changing

Humble Confidence: The Appropriate Theological Attitude

I've just got round to reading January's International Journal of Systematic Theology (IJST). I really look forward to it coming in the post: it is the universal problem of research-students-who-are-within a-few-months-of-submission that we become so engrossed in the topic at hand (in my case Karl Barth) that other things pass us by. So, IJST affords me the opportunity to lift my head from the Barthian-pit and read a few other things and have those bits of my mind that remember what it was like to read freely in any area of systematics re-enlivened (avoiding the Barth essays within the journal...for now). Normally I skip over the editorials and head for the articles, but last night I read Steve Holmes' editorial for the January edition. In it Holmes, senior lecturer in Systematic Theology at St Andrews University, considers with what attitude the discipline of theology must engage with other academic disciplines. He outlines two, before settling on the third.

Michael J. Leyden

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