I’m Chris Jenkinson, the Academic Affairs Officer at the University of Manchester Students’ Union.
Posted in Religion / secularism on Apr 24th, 2007
Interesting debate on the place of non-believers in modern society in the House of Lords (hat tip and interesting review). John Sentamu comes out with the new religious tactic of trying to define atheism as a religion, but this is my favourite bit:
Twenty-seven years ago I was chaplain to a young offenders remand centre, Latchmere [...]
Posted in Religion / secularism on Apr 17th, 2007
Saturday’s Guardian carries an opinion piece from Nicholas Buxton entitled “Face to faith” where he touts out the now-frequent line from organised religions about how atheism is also a religious movement with a dogmatic approach to everything from science to social justice. He starts his piece with this rather extraordinary sentence: “Post-Enlightment critiques of religion [...]
Posted in Religion / secularism on Apr 14th, 2007
With all this controversy about the supermosque proposal in London (which I don’t really care about, though I am slightly concerned about the source of funding), it might be easy to forget the increasing influence Christian creationist groups have in the US. They are fighting hard to open a “museum” detailing the literal Genesis creation [...]
Posted in Education, Religion / secularism, Student politics on Feb 12th, 2007
This week’s edition of Student Direct features the Islamic Society on its Societies page. The article is written by one Walead Quhill who stood for Life Sciences secretary in the Student Union council elections in 2006, and thankfully he wasn’t elected given he doesn’t seem to accept evolution as a valid scientific theory (or indeed [...]
Posted in Religion / secularism on Jan 26th, 2007
According to Christian Today (I’m not a regular reader, it has to be said), the Catholic church is once again lobbying for the reintroduction of a direct reference to the role of God in the formation of Europe as a continent. Considering the reliance of the Catholic church on a centuries-old document one would think [...]
Posted in National politics on Oct 22nd, 2006
Jack Straw’s ideas about House of Lords reform (leaked document) are a good first step towards changing the chamber away from a council of elders into something actually reflecting the electorate at large. In short, the plan is to:
Reduce the number of members by a third.
Half 50% appointed and 50% elected.
Pay elected members a salary [...]
Twitter Liberal Democrat blogs