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Showing posts from July, 2016

An anecdote in praise of grammar schools

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This is an anecdote. I was born in 1982 and raised in a housing association house on the east of Birmingham. My mum worked as a teaching assistant in my primary school, and my dad on the shop floor of a vehicle parts factory. He biked it to work because we didn't have a car. My mum's parents weren't called grandparents. They were Nan and Granddad, and they too lived in council housing. My Nan used to bath all three of us kids at the same time, and wash our faces with our own underpants. True story. We were working class. Birmingham has always had a strong grammar school presence, and I was one of the select few to whom those schools afforded an opportunity that I had no right to claim. No one coached me for the 11-plus entry exam, I just turned up and did it. They offered me a place. That was a critical moment.  I loved the environment at my school, and felt immediately at home. It was an environment in which I was able to indulge my love of learning and my teachers pushed ...
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Religion: The Dependent Variable

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I was reading an article recently by Philip Mellor and Chris Shilling entitled 'Body pedagogics and the religious habitus' in which the following statement is made: "The global resurgence of religion in the contemporary era, however, has presented a challenge to what can be seen as the methodological ‘default’ position of many sociologists, namely, that religion is always the ‘dependent variable’, relative to secular phenomena deemed to be more important." (p. 27) I want to assist with this challenge. It seems to me that every social scientist must stand downstream from Marx for some period of time, if not to take the plunge then at least to test the water. Why is this? It is plain that the great majority of renowned sociological thinkers draw from that stream. When Mellor and Shilling speak of the 'methodological default', it seems to me what underlies this is a prior commitment of those 'many sociologists' to a leftist theoretical perspective. ...
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Popular posts from this blog

More than a Crest: the meaning of the Barça badge

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The changing design of Barcelona's club badge teaches us about how sport is an integral part of wider society, not simply a meaningless addendum.  In 1899 at the club's founding it was decided to use the city coat of arms as the club's badge. FC Barcelona's regional ties have long been a fundamental part of its identity, and when the club produced its own unique badge in 1910, key symbolism from the city's crest was retained. The Cross of St. George 1910 crest St George, is not only the patron saint of England, but also a significant icon in numerous regions of Spain. In Catalonia, as in England, he is the noble slayer of dragons, the moral crusader, the rescuer of damsels; in short, God's man on the earth. In a culture saturated with Catholicism the symbolic act of wearing George's cross is of great relevance. The selection of the Cross to form the Barça crest is a means to tie the club to a heritage which - albeit mostly invented - enables the...
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The Supremacy of Scripture and Francis Schaeffer’s Line.

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The Christian church in the West has abandoned the supremacy, primacy and infallibility of Scripture. Notice what I did not say. I did not say that we have abandoned the doctrine of the supremacy, primacy and infallibility of Scripture (though some have). I said we have abandoned the supremacy, primacy and infallibility of Scripture. Let me explain how this has come about, and what difference it makes. Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who is There is a favourite book of mine. In it he argues that Western man has, over a period of several centuries, become isolated from himself, from truth and from God because he has given up the search for coherence and unity in his view of his existence. Having done so, modern Western man has replaced the search for coherence with an acceptance of a dichotomy. The dichotomy is the dichotomy between the rational and the irrational, between the natural and the spiritual. Schaeffer argues that this dichotomy can be understood to have produced a line...
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Michael Polanyi and the best ever goal.

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"There is no real substitute for a ball struck squarely and firmly". So says Billy Bragg in the song A Lover Sings, and anyone who has played football (soccer, if you must) knows what he means. You know what it's like to make the perfect connection with the ball. You just know. But what is it that enables us to 'just know'? That's what this blog post is about. Think about the last time you hit the perfect strike and sent the ball screaming into the back of the net. (Okay, point taken. Just imagine it.) What did it look like? How did it feel? Did it sound like a thud, or was it some other kind of sound? Were you aware of your surroundings? The opposition? Teammates? It's kind of hard to say, isn't it? We need some way of thinking this through, so let's start with an example, to which we can refer. Here is a short video clip of the best goal ever. (You heard me.) More than we can tell I wonder what the goalscorer Zinedine Zidane would...
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