Full text of the statement by the Archbishop of York at the end of his fast:

'In our peacemaking efforts the real problem is not one of re-inventing the wheel. The danger is re-inventing the flat tyre. This kills. I have always known that violence is not on and after seven days of fasting and praying I am more persuaded than ever that wars and violence cannot lead to a long lasting solution. Hate cannot defeat hate; the only way to overcome an enemy is to make them a friend.

I have been humbled by the thousands of people - of faith and of no faith - who have supported me over the past seven days with their presence, prayers and solidarity. With all these people I want to raise my voice and declare like the Psalmist that human life is too valuable and fragile. Each of those who have been killed were 'fearfully and wonderfully made'. Why then is their life cheapened by those who control suicide bombers, Katusha rockets, airstikes and gunships.

At the end of one of our hourly prayer sessions a five year old lad visibly upset, came up to me with his mother and said "Thank you for what you are doing. I am very upset with all the killings. Why didn't they get it sorted by talking?"

A teenager asked, "Why didn't God stop it? Where was He when people were killing each other?"
"He was being violated" I replied to her "God was being violated. Do you remember Elijah and the wind, the earthquake and fire?"
"Yes" she said. "God was not in them, but in a gentle, still voice."

God's voice is to be heard in the voice of an eight year old Lebanese girl, injured and orphaned who had lost her eye in an airstrike and in the voice of an eighty-five year old Israeli woman, sick, poor and unable to move out of reach of the Katusha rockets.

Where is God? Surely he is being violated with those who are damaged by the consequences of violence and being diminished with those who enact it.

The road to peace is not an easy one, but we need to stick at it. The dividends of peace are incalculably greater than the wages of conflict which have been paid in the Middle East in the countless widows, orphans and displaced peoples produced by conflict.

The continuing tragedy makes demands of us all and underlines the need to find peacemakers and mediators from the international community who will work for conflict resolution.

With the Archbishop of Canterbury I believe that one of the middle-to-long term issues for any UN intervention will be, what kind of peace is expected to emerge now that a cease fire has been negotiated - who takes responsibility for anything that looks like a "common security" solution preserving the integrity and legitimacy of civil society and government in Lebanon and giving no possible handle to the rhetoric of groups that challenge Israel's right to exist.

The events of the past weeks, in the Lebanon, Israel, the United States and Britain have demonstrated that we cannot afford any longer to leave the issues of the Middle East in the pending tray of unresolved business. There is no greater recruiting sergeant for would be Jihadists than the conflict in the Middle East. Without urgent action on our part, for their sakes and our own, the spiral of violence that has lasted longer than the whole of my lifetime - and I am 57 - will continue unabated, as new generations become mired in the enmity of their forefathers.

The challenge for the international community is to make peace in the Middle East a priority for the sake of us all and to sacrifice their own self-interest in the short term for the prize of sustainable peace.

As in all conflicts great and small, both sides have acquired supporters and protagonists. We as humans are prone to divide into camps named For and Against. Christians must continue to struggle to find ways to create communities which transcend tribalism, where we strive to love one another as God loves us. We must not give in to the fear which is in all of us but must seek to fan the spark of divine humanity which we all possess.

Today marks not an end but rather a spur to continuing prayer that God's peace will come. We must not, however, just look across the water and pray for peace in the Middle East, and peace in the world. We must look at our own nation, our own children growing in a society which does not always foster inclusion and generosity as our priority. It is surely fear and anxiety which leads to aggression. We must build a sense of safety. Our Christian calling is to cry out for those who feel outside and to nurture love within. If we seek for others an integrity and legitimacy of civil society, we ourselves must strive to think about our own.

We must each and every one of us hold responsibility for seeking peace in our own time, in our own streets and in our own homes as well as continuing to pray for the world.

I believe that this is why I have been here in the Minster this week. We must look into our own hearts and at our own demons as well as seek to help others with theirs. We have in our world the ravenous demons of idolatry; materialism, militarism and racism whose food is money status and power. These demons are like the demons in the boy whose story is told in the Gospel of Mark chapter 9. Jesus tells his disciples that these demons cannot be cast out except by prayer and fasting. Some demons have settled deep within us.

We can nurture love, foster courage and seek wisdom, we can choose not to accept sentimentality, leave foolhardiness unchallenged or lapse into cowardice.

My hope and message to all of us is that in a world of short cuts, deception and death may we seek and find the Way which is of Truth and brings Life.

As a continuing symbol of prayer and hope for the Middle East I will leave my tent, my tent of meeting, erected in St. John's Chapel, with my crozier on the altar, until such time as a peacekeeping force is installed in Southern Lebanon. I continue to invite people to come and to offer prayers of peace in this place for the Middle East, for our nation and for peace in our own hearts.'

www.dioceseofyork.org.uk/cgi/news/news.cgi?t=template&a=894 

Quotations from Martin Wroe's fine article on John Sentamu's fast in today's Sunday Times:

Every now and then an archbishop hears the voice of God. For Sentamu, born in a village outside Kampala in Uganda 57 years ago and the first black archbishop in the Church of England, it happened watching a television news report. In a Lebanese village an eight-year-old girl had lost an eye and did not yet know that both her parents and brother were dead. Not so far away, in a deserted neighbourhood of northern Israel, an 85-year-old woman sat alone in her flat, the only person left to hear the rockets of Hezbollah screaming through the night.

Sentamu, who became the 97th Archbishop of York only last October, was preparing to set off with his wife Margaret and their two grown-up children on a holiday to Austria. As the crisis in Lebanon spiralled out of control, for some days he had been listening for a divine word but, disappointingly, given the precedent for divine articulation in the region, God seemed to have lost his tongue. Powerless to know how to respond to an escalating disaster, frustrated at the impotency of political leaders, agnostic in the face of e-mails asking what people of faith might do.

'I was gutted at that news report,' explains the archbishop, who does not speak received Anglican. 'Gutted at the plight of the young and the elderly, at those who are helpless in this conflict. And then I realised this was what I had been trying to hear. I was hearing the voice of God in that little girl, in that old woman.'

His decision to scrap the holiday, move into a tent inside the cathedral and undertake a fast came when he read from the Bible about the disciples of Jesus failing to heal a young boy. 'They ask Jesus why they couldn't do it,' he explains. 'Jesus replies that it was "only by prayer and fasting". And that was my word. I thought, this is the same. It's got to be prayer and fasting . . . '

For the whole perceptive article, which is certainly worth reading, see:

www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2320084_1,00.html

I thought this would be of interest. Yours, Phil :-)

Phil Simpson CMS Regional Director Conference of European Churches - Office of Communications Press Release No. 06-31/e 16 August 2006. Jointly issued with the World Council of Churches ECUMENICAL DELEGATION RETURNS FROM BEIRUT AND JERUSALEM AND TRANSMITS THE CONCERNS OF THE CHURCHES.

"Why such awful destruction?" was the question heard over and over again by members of an ecumenical pastoral delegation in relation to Israel's attacks on Lebanon. Entrusted by the WCC, the Conference of European Churches (CEC), the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), and the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) with the mission of expressing global ecumenical solidarity with churches and people affected by the conflict in the Middle East, the delegation returned with the task of transmitting the hopes and expectations of the churches in Lebanon, Palestine and Israel to the international ecumenical family. Reporting on their 10-15 August visit to Beirut and Jerusalem, the three members of the delegation - CEC President Rev. Jean-Arnold de Clermont, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Tours (France) Mgr. Bernard Aubertin, and WCC programme executive on racism, Ms Marilia Alves-Schller  emphasised that the representatives of Lebanon's various communities with whom they met had all agreed that the answer to that question is that the destruction was both deliberate and planned.

In support of that analysis, community leaders mentioned their concern at the growing influence of neo-conservative forces in the US on Israel's political leadership. In particular they questioned US secretary of state Condoleeza Rice's comment that "The suffering of Lebanon is the labour pains of the new Middle East". The delegation also wished to strongly affirm all that representatives of Lebanon's different communities had shared with them about the over-riding value of the multi-cultural and multi-confessional nature of their society. For the community leaders this represents a guarantee for peace. They noted that Lebanese of all religious faiths - Christians and Muslims, both Sunni and Shi'ia - had remained firmly unified despite the enormously divisive pressures of the war. The second message members of the delegation brought back , was that it is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and not the role and actions of Hezbollah that is at the heart of the present crisis. Nevertheless, the delegation reported that all religious leaders with whom they spoke condemned all use of indiscriminate violence from whatever source including Hezbollah.

Welcoming the delegation to the Ecumenical Centre on behalf of the four Geneva-based sponsoring ecumenical organisations, WCC general secretary Rev. Dr Samuel Kobia concurred that "It is only by addressing the Israel-Palestine issue, and only a comprehensive and just settlement of that issue that can bring peace and security in the Middle East". In Jerusalem, the delegation heard both the chief rabbi and the chief judge of the Islamic court separately voicing the same negative perceptions of each other's communities. "They have no compassion for their children," both men had declared. Another view the delegation also heard expressed was that the idea of permanent warfare seems to dominate thinking in the Middle East, and that there is a need for all thinking in the region to be demilitarised. Although perceptions of "the other" bode ill for the ability to return together to the negotiating table and overcome mutual hatred and grief, members of the delegation said that they had also heard many church leaders voicing concern about how people can remove the hatred from their hearts and learn to live together as neighbours. As "a tangible and concrete expression of the ecumenical family's solidarity and a way of sharing their grief," the visit from the ecumenical delegation was a sign of the World Council's intention to broaden its co-ordination of the ecumenical response to the Middle East crisis, and for more concerted efforts in this direction, Kobia explained. "The situation in the Middle East is changing," he said. "A new political, economic and moral landscape requires new elements to be brought into the equation for a just peace in the Middle East." New WCC programmes mandated by the WCC's recent (February 2006) Assembly will lay the groundwork for that, Kobia said. A 16 August message signed by the general secretaries of the WCC, CEC, LWF, and WARC and distributed at a press conference with the ecumenical delegation concludes: "In the light of all that they tell us, we shall during the next weeks reflect prayerfully and urgently together on the contribution which the churches can make in furthering the cause of peace in the Middle East."

*** See full text of CEC Statement at www.cec-kek.org/pdf/CECStatementME.pdf Other statements by churches and church-related groups appear on the Decade to Overcome Violence website

 http://overcomingviolence.org/en/resources/thematic-summaries/statements-on-the-middle-east-crisis.html

The Conference of European Churches (CEC) is a fellowship of some 125 Orthodox, Protestant, Anglican and Old Catholic Churches from all countries of Europe, plus 40 associated organisations. CEC was founded in 1959. It has offices in Geneva, Brussels and Strasbourg. For information: CEC Office of Communications Phone +41 22 791 63 25 Fax +41 22 791 62 27 E-mail: cec@cec-kek.org Website: www.cec-kek.org

Dear Karen,

You raise so many points that I can only reply in a disjointed way.

I think there is some agreement that we would take up arms against an immediate armed threat to our community, even if it may be more saintly not to take up arms. This can also be regarded as irresponsible as we benefit from the defense given by others.

The nature of Nazi philosphy? An unholy mix of bogus science used to justify racism, German mythology and anti-semitism which could be justified from the works of Martin Luther. In sort it was an effort to unite the German people and give them back their pride and undo the effect of the Treaty of Versailles. Certainly in the pre-war period they would not be interested in catching Jews. They were quite happy for them to leave for America so that the state gained they property and possessions. The war was about living space which they wanted to take from Poland and Russia.

Yes, we now have the technology to impliment a Fasist state. The trouble with Nazi Germany and  Stalinist Russia was that the buraucracy they involved was intensive in manpower and inefficient whith slow communication. It is frightening what can be done now from a desk in Whitehall. Think of a name, any name, and within a few hours you can have credit records, criminal records, health records, bank records, spending profile, club memberships, computer usage, email records. The Data Protection Act is supposed to protect out interests but in a case of "National Security" the requests of the investigators will not long   fail to be met. The opposrtunities for a few bent cops are limitless. They can even find out who reads this Forum!

I agree that we don't know from prophesy wat is going to happen or at least when it is going to happen. I am very dubious of any argument that we need to give prophesy a helping hand.

The origin of war comes down to   wealth. Where does wealth come from and when is this unjust. The answer is that  wealth creates wealth and population growth divides wealth. In an agrarian economy, population growth will mean bringing into use less firtile land what is further from town. Wealth is created in the ennd by trading. This requires capital or wealth for transport, storage manufacturing facilities, research etc. In the end where is the unfairness. We are not talking about slave labour. It is suggested that it is in the vast differences in wealth at an individual or national level. Yet this wealth was not gained by robbery or violence, in the main. I don't know.

We must ask why Israel is sucessful. It is not becaue they have stolen land from Arabs. Most of the land was bought from Arab landlords. It is beause they applied the lessons of Western civilisation to farming methods and infra structure development.  We must be clear, the Palastinians do regard their claim to be not just an injustice to their grandparents but an affront to Allah, that land where he was worshiped has been taken from him.

Are Muslims oppressed in Britain. That depend on which Muslims you look at. Muslims with degrees are pursuing sucessful careers in banking, accountancy, local government etc. Muslim businessmen are doing well in all manner of small businesses.

What about the oil wealth which has gone to Arab countries?

The Moguls converted to Islam a couple of generations after Ghengis Khan and then went on to take Islam to India in a particularly bloody way.

Multinationals are the taargets of  ecoterrorism, animal rights activists and I suppose as a proxy for the USA.

Dear 1057 - it is partialy as a result of Frances efforts in the last war that I had to suffer learning their perverse language to O level. The sufferings of the French lessions cerainly enhanced the emotional impact of Henry V and the glories of Tafalgar and Waterloo!

We now have 5 links to information on the just war. In the medieval period the churches effors were directed at the conduct of disputes between Christian Kings and Princelings. I believe there is a comprehensive treatment of the Just War in Aquinas. The just war theory addresses two questions - When is going to war justified? and What means can be used to pursue these ends. The annswer to the first question remains intact, due cause, right intention, proportionality of the offense to the cost,  a reasonable expectation of sucess and the possibility of discrimination of targets. The proper means pf warfare have been sere abandoned in the Second World War on the basis that we had to use any means at our disposal, the enemy had already done it and no act was proprtionate to the evil of a 1,000 year Rich, an anti-millenium if you please. Thus the lives of Japanise civilians were weighed against those of American soldiers. More recently technology has provided the means for the far more accurate delivery of bombs. We must assume that America did not just set out to destroy Bagdad as they achieved less in over a month than bomber command did in on night over Dresden. The Americans may see their way of War as justified on the basia that their overwellming superiority would cause any rational opponent to surrender without a shot being fired.

1057 Good answer! I feel sure that I probably would defend myself from the Nazis with violence or even seek to get away from the Nazis but would Jesus? Was that war really about German economic supremacy dressed up as racial supremacy? It's much easier to obtain wealth from your enemy, whether it is in the form of money, goods property and forced labour when you convince/brainwash people into believing that some humans are well, not that human. With the escalation of events in the Middle East and the Terror alerts here, it is not impossible that we will succumb to de-humanising rant about our muslim and asian neighbours and that we will see them rounded up into camps, their wordly goods confiscated and special work found for them. Far-fetched? Guantanamo Bay? Today's news reports have talked about 'passenger profiling' at airports which we all know means the targetting of arab, asian, north african, malaysian,indonesian and central asian travellers. That should be even easier for our authorities to do than it was for Nazis to hunt down fleeing Jews. Just imagine if the Nazis had the joined up bureacracy and surveillance technology that we have today!please pray about this issue.

1057 and 974, could you both be right? I think that we can't ignore prophesy but we shouldn't necessarily go looking for signs of the end times, we should just pray as Jesus said to the disciples - Mark 13:32. I don't think that Jesus meant for us to be watchful in the sense of logging incidents in some sort of rolling archive of events leading up to the BIG ONE,( Rapture - pre, mid or post Trib, Second Coming - whichever is your eschatological understanding), but to be watchful of how we lead our lives in Him now and in speaking out for peace and justice and the Gospel. We need to keep speaking Jesus' name into this situation.

Also the underlying cause of most conflict is probably economics. As Karl Marx said, control of the means of production etc. Israel is rich, modern and successful. Israel has what many Arab nations and Muslim people do not have, just as the West similarly has what they do not have. Muslims resident in the West ARE economically excluded and oppressed. What does Jesus say, that we his disciples should do about economic injustice?

Much of that which informed and fuelled the Troubles in Northern Ireland was Roman Catholic and Protestant material poverty, unemployment and workplace discrimination. 'Want' is the terrorists recruiting sergeant. If there had been full regular employment for the workers of N.I. then people would have submerged their religious differences and rubbed along as they had done before. Much of nationalist politics was more grounded in Marxism and the armed struggle than in Roman Catholicism anyway. Religion is largely a tenuous factor in Nationalism. As the comedian Frank Carson said in that in N.I. if you were an atheist school child, you had to be a protestant atheist or a catholic atheist in order to find a school. It was funny the way he told it. Did Jesus teach that religious or economic or social oppression should be dealt with by violence? Or that the violence should be seen in terms of eschatology? Possibly the latter but He was sying that these war events might be signs of the END and NOT that in some way they were justified.

Moreover China has successfully 'controlled' it's Muslim minorities via discrimination of all kinds but it has not been targetted - yet.

These countries may well become targets in time, if terrorists seek to 'liberate' the oppressed muslim minorities but at the moment they are out of the picture. These countries must humanely and justly treat their muslim minorities to allevaite the potential for violence and unrest. In the last year I have read reports that muslim fundamentalism is gaining an albeit small toe -hold in the Central asian republics of the former Soviet Union. Here terrible poverty and cruel dictatorships will provide for rich pickings of oppressed, unemployed young men looking for answers; answers which will be provided by the terror recruiters unless we can give these people Jesus first and a real genuine economic helping hand.

It is also perfectly possible for religious extremists to work hand in hand with political fanatics to make common cause when it suits them. It should be no surprise that a more secular group like Hezbollah might ally itself with very religious regime, if that regime will payroll your armoury. This may or may not mean that Psalm 83 is prophetic into this situation. If it is a prohetic message into our time, what do we do with that prophecy? Amongst terrorists is there some sort of ethic like , 'Oh we're marxist guerillas so we won't take money off the religious terror groups because we would betray our principle of destroying the opiate of the masses. How could Irish terrorists accept training from Libya - but they did. Because all modern day terrorists ultimately share one common enemy - those who have the Power. Individual terrorists may have firm religious beliefs which may not necessarily be shared by all their comrades. The most prolific suicide terrorists are the Hindu Tamil Tigers but how secularised are they?

I believe that the next power group on the agenda will be the powerful multinationals - IKEA has already been subject to an attack, will Microsoft and Coca - Cola become targets. Do we Christians speak out against economic injustice or rest in our prophecies.

Don't get me wrong I believe in much end-time prophecy but I believe we have to live as Jesus said, in today. Today has enough cares of it's own without trying to work out whether the second coming or rapture or defeat and destruction of Israel is imminent. I believe that there is much to be said for the Rapture and dispensational eschatology and I studied it before I read 'Left Behind' which I thought was a poor rendition of the teaching. I know many christians who believe in the Rapture who have never read the Left Behind series or nor do they subscribe to some sort USA millenarian movement as this teaching is sometimes decribed over here in the UK. This teaching has been in the UK for longer than the Left Behind books. HOWEVER Jesus says NOT to dwell on this stuff. So I don't. He wants me to live for Him and serve Him in this moment, now! We should actively pursue righteousness for the people of the world by love, by service and telling people primarily about Jesus not prophecies.

My lament for Lebanon and Israel is that in the end, when you are dying or injured does it matter how your assailant was religiously or politically motivated or whether it fits into some sort of eschatalogical framework or who paid for the bullet? But it does matter that you do or don't know about Jesus. Lebanon and Israel do you know Jesus?

Instead of looking for a reason for this war, which we as Christians already know to be sin, we should be voicing the teachings of Christ. Sharing the Gospel may or may not stop the war in Lebanon - it probably won't stop the current problem in Lebanon and elsewhere - but we must never stop sharing the Good News of God's Love and sharing the teachings of Jesus - this our share in God's work in this world until at such a time, known only to the Father, we shall join Him.

Dear Karen,

If war and self-defence did not have a place in our world, many more students would be begrudgingly speaking German.

I have read the psalsms once or twice before. Did you read the article from the newspaper ? What do you make of it ?

I definately wnat to read the book--coming out shortly, I understand.

JUST WAR? - A question on everyone's lips these days.'Just' a few online resources. Sorry they are not living links - how do you do make live links? -

http://gbgm-umc.org/umw/terrorism/just_war.html

www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/pc-of-god.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_and_Truce_of_God

Poor Lebanon, poor Israel and are we also saying poor us? It's frightening.I think it is a lament for us all which is required.

I don't think that there is any Just War in God's eyes; war is one the consequences of sin. It's what we as fallen beings do. But as redeemed beings in Christ it is something we must not do - I am not even sure of self- defence as it always seems to involve killing. I don't think that there is a half way house called Just War for Christians.

It is not just the outright killing of soldiers and civilians or even the destruction. It's the wider affects of permanent physical, emotional and spiritual damage - the hardening of hearts. I think that here in the UK we are still suffering the effects of two world wars. We've seen family breakdown escalate since WWII in this country; could there be a connection between the two via emotionally and spritually damaged parents of the Forties and Fifties onwards not relating to their children properly. Why is teenage rebellion more noticeable in the UK as a post war phenomena for instance? Did those men in the WWI trenches discard God and bring back undiagnosed mental illnesses which affected their wives, children and grandchildren. How many hearts in the UK are still hardened towards Germany and Japan? How many generations before we forget and forgive WWII and move on? When are we going to learn that there are no winners only more and more horror that seems to bleed into the psyches of our children in each generation. Today in the Twenty-First century I have met language teachers at Secondary level who have deal with situations where todays teenagers refuse to learn German because of the War! For real! We love war it seems.

Some time ago it seems, my children and I watched a programme about the Israeli families withdrawing from Gaza. We noticed that many took all their belongings and that many of the houses were bulldozed or put to the torch. We wondered if this is what Christians should do if faced with the same situation. Would we take the view that if we couldn't have our homes and stuff, we too would destroy everything. I think I remember that the Russians put Moscow to the torch to stop it falling into the hands of Napoleon's army or some other invader?!?

We wondered what the effect would be if the Israeli's had left all their houses and belongings intact for the personal use of the Palestinian families arriving in Gaza? Would it have left a better chance for peace and perhaps forestalled the anguish that many Palestinians felt when they saw the destruction in Gaza upon their arrival in the area? An ordinary Palestinian mother finding an intact useable home might not feel so disposed to even covertly support Hamas violence. Too late now but I was thinking in lines of what Jesus said about giving your garments to someone who demands your coat.It would also be in line with Exodus where the Egyptian people loaded the Israelites with precious goods for the exodus journey.

Verse four (below) speaks of Hezbollah's ultimate desire for Israel. Because of the ideology of the organizations/people Israel is surrounded by, the cease fire will cease; I have little doubt.

User 974, Hezbollah means party of Allah. They are fueled by the Quran and their mission is Jihad. I beg to differ that, "Apparently it is a political, rather than a religious movement. . ."  Their political aspirations are only to establish a religious order ruled by a apocalyptic Shiite understanding of history.

A sobering reminder from Psalm 83:

¹ O God, do not keep silent;
       be not quiet, O God, be not still.

    ² See how your enemies are astir,
       how your foes rear their heads.

    ³ With cunning they conspire against your people;
       they plot against those you cherish.

    ⁴ "Come," they say, "let us destroy them as a nation,
       that the name of Israel be remembered no more."

    ⁵ With one mind they plot together;
       they form an alliance against you-

    ⁶ the tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites,
       of Moab and the Hagrites,

    ⁷ Gebal, ^[a] Ammon and Amalek,
       Philistia, with the people of Tyre.

    ⁸ Even Assyria has joined them
       to lend strength to the descendants of Lot.
       Selah

    ⁹ Do to them as you did to Midian,
       as you did to Sisera and Jabin at the river Kishon,

    ¹⁰ who perished at Endor
       and became like refuse on the ground.

    ¹¹ Make their nobles like Oreb and Zeeb,
       all their princes like Zebah and Zalmunna,

    ¹² who said, "Let us take possession
       of the pasturelands of God."

    ¹³ Make them like tumbleweed, O my God,
       like chaff before the wind.

    ¹⁴ As fire consumes the forest
       or a flame sets the mountains ablaze,

    ¹⁵ so pursue them with your tempest
       and terrify them with your storm.

    ¹⁶ Cover their faces with shame
       so that men will seek your name, O LORD.

    ¹⁷ May they ever be ashamed and dismayed;
       may they perish in disgrace.

    ¹⁸ Let them know that you, whose name is the LORD
       that you alone are the Most High over all the earth.

As the guns fall silent, at least for a time let us remeber all those soldiers who have given thier lives for the liberty of theit fellow country men. They shall not grow old and age shal not wery them.

This may be the time for a rational reflection on the possibility of the practical necessity of war in a fallen world. There is a good summary of the just war tradition on the BBC website http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/ethics/war/ and the Church of England website http://www.cofe.anglican.org/info/socialpublic/international/foreignpolicy/

Would you mind if I mention some very interesting and I think, helpful articles listed with living links on the 'Thinking Anglicans' website, under today's date--12th August.

www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/archives/001860.html

There is one on the rapture, millennium and Israel.

And another on really understanding Hizbollah, and ways forward out of violence.        Apparently it is a political, rather than a religious movement-- and I'd not appreicted this, at all. (Maybe similar to the Orange Lodges of yore, which seemed so religious to me, but turned out differently ? this is a possible parrallel that occured to me--could well have got that wrong.

Also an excellent piece on the sewardship of the earth by Jonathon Sacks.

I do hope ypu get to read them some time.

The Proms season, a least brings us huge joy, spiritual reflection and gifts from creative and thoughtful minds wrestling with our lives......courtesy of radio and later on tv.

Dear User 1040, CEN is an acronym for the Church of England Newspaper, see

www.churchnewspaper.com/

Andrew Goddard's article is not online, only in hard copy.