Steve Bell’s If… cartoon in the Guardian today (and presumably for the rest of the week) is a little tale called For A Fistful Of Euros. However, it’s about the arguments over policy towards the Euro between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, rather than an expose of us.
While the Guardian does make Bell’s editorial cartoons available over the web, If… doesn’t seem to be available. If anyone does know where it may be available online, then please let us know!
The Czech press digest Fleet Sheet puts out a free email bulletin with blog-like observations on Czech culture, business and politics. Though it’s sometimes a bit off base, it’s worth looking at to get a sense of the scene in Prague. Today’s…
Why does Prague airport have expensive self-service parking machines, when the CR is a mecca for low wages?… It’s still possible to get shoes or a broken TV repaired in the CR, but the march toward the European welfare state will soon raise taxes and wage costs so high that it’ll be cheaper to throw out the old shoes and buy new ones. Premier Spidla told Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that reconciling the costs of modernizing the welfare state and the impact on common people is a European-wide problem without a solution. If the European welfare model collapses, he said, so will the EU itself. Then Czechs could go back to minding the parking lot.
An interesting statement with wide implications, although I’m not exactly sure there’s such a strong connection between parking meters, broken televisions, and the European welfare state.
Not having been educated in Europe, I can’t contribute to the thread on religious education. But I want to thank Nick for putting it up, and everyone else for their comments on it. One of my pet peeves is how American arguments about religious education, and “establishment” issues in general (as they are usually described in the U.S., following the language of the First Amendment), seem to me at least to be trapped in a very narrow (judicially dictated, for the most part) box. I’m not a theocrat, but I suspect that, had America’s historical experience with religious-civic partnerships been different, we perhaps might more easily be able to relate to both the benefits, and the costs, of the sort of (I think highly admirable) experiences with religious education that many of you are describing. Anyway, your thoughts prompt me to excerpt here a post from my own blog from last September; specifically, a quote from Stanley Hauerwas, that expresses my views of the matter pretty succinctly…
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Many thanks to the good folks at AFOE for the invitation to guest-blog here for a while. To include a non-European and non-European-resident among this crowd is not a little humbling; I hope I do the blog justice. I have no handy bio available, so suffice to say that I’m an academic, I teach political philosophy, once lived in Germany (but not for nearly long enough), now live in Arkansas, and often stay up late trying to get our two-month-old daughter to go to sleep. For more information, feel free to peruse my own blog, W?ldchen vom Philosophenweg.
Recently I ran across a fascinating article by James C. Bennett, he of “Anglosphere” fame. The article, one of the cover features of the most recent issue of The National Interest, is titled “Networking Nation-States” and is heavy-laden with ideas and insights. Bennett is an unapologetic defender of the globalized free market, who sees politics through the prism of contract and transaction, meaning that he understands healthy polities to be those which maximize fluidity, entrepreneurship, reflexivity and innovation, with little distinctions between the political and the economic spheres. Like some others here at AFOE, I find this kind of neoliberal triumphalism wearying. But I forgive Bennett because he has such an intriguing grasp of the related issues of “space” and language in the construction of societies. Those interested in the EU, and the argument over its relationship to traditional understandings of political identity and sovereignty (which I tend to think is a complicated philosophical matter, and not simply an IR debate over terminology), would do well to think hard about what Bennett is saying.
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Following on from threads on Calpundit and Crooked Timber, and given that Europe seems to be at the centre of the debate over religious education in schools at present, what with the French headscarf debate and the proposals to add atheism, agnosticism and humanism to RE in British schools, I thought it would be interesting to get a picture of how the teaching of religion is handled in education systems across Europe.
Below the fold of this post, I’ve given my experiences of religious education at school in Britain and what I understand to be the present position. What I’d like is for our commenters and other contributors to add their experiences or knowledge in the comments box and we’ll see what sort of cross-continental picture we come up with. I’ll admit to being quite ignorant of the position outside Britain (though I know some of the system in France and Ireland) and hopefully we can all enlighten ourselves!
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Over at normblog, which is where I more usually hang out, there is a character variously known as WotN and Wife of the Norm, and who is known in her own right as Ad?le. With a name like that she could be French but isn’t, and yet I feel it’s admissible to bring her over here to A Fistful of Euros, she being Ad?le, and having a grave accent over the ‘e’ in her name. Getting to the point, now – and not before time – Ad?le noticed a recipe for yoghurt scones linked to on The Daily Bread by Jackie D, and originating with Clotilde of Chocolate & Zucchini; Clotilde who surely does gain entry to A Fistful of Euros, being as she is, I am told, authentically French; and so she – Ad?le, that is, not Clotilde, not Jackie – made us some of these scones today. And I had two of them, and most excellent they were. I can do no better than to quote Jackie:
[They] are unbelievably light, moist, and airy, with a very slight sweetness.
Not that Jackie had any of the scones Ad?le baked. She did not. But she somehow knew. It’s like with a map, a recipe. Anyway, what Jackie says is what I thought. Nice scones. Try ‘em.
Population changes are going to bring many cultural changes in their wake: and I’m not thinking only of immigration and multiculturalism here. Ageing populations will have different tastes and preferences, among them, apparently, will be changes in the quantity and types of alchohol consumed.
Among the explantations offered for the fact that the nation of beerdrinkers may soon no longer be one are the trend towards healthier living, economic problems (although that used to be thought to be a cause of raised consumption) and a deposit now payable on many cans and bottles. But there is no getting away from the fact that the big cause is changing demographics. Less young people means less beer. Now what else does it mean?
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Nikolai Johannes Merrill, born this day at 12:17am, to loving parents Iris and Douglas
A beautiful new smile in this still-new century…
In Kassel the court has spoken, and its words are a stern warning to us all: do not kill and eat people (unless you are prepared to give up eight and a half years of freedom for the privilege).
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Austere but elegant, and with fine views of an historic rococo church, this lovely building would make a fine weekend cottage. And you could be the lucky bidder when it comes under the hammer! There’s one thing you’ll want to have removed before settling in, though: the corpse of Franz Josef Strauss.
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