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In One Ear
Nov. 21st, 2004 05:58 pm( Dancing and that )
You can't have one of these updates without mentioning religion, so I thought I'd point out an interesting article on Ship of Fools about university CU missions (like CICCU's Promise this year). There's a link at the top of the article to a longer PDF version, which is worth a read.
The author talks about most students being apathetic toward religion and student politics as if this were a recent change. I'm not sure I believe this, though. Kate Fox's Watching the English mentions "The Importance of Not Being Earnest" as a general rule of Englishness: we're naturally suspicious of anyone who appears too keen on anything. When she talks about religion, she also notes that while many people will say they're C of E on census forms, few people actually care about religion enough to bother arguing about it. The hothouse environment of the vast Cambridge friends-of-friends web magnifies the importance of religion, since it is full of people who have thought about it and decided one way or the other.
This is probably a good thing, since it means that there is no political capital in placating the fundamentalists in this country. No Bush for us: Tony keeps quiet about his (quite serious, by all accounts) Christian faith. We're far more interested in class war: witness the way that, as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shreena pointed out, the ban on foxhunting got far more press coverage than the introduction of civil partnerships for gay people.
You can't have one of these updates without mentioning religion, so I thought I'd point out an interesting article on Ship of Fools about university CU missions (like CICCU's Promise this year). There's a link at the top of the article to a longer PDF version, which is worth a read.
The author talks about most students being apathetic toward religion and student politics as if this were a recent change. I'm not sure I believe this, though. Kate Fox's Watching the English mentions "The Importance of Not Being Earnest" as a general rule of Englishness: we're naturally suspicious of anyone who appears too keen on anything. When she talks about religion, she also notes that while many people will say they're C of E on census forms, few people actually care about religion enough to bother arguing about it. The hothouse environment of the vast Cambridge friends-of-friends web magnifies the importance of religion, since it is full of people who have thought about it and decided one way or the other.
This is probably a good thing, since it means that there is no political capital in placating the fundamentalists in this country. No Bush for us: Tony keeps quiet about his (quite serious, by all accounts) Christian faith. We're far more interested in class war: witness the way that, as
shreena pointed out, the ban on foxhunting got far more press coverage than the introduction of civil partnerships for gay people.
