So much good work is done by unglamourous people acting under the radar to faithfully carry out the work God has given them. "Mr Rinaudo's technique [is used on] 5 million hectares, with 200 million trees regenerated [and contributes] $US900 million every year to Niger's agricultural output."

I'm feeling oddly nostalgic for the days when Disney felt so powerful that they forced through copyright extensions across the USA just to protect Mickey Mouse. Seems like they aren't even interested in sticking their head a couple inches above the parapet to protect their human stars these days.

This is precisely the kind of government coercion that the First Amendment was designed to prevent — and media companies need to start standing up rather than capitulating to it.

How small towns across Scotland are helping refugees and asylum seekers acclimate to their new lives... My deep-dive for @heraldscotland.bsky.social www.heraldscotland.com/news/2543954...

Was "Let's make our universities financially dependent on overseas tuition fees." Then "Let's make it more difficult and less attractive for overseas students to come to the UK." Now "Oops."

"Just kill them." How low our society has sunk when a news anchor can advocate the killing of homeless people... on the air... and nothing happens. This is depraved. It is not okay.

I'm reading through Frankenstein in preparation for the film and after much careful and nuanced reflection, I have concluded that Victor Frankenstein is a real tool.

It is the year of our lord 2025 and somehow Microsoft has still not figured out a way for Teams to natively support bcc on Teams invitations.

"The role of the archbishop is not actually to interfere with international migration policies.” Does this guy know that Christians worship a God who literally sought refuge in a different country? www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

I know bishops in the House of Lords is a bugbear of the left. However, becuase they vote on government policy from time to time, it makes perfect sense for them to voice their criticisms of potential policies, especially when there is a clear clash between those policies and basic Christian duties.

Why do I need to worry about other people's housing insecurity if I've got a long term place to live? Here's one reason. A lot of health outcomes work at a population level, and when a large % of our country lives in the kind of precarity that makes keeping up with vaccines hard, we all suffer.

Kandiah has handle this whole thing really graciously, much more so than I would have done.

Vasily Grossman wrote this in 1959, but it captures so much of where we are today, with governments and businesses simultaneously pointing to AI as the future and devaluing the living, breathing miracle of human life via embracing increasingly authoritarian and inhumane policies.

Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if UK politicians spent less time silencing people who point out their racism and more time trying not to be racist. With Jenrick it's all so cynical. I doubt he believes any of what he says, but he's willing to stir up hate to get power.

Rather than giving Reform free airtime to complain about things, in my dream world the media would actually push them to be explicit about their policies, ask them how they'd pay for them, and then publish articles like "Reform plans would cost £X billion a year" etc.

I really wish the reporting on the DC takeover that suggests that this is just the first of many cities, would note that federalising a municipal police force in any city other than DC would be completely illegal and a gross violation of the 10th Amendment.

1 in 3 doctors were born overseas. 1 in 5 university academics were born overseas. 1 in 7 UK business founders were born overseas. 1 in 2 builders were born overseas. 1 in 5 nurses were born overseas. 1 in 4 transport workers were born overseas. The media, their framing, IS the problem

This Nesrine Malik piece is on point in all sorts of ways. I wish the rest of our media would be this reality-based in their way of talking about immigration. A big part of why people are so worried about immigration is because they've been lied to about it. It's refreshing to have a bit of truth.

"... the problem is [Starmer's] – and the entire political establishment’s – dependency on immigration as an issue to be exploited, rather than to be handled with honesty, duty of care to immigrants who are now terrorised in the streets, and to the whole country’s social cohesion."

just a reminder again that we were told over and over that a 13 year old downloading a Limp Bizkit mp3 was an existential threat to society

No, you did not give those of us who happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor any due process. And that was profoundly wrong. It destroyed our lives.

Position Opening:  Assistant Professor in New Testament McCormick Theological Seminary invites applications for a tenure track residential faculty position. www.aarsbl.org/job-listings...

My bet is that Clear and Present Danger was on TV last night and Trump fell asleep after the cool sniper stuff, but before the second half of the film where Jack Ryan explains why this is a really bad idea.

This is legitimately insane. It's not an exaggeration to say this is actually a full on bathroom ban for trans people because they're banned from using spaces of their sex assigned at birth too!

My publisher has sent me an opt-in request for licensing my book to GenAI companies. Since I know it's already in copyright-violating datasets that these companies have used to train their models, feels a bit like shutting the door after the horse has bolted.

This is horrific. I can't imagine the pain of losing a child and then to have that compounded by being charged with a felony and jailed with a $1.5 million bail (and separated from their six other kids), all for letting their ten year-old cross the road on his own.

If you're planning on being around Aberdeen this autumn or can make it to us for the mornings of 20 Sep, 18 Oct, and 22 Nov, please come join us for this exciting series of Aberdeen Academy of Theology workshops on interpreting the Hebrew Bible led by the Univ of Aberdeen's Dr Nathaniel Greene.

A growing number of the new victims of Trump’s cruel, illegal ICE terror are young Asian Americans with LEGAL STATUS who have grown up their entire lives in this country and are being swept up for minor infractions or technicalities.

It's really frustrating when 'history' is set against justice in the way it is in this headline. A record of historical failures is not a record of the necessity of failure, but rather of the contingent choices people made to value things beside a base level of justice. Injustice is not inevitable.

“Hi, Senator Hagerty, hi, this is Amy Grant,” she said. “I’m standing on stage singing to over a thousand people … We want you to know that here in Nashville we want to see full funding of PEPFAR so we can stay on track to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic by 2030.” www.christianitytoday.com/2025/06/amy-...

'The mounting international horror over the trajectory of Israel’s war in Gaza is increasingly being reflected inside Israel itself – and within the wider global Jewish diaspora – amid images of emaciated Palestinian children and reports of the shooting by Israeli forces of hungry Palestinians...'

When I did a story on conditions in migrant hotels, there was a woman who would have to wash the spicy sauce off the pasta - in the sink - because there was no meal suitable for her toddler. She felt like a bad mum who couldn’t feed her own child

Pause for three minutes and soak up the grace of this man. Earlier today, the father of three U.S. Marines, Narciso Barranco, spoke publicly for the first time after being pinned to the ground and savagely punched by ICE agents while they arrested the landscaper outside the IHOP where he worked.

Pope Leo: “Many migrants, refugees & displaced persons are privileged witnesses of hope [as] they demonstrate this daily through their resilience & trust in God, [while facing] adversity seeking a future [of] integral human development & happiness.” www.americamagazine.org/faith/2025/0...

Pretty discouraging to see a large Reform UK tent at our local agricultural show. I thought people in Aberdeenshire would know enough immigrants via the international nature of the oil sector and about how bad Brexit has been on farming to be immune to this nonsense, but evidently not.

This is quite sweet. Probably my favourite of these they done.

Even if every slander against Palestinians I have ever heard were true (which they are not), there would be no justification for this genocidal cruelty. None. This has long since passed the point of complex narratives and contested histories.

A Palestinian mother in Gaza: “My children have become skeletal, skin and bone. Even the slightest effort makes them dizzy. They are asking for food, and I have nothing to give. I can’t lie and say I’ll bring them something when I know I won’t be able to.” www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

"Our public discussions on race are utterly impoverished, and this is largely because our haughty institutions have developed a preference to either run scared or dismiss real discourse rather than challenge, engage and understand."

If increasing the number of workers in an economy drives down wages (as Hinder argues here) then maybe the golden age was 1850. With only 17 million people in the UK, factory workers must have been making bank (and Dickens was just making all that poverty stuff up). That's how this works right?

Racism takes different forms..it's all racism and it's all appalling and must be resisted but it's idiotic not to think racism doesn't take different forms. Do you know what it takes to live in my skin? And I'm aware that my brown skin doesn't get half of the hate that someone with black skin does

Shopping the SCM Press sale today, it's bonkers how within 2-3 years the pandemic went from being 'The New Normal' referred to in a couple of these titles to something we've all conveniently memory-holed.

Opportunity for a virtual fellowship for a scholar/student from Gaza : rul.st-andrews.ac.uk/call-for-app...

And as I'm thinking about this, if churches were clever they would realize that a lot of grads or there working for Gregg's or McDonald's might jump at the chance to work for a church which would mentor them and give them real responsibility. Churches would benefit a lot from investing in them too.

The employers complaints in this are: 1) They're getting too many applications from graduates who tick all the boxes for the job description 2) Graduates are universally rubbish and not up to graduate-level work I'm skeptical on 2, but 1 is a business process problem and not the fault of grads /1

'...forced to choose between the chance of a truce and his political survival... Netanyahu opted for survival. There was no cease-fire plan, he promised Smotrich... as the cabinet discussion moved on, Netanyahu quietly leaned over to his security advisers and whispered... “Don’t present the plan.”'

Amazon Prime day is the frivolity Ecclesiastes warned us of

At the DeSantis Everglades detention camp, people with green cards are being held in terrible conditions, with maggots in the food, the lights kept on 24 hours a day, and delayed access to medicine. One guy had his Bible taken and was told "here there is no right to religion."

'We need to ask ourselves: do we really want to make it harder for students to choose Britain? We know that these changes are part of a wider plan to control immigration and address public concerns, but they could make the UK less attractive to students from abroad.'