Showing everything tagged as Revd Dr Sam Wells

The world is captivated by freedom; and never more so than when that freedom seems in jeopardy. Three years ago Donald Trump claimed the American presidency by telling a story that American ‘greatness’ had been stolen by politically correct élites and racial, ethnic and religious others. The same year the Brexit campaign won the day by lamenting that British sovereignty had been stolen by European bureaucrats and manipulated by profiteering citizens of nowhere.

I want to share with you a letter I received last week.

In 1995 an extraordinary heatwave afflicted the city of Chicago, killing around 750 people. Later, the sociologist Eric Klinenberg made a detailed examination of who died and who didn’t. What he found was that the intense heat affected diverse neighbourhoods and social groups differently.

St Martin-in-the-Fields Annual Parochial Church Meeting,
28 April 2019

It’s about the oldest joke in the book. In a pantomime it’s called ‘He’s behind you.’ The point is, the audience can see something the character on stage can’t see. The thing is, it never stops being funny. In the classic Fawlty Towers version, Basil Fawlty is horrified to find a dead body in his hotel, and refuses to fess up, even when the poor man’s relatives come looking for him

Each year on New Year’s Eve I gather round the dinner table with family and friends and we give each other time and space to remember and describe the best day of the year just gone. It’s not always the happiest or the most memorable, but often the day that just had everything – that summed up the previous twelve months.