Showing everything tagged as Revd Dr Sam Wells

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.

Twenty-five years ago this week a plane carrying the Rwandan president was shot down on its descent into Kigali. In the hundred days that followed, soldiers and militias slaughtered an estimated 800,000 people

I once was invited to address an annual meeting of a regional religious society. That meant before I got up to speak there was half an hour of the legal business of the organisation to sit through. The chair received the secretary’s report; and once it had been digested, the chair said, ‘I need to tell you that our secretary has decided that it is time to stand down, and that, after 8 years of loyal service, we shall be needing to look for a successor. Are there any nominations?’ There were none.

The Slovaks have just elected a president with no political experience. The Ukrainians look like they’re about to. America did so recently; so did the French.
It’s quite normal for interviewers to expect that we have experience as well as skills and good character to be eligible for a job. But experience isn’t always a perfect preparation