The Need For Equality

This post could well be titled Greenbelt 2011 Part 2 as it is about a talk I went to at Greenbelt and the book I have just read as a result.  It was a talk I attended by accident but one that I found most worthwhile.  The accident was that I read the surname of the speaker and assumed that it was the same person I had heard the day before - but being stupid can have its advantages.

I want to start with a quotation that is in book from someone who had read an earlier edition and at the end I will tell you who it is!

"that among the richest countries, it's the more equal ones that do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator ... per capita GDP is much less significant for a country's life expectancy, crime levels, literacy and health than the size of the gap between the richest and the poorest in the population ... We all know, in our hearts, that as long as there is deep poverty living systematically side by side with great riches, we all remain the poorer for it."

The book is The Spirit Level, subtitle Why Equality is Better for Everyone, and it was written by Richard Wilkinson, who I heard speak, and Kate Pickett.  This, I have to admit, is my kind of book, a book full of graphs and the inferences that can be drawn from them; I didn't do Applied Statistics all those years ago because I didn't like it!  The main theme of the book is that once a country or state reaches a certain level of affluence it doesn't social problems such as teen pregnancy, drug addiction, crime, violence, bad health etc are not related to the level of affluence but to the distribution of the affluence within that country or state.

Reading the book 2 things kept going through my mind.  The first was how obvious the conclusions were when you saw the data and the second was that Christians shouldn't behave in the ways described for the most unequal countries.  I say shouldn't because two of the most unequal countries are the UK and USA, both of which claim, to some extent, to be Christian countries.

Have you worked out who was been quoted in the book? It was David Cameron.

Greenbelt 2011

Better later than never I thought I'd post my comments on Greenbelt 2011 so I'll start with the pictures I took:

Yes I did take my camera but I didn't take any photos.  To make up for that here are a couple my wife took:

Our trailer tent complete with bunting made by my wife

Me wearing my new hat and hoodie standing by my son-in-law

 This year the only music we went to was Billy Bragg who, as usual, sang it as he saw it.

I'm not sure why but I wasn't as organised as last year so I didn't get to as many talks as I would have liked. Of the talks that I attended the highlights were:

Paula Gooder on what happens when we die, I may well blog more about this once I've read the book.

Rob Bell to me didn't live up to the hype. There was nothing wrong with what he had to say but it sounded more like a motivational talk about 'being yourslf' and he was 15 minutes into his talk before he mentioned God.

Brian McLaren was excellent but I didn't take notes so may well blog about his book once I've read it.

Yonatan Shapira is an Israeli pilot who refused to carry out orders to take part in attacks on the Palestinian Territories.  He is a co-founder of Combatants for Peace and campaigns against what he sees as the illegal suppression of the Palestinians by Israel - he used the word 'apparthied' to describe what is happening. I felt that I was in the presence of a genuine hero.

Barbara Gleeson whose talk about how the church must transform itself in order to reach out to the rest of society included what, for me, was the phrase of the weekend: "Butterflies are not caterpillars with wings"  This is a rallying call to the church to look at itself and to be prepared to be completely transformed.  Again I may well blog about this again when I've read her book.

Finally two things touched me more than any music or talks. Firstly there was the Sunday morning communion with several thousand people sharing the peace, breaking bread and drinking wine together.  I won't try and describe it but suffice to say it was a special time.  The other is closely related and that is the atmosphere of the whole event; it feels peaceful and safe and you find yourself talking to complete strangers in a way that you wouldn't normally dream of doing.  It's a special time and place where God's Spirit seems to gently break through; I think our Celtic forebears would call it a Thin Place.

So that's it for Greenbelt 2011.  I'm already looking forward to Greenbelt 2012 where I may, or may not, be more organised.