News headlines on Easter Sunday

[To preempt any future lawsuits, please note that the stories below are not true. Yet.]

‘Refugees welcome in the USA,’ declares Donald Trump, announcing his plan to receive up to 12 million refugees from Syria to be given US green cards.

Fortune 500 companies unite to end HIV/Aids. Apple, McDonald’s, Walmart and Coca-Cola pledge 50% of their net profits over five years to supply HIV antiretroviral medication and health education programmes to 47 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, where 71% of those living with HIV/Aids globally can be found.

Mahmoud and Netanyahu declare peace in the Holy Land. President of Palestinian National Authority Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have issued a statement confirming a resounding success in the latest year-long peace talks between the Palestinian National Authority and the state of Israel. The leaders of the Palestinian and Israeli people are confident that a lasting peace will be achieved.

The NSPCC has announced it is to close as calls to Childline fall to zero. The trustees of the charity celebrate its closure as a resounding victory over child cruelty in the UK, as there are no longer any children who need the service.

The Prime Minister announced the end of homelessness in a statement outside Downing Street today following the completion of the greatest house-building programme ever devised.

ISIS and Taliban disarm and form charitable foundation for women’s education. Malala Yousufzai has agreed to work with former ISIS fighters and Taliban leaders to devise programmes covering Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Nigeria, with more projects to be rolled out in coming years.

If Christ has risen from the dead, then anything is possible.

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Making the best of a bad situation

This morning, instead of going to church, I put this note through all the houses on our street. Despite being an extrovert, I have a tendency toward social anxiety. Despite being an evangelist, I really hate door knocking. As I approached each door, I noticed lots of “no junk mail” stickers and felt briefly worried. One sticker said “no unaddressed mail”. Putting notes through the doors of people I’d never met - even though we live within a few dozen metres of each other - felt risky. Even worse - some people were outside their houses. I actually had to talk to them! “Don’t worry, I won’t come too close,” was my opening gambit. As someone who suffered from OCD as a young adult, fear of contaminating others is quite a familiar sensation. We Brits have the reputation of being standoffish and maybe a bit antisocial, and the virus is not helping in this regard. And yet, I live in the commuter belt; many of us on our street go off to London on trains every morning and come home late

Halloween

It's that magical time of year again - that one night when my small neighbours knock on my door asking for sweeties. This year, I'm properly prepared: I have two pumpkins (I wanted five, but decided to be thrifty), a big tub of sweets and a tube of 100 glow sticks. The sweets are my concession to popular demand; the glow sticks are an attempt to represent light in darkness (a symbolism which will doubtless be lost on the kids). I'm seeing the pumpkin as my main opportunity to communicate something of my Christian faith to my neighbours. One year, while I was at theological college, Halloween fell on a Sunday. The new housing estate church I was assigned to met in a church hall on Sunday afternoons and many of the congregation were unaccompanied children. I googled 'Christian pumpkin carvings' and guess what - there are a lot of ideas out there, America being a country which is big on Halloween and big on Christianity too. I decided to carve a simple fish and c

Do not fear

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash When I was 15 years old there was a particularly unpleasant murder which was splashed all over the news. The culprits were identified, given long prison sentences and, many years later, new identities upon their release. I remember watching news footage of the defendants being brought to trial in a prison van, angry crowds screaming abuse as it drove past. My mother's perspective on this was interesting. "We all have darkness inside us," she explained. "It's easier to scream at it in someone else than to face our own." Today is All Hallows' Eve: for the past week, pumpkins, skeletons, witches and ghosts have loomed at us out of shop windows, from supermarket shelves and strung up as decorations outside homes. Tonight it reaches its peak as many of us, adults and children, dress up in the things we most fear. Axe murderers, which come to mind whenever we're alone in the house and hear a creak on the stai

Coffee Theology

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