About Simon Barrow
Articles by Simon Barrow
Changing the agenda on faith schools
Simon Barrow (London, Ekklesia): For a number of years now the media has both witnessed and rehearsed a ‘debate’ about publicly funded faith schools in which two narratives pass each other in the night and important issues get lost in the shadows.
On the one hand, some say that religious schools are divisive, sectarian and biased, hijacking what should be the secular enterprise of education to perpetuate religion at the taxpayer’s expense. Others retort that faith schools are part of a rich diversity of provision, support community cohesion, give affirmation to minority communities and promote tolerance.
When Jerusalem turns to Little England
Simon Barrow (London, Ekklesia): Mention the word ‘Jerusalem’ in your local high street and the chances are that the first thing to come to mind will not be a city tragically divided between three faith and two peoples, but Blake’s famous hymn – associated, through many mutations, with the left’s dream of a new society and the right’s assumptions about ‘quintessential Englishness’.
Whose welfare, what provision?
Simon Barrow (London, Ekklesia): The new report commissioned by the Church of England on faith groups, government and social welfare, Moral, But No Compass, has been portrayed in sections of the media as a whining ecclesiastical broadside against Gordon Brown and a plea for special treatment from an Established Church fearful of decline and loss of influence. It’s actually rather more interesting than that, raising a host of thorny questions about how public services are shaped, to what ends, and in partnership with whom.
This week's guest editors
Our guest editors James Ron, Leslie Vinjamuri, Sophie Arie and Archana Pandya introduce this week's theme of:
Our guest editors James Ron, Leslie Vinjamuri, Sophie Arie and Archana Pandya introduce this week's theme of:
A Turkish Spring?
Woolwich - terror or conflict?
Palestinian borders
Nobel Women's Initiative
Europe from the bottom up
The media in Europe
Mali: the plot thickens
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Remote control war
oDRussia at journalismfestival .com
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Dan Hancox Revel, Riot and Rebellion
Martin Rose Bliss Was It in that Dawn to Be Next Door
Vron Ware Up in Arms
Jim Gabour Sunday Comics
James Warner Standing Perpendicular, as books do
Markha Valenta Inter Alia: religion, politics, culture
Paul Rogers on Global security
Mary Kaldor on Human security
