Contents
![[Cover of Issue 90]](cover.jpg)
Editorial
All Gas and Gaiters
Bible Study — Psalm 24
Life
Social Action is often seen perhaps wrongly as an “extra curricular” activity for Christians. Often in churches, opportunities for social action are on a sign-up sheet and those who can either find the time and energy to do such things are often in the minority. This seems a different reaction to the message that is aparent in the Gospels. The message was to give up everything and to carry out work to help others worldwide. There are countless opportunities to do this and if you look hard enough maybe you can do this by encompassing something that you enjoy. Speak organises such action and also prays for social action worldwide. Maybe over the coming weeks, even if exams are looming and we don’t have the time to go and do something on a huge scale, we could just keep in our prayers those who work for justice in the world on a daily basis, not just as an extra curricular aspect of their faith, but as part of their life; not separating their faith and life but recognising them as being inseparable.
Tara Cooke
Speaking Out
Social Inaction
Le Projet de L’Empéreur
A Touch of Decadence
World
There’s no use having a universe, a cosmology, if you don’t have witnesses. We are the witnesses to the miracle. We are put here by creation, by God. We’re here to be the audience to the magnificent. It is our job to celebrate. But we don’t. Every hour fifty-one people die and ninety million pounds is spent on war. There have been thirty-five minutes of world peace since the end of World War Two. There are more than fifty submarines armed with ballistic nuclear weapons, and it would only take three to destroy the planet. There are already fifty-one nuclear warheads and seven nuclear reactors at the bottom of the North Atlantic alone. Greenpeace almost bought a nuclear warhead from a Russian General for two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. In this world we’ve created, no-one is safe. Ceri Owen and Greg Melia explore the alternatives pacifism offers us.
Third-world poverty is a powderkeg, ignited only by our indifference. It’s tough to care about everyone who is less fortunate than ourselves, especially when the cameras are pointing elsewhere, but the Christian faith demands that we do. Christis finds the country the cameras forgot in the article about Myanmar.
David Jones
Focus on Mayanmar
A War Chant
The Pacifism Paradigm
Belief
Even though thousands of people come under the banner of Christianity, understandably, we all believe slightly different things, and have different opinions. Christis’ belief section provides an area for people to express or examine their beliefs, or those of the Church as a whole.
This issue sees Noel Davies tackling a question of an extra-terrestrial nature: if aliens were discovered, how would we set about spreading Christianity to them?
Tara Cooke has written two articles about belief for this issue. The first is on Mary the mother of Jesus, and her importance to the Catholic Church. In the second she muses on the interesting concept of a pint of Guinness as a metaphor for God!
We also have an in depth look at the Church as the body of Christ, in Gino D’Oca’s “Mystici Corporis Christi.”
Rachael Stephenson
Ave Maria
God’s other children
Mystici Corporis Christi
A Shamrock in a Pint of Guinness
Letters
Poem
![[Cartoon on back cover]](/graphics/cartoons/st_cuthberts_upper_kington.jpg)
By Peter Tylor