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frjonathanbish.bsky.social
Vicar. Priest-in-charge of the Batley Benefice in West Yorkshire. I like steam trains, Anglo-Catholicism, travel, history, politics, choral music, wine and more.
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Watching the nice centrist dad liberals getting redpilled on defence spending - this is Paul Mason - is absolutely hilarious:

submitted 1 hour ago • 1 comment

Controversial but I'm convinced that in Christianity, we don't have a Hebrew Bible, we have an Old Testament. Our tradition didn't treat Hebrew as the end-all-be-all base language for these texts at the exclusion of others. The Old Testament was normatively received in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.

submitted 1 day ago • 6 comments

I mean, it's good news for the security of Canada, Greenland and Panama, but I don't think it's a great idea to try copying Stalin's purge of the Red Army...

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that saying you wouldn't campaign alongside someone solely on the grounds of their religion is not the right on take some of these people seem to think it is... (Not that many of them will have knowingly met an evangelical Christian in their life!)

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

This & YouGov's poll showing Brits give Zelenskyy +48 & Trump a -51 approval shows dangers to the right in UK of listening to the v. online/US coded in their approach to Ukraine. Brits really support Ukraine & aren't polarised on it. 52% of Reform voters entirely blame Russia

submitted 3 days ago • 17 comments

Very sad to see this today. Can't remember how many times I've seen the SS United States from the plane when returning home. One of the last four great ocean liners of the 1960s left - and she will soon be no more. www.youtube.com/watch?v=_090...

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments

This is absolutely bang on - and I speak as someone who is basically pretty sympathetic to a lot of Blue Labour aims. Many groups in British society (the church among them) operates with a view of who the working class is that's based on cliche and is about 30 years out of date.

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

'Not on Twitter but in their local communities' is a great advert for any organisation, but not sure why Kemi is supplying it to the Lib Dems for free. (Also, most British people don't have much of an ideology other than being nice, so...)

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

Pleased to see this. One of the things you notice after a while is that every time you look at towns whose GDP is larger relative to their population or is growing, Milton Keynes tends to come up. That ‘arc’ in the Oxford-Cambridge arc isn’t a bonus - it’s the main feature.

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

Yanks try not to do Manifest Destiny to people who don't want it challenge. Difficulty: Impossible

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

Bishop of London: "The best safeguard is the current law. I urge Parliament to reject this Bill. It is neither safe nor compassionate. We should be focusing on providing the best possible palliative care services. Dying people should be offered hope, not fear." www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

An Anglo-French deterrent would show we were deadly serious about European security. Either way, closer cooperation with France has got to be our most important bilateral relationship right now. Feels like we would be crossing over into a different era, though. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

Douglas Murray may or may not be wrong about whether citizenship makes someone as British as anyone else… But he’s definitely wrong about the idea we’ve taken this from America: the idea that being British is not connected to ethnicity is a straightforward product of the British Empire.

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

Proof, if ever we needed it, that evangelicalism’s core hermeneutic is one of ‘modernization.’ Even on issues long settled in the western church - as the Eucharistic elements were before the reformation - evangelicals will see fitting with the prevailing culture as a good in its own right.

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

Better times. They were writing books then.

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

I’m an absolutist on assisted suicide (fundamentally changed our relationship to medicine, human rights etc., but @doctoroxford.bsky.social isn’t and this is well worth reading as a summary of many of the issues that have plagued the committee stage of the bill.

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

I must confess… I misread this as different sort of ‘poly.’

submitted 8 days ago • 2 comments

Absolutely barmy that we think this way - especially about churches that are growing - while we spend millions trying to open new worshiping communities that may never pay their way. (It should also be called out for what it is: a subsidy for a particular tradition.)

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

I have a question. What is the foreign policy of the U.S. government? www.wsj.com/world/europe...

submitted 8 days ago • 589 comments

Plans for Assisted Dying Review Panels have be released. It's a massive change to the Bill, and I can't believe it can be made and accepted without hearing new evidence and starting scrutiny again. It turns out "Judge-plus" is no such thing. publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbi...

submitted 8 days ago • 2 comments

Ah, yes, but you see there’s no infrastructure left in Gaza and no railways, so much harder to murder people on the trains and the roads. Smart people they’ve got working at the WSJ.

submitted 9 days ago • 1 comment

If there is a reshuffle Labour should focus on 2 things. 1. Get rid of unnecessary noise that detracts from Labour’s core messages - eg education has been an unnecessary mess & little political gain. 2. Bring in bruisers willing to take political fight on airwaves eg Thornberry.

submitted 9 days ago • 19 comments