What is in Kelvin's Head?

Pollokshields – These are our neighbours

14/05/2021

It was impossible not to be moved by people standing around an immigration enforcement van in Pollokshields yesterday chanting “These are our neighbours, let them go”. Many people today are proud of those in this city who stopped this enforcement action.

Every country needs to have an immigration system and every immigration system needs to be enforced in some way. Every such system needs to be fair and just. However the immigration system in this country has ceased to be fair and has ceased to be just. Any government that actively seeks to be hostile to those seeking asylum has already failed the test of being fair and just. The immigration system in this country has not only become hostile to refugees but the government has recently announced plans to make it even more hostile and to limit the possibility of appealing to the Supreme Court in asylum cases.

Every asylum seeker needs access to justice in order that the system itself can be seen to be fair.

Yesterday, the people of Pollokshields came out onto the streets because they believed that what was being done in their name was not fair. With an aggresively hostile system in place as a policy, it is impossible to be sure that any asylum decision is fair.

The police made a wise call yesterday not to try to clear the street and the two men detailed were set free into the community.

We need a fair asylum system. Without a fair asylum system, there will increasingly be successful protests by citizens who will prevent the authorities from being able to act.

If the government believes it can appeal to voters by making an already hostile asylum system even more hostile, the people in the streets of Pollokshields showed yesterday that at least in some places, that policy will fail.

asylum, refugees

18 responses to “Twenty Years On”

Sarah

02/10/2009

The time has passed in a blinking of an eye and yet….
Special time, special place, special people.

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Rosemary Hannah

02/10/2009

I met one of my best friends there 37 years ago when we were both bejantines. She happens to be spending this week with me. She is a Rev. Dr these days – I never even made it to the coveted blue scarf. Heigh ho.

Not one female member of staff in my day at all. They used to say ‘how nice to have the ladies with us’ -some of them – while I ground my teeth.

I think there is more to it that ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’ – in that openmindedness is not prescriptive of either. It is the way you think not your conclusions, as a brief study of a certain kind of library shelf will reveal. There, Bauckham is no more welcome than Hampson.

From my own experiences of students, I would say that (alas) even very conservative Biblical studies still come as an almighty shock to very many.

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Steven McQuitty

03/10/2009

What about the Church of England colleges, like Ripon, Ridley Hall, Westcott etc…?

Does anyone have any inside knowledge?

By the way I have jumped ships and become an Anglican Christian as opposed to a Presbyterian Christian…just started attending my local Church of Ireland parish church, which happens to be Bishop David’s last parish!

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MadPriest

03/10/2009

In England, in order to save money, the dioceses are insisting that ordinands are trained on part-time local courses. This means that they do not have the choice of traditions but have to study under the ethos of the local scheme. Unfortunately, as is the way of things nowadays, these local courses are dominated by Fulcrum type evangelicals.

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kelvin

03/10/2009

Oh, don’t get me started on training ordinands.

I don’t know anything much about the C of E colleges. I was briefly accepted to study at one of them (known as one of the two bishop factories), when the principal of TISEC decided that she didn’t want to teach me. I visited it once and decided that all the students were frightened of the principal there. I wasn’t convinced that traditional seminary based teaching was any better than the pickled seminary that TISEC had become.

We always trained together in Scotland, Madpriest. The idea of training based on churchpersonship seems rather odd.

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fr dougal

03/10/2009

Well, the old Coates Hall was supposed to be a “non-party” theological college, but a friend of mine came to study there as an evangelical ordinand and pointed out that it actually was distinctly Catholic in ethos. It might be more accurate to say that in Scotland the training reflects the ethos of the Province – which means it is catholic in ecclesial outlook rather than evangelical.

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David | Dah•veed

03/10/2009

I went to graduate seminary in the USA after completing a five year Licenciatura in Human Behavior (psych & soc) in Mexico. The accrediting agency for schools of theology is joint for the US & Canada, so I assume most schools in Canada are very similar to the US.

I started at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX. I finished at Northwest Theological Union, Seattle, WA. I did one summer stint at Vancouver School of Theology, Vancouver, BC, sitting at the feet of the Rt. Revd. John Shelby Spong. (I drank all of my Kool Aid, thank you very much!)

In the US & Canada it seems that accredited seminaries fall into two basic categories. The first is a “conservative” seminary with a statement of faith set in stone that a student must subscribe to at some point in order to be allowed to continue their education at that institution. The curriculum then consists of spoon feeding that prescribed belief system into the students so that they might spew it back on exams.

The second is a “liberal seminary” which has no proscribed beliefs per se and has a curriculum which equips the students to do theology, and leaves what they believe to them to work out. The professors will grade you on your proficiency of using theological methodology and may critique you on how you arrived at your stated conclusions.

The three seminaries with which I was involved were in the second category. I hear Perkins has a few more evangelically minded professors than when I was there. NTU failed as I and my same year classmates completed our courses and finished our exams. My degree was a four year ThM. We never got our degrees, we cannot get transcripts, but they cashed all of our checks!

Which has something to do with why I am a psychologist and not a priest.

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Robin

14/10/2009

> It was whilst I was there that I joined the Episcopal Church and became an Anglican

It was excellent that you joined the Episcopal Church, but why on earth did you become an Anglican? I was one for three years, when I lived in Cambridge in the 1970s, but I’m glad to say it did me no permanent damage.

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