Wednesday 17 March 2010

St Patrick's Day

After a conference on theological economics at John Milbank's Centre for Theology and Philosophy at Nottingham University last year a minicab driver from Peshawar in the Midlands told me of the Saudi-funded Wahhabbi terror that was destroying his home town. But he also observed that the costs of educating his children at college in England had turned him into a wage slave. Many who have lost their jobs because of the avaricious tyranny of the bankers, and those who deregulated their activities, may think that wage slavery is better than unemployment. But neither condition is true freedom.

Among the earliest Christian texts against slavery is St Patrick's Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, written around 400 AD and archived at Yale's Gilder Lerhman Center for the Study of Slavery http://www.yale.edu/glc/archive/1166.htm.

So raise an amber glass to St Patrick tonight and rejoice that Christian freedom is the antidote to tyranny.