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I promise you: I will get over this Sarah Palin obsession very soon. But ... On Sunday morning, Cal Thomas and I did a post-mortem on the first presidential debate. And 'post-mortem' is pretty accurate. The candidates' first major encounter was duller than any of us expected. But Thursday will be different. Because on Thursday, Sarah Palin goes head-to-head with Joe Biden in a televised debate.

Biden is a very accomplished debater; so his coaches will be advising him not to get too aggressive, and to avoid pummelling a hockey mom into the ground on national television. He needs to work up some modesty for the occasion, and avoid off-the-cuff gaffes that will be quoted for the next month.

As for Sarah Palin: she has apparently been in politics boot camp for a couple of weeks. The McCain team have kept the press away from here, she has agreed to hardly any interviews (and the Katie Couric interview may explain way), and she has been having some carefully choreographed meetings with a few foreign heads of government. Perhaps the prep team want Governor Palin to be able to name-check some leaders she has met to offset the public's impression that her only foreign policy insight is the ability to see Russia from the kitchen window of her Alaskan home. We will soon see whether the fast-track briefing has succeeded, when the governor meets the senator on Thursday.

In the meantime, think back to Matt Damon's suggestion that this whole business looks like 'a bad Disney movie': the unknown hockey mom plucked from the obscurity of the Alaskan wilderness and catapulted into White House. Just imagine how an ordinary, decent American could transform the reclaimed swampland of the US Capitol? It sounds like a remake of with ice skates.

No sooner is the idea mooted, than a trailer for the new was added to the internet. . It's brilliantly funny. I have only one concern about this trailer: some swing voters in the US may think this movie looks 'kinda cool' and mix up their ballot papers with their DVD rental cards.

After a dull first presidential debate between Obama and McCain, get ready for a debate which promises to be anything but dull. On Thursday, the self-styled "hockey mom" Sarah Palin will take on Joe Biden, renowned as one of the greatest debaters in congress. The Obama team will be slightly worried -- though, I suspect only slightly -- that Biden may produce one of those gaffes he's famous for. The McCain team will be more than slightly worried that Sarah Palin could seriously damage their ticket -- especially following this CBS interview with Katie Couric.

I've talked this weekend to Republican supporters who were shocked at Sarah Palin's performance. When asked about John McCain's career-long opposition to regulation in the financial markets, Sarah Palin was unable to defend her running mate's record. An example:

Katie Couric: I'm just going to ask you one more time -- not to belabour the point -- for specific examples in his 26 years of pushing for more regulation.

Sarah Palin: I ...I'll try to find you some and I'll bring em to ya.

Gordon Brown is planning to remove the constitutional ban on Catholics becoming monarch. Chris Bryant MP, a former Anglican priest, has been reviewing anti-Catholic legislation, and the laws will be repealed early in a fourth term. The key laws that will be revised or repealed are the 1688 Bill of Rights, the 1701 Act of Settlement and the 1707 Act of Union. The current UK constitution also prohibits accession to the throne anyone from a non-Protestant faith background.

Plainly, the ramifications for this consitutional revision -- should it be enacted -- for the established Church of England will need to be examined. The monarch is currently ex officio Supreme Governor of the Church of England. That is a role that could not be filled by a future monarch who is not Anglican. I wonder if Chris Bryant is also proposing that the be repealed. The repeal of an Act granting titular headship of the established church to the monarch would seem to follow as a matter of logic should other reforms make way for a non-Anglican sovereign. In other words, Chris Bryant's plans pave the way for the disestablishment of the Church of England.

One of my regular Will & Testament bloggers thinks Rowan Williams's is "wrong". In fact, John Wright thinks the archbishop is this wrong:

"I couldn't object to a single paragraph more than if the devil himself boomed it from hell with flaming nostrils. Williams is wrong, wrong, wrong. He couldn't be more wrong than if he claimed Clay Aiken isn't gay after all. He couldn't utter a more contemptuous statement than if he was telling us that the church planned to raise Harold Shipman from the dead and ordain him as a bishop zombie. The statement is as wrong from right as George Michael is from Albert Einstein. It's as objectionable as a pedophile in Disneyland. It's as idiotic as Hitchens being waterboarded. If my own precious five year old child said something like that, I'd spank his face with a Louisville Slugger. It's enough to make a drunk sober. It's enough to make Mother Theresa flip a middle finger from the grave. This Rowan Williams. He's sipping from the Fallacious Cup. He's eating from the Bonkers Bowl. He's a maniac. He's wrong."

Does Rowan look bovvered?

Rowan Williams is much maligned as the primus inter pares of Anglicanism, but he is at his best as a writer and thinker. In this of the international financial crisis, he uses the words "right" and "Marx" in the same sentence.

Money quote:

"Fundamentalism is a religious word, not inappropriate to the nature of the problem. Marx long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no life in themselves; he was right about that, if about little else. And ascribing independent reality to what you have in fact made yourself is a perfect definition of what the Jewish and Christian Scriptures call idolatry. What the present anxieties and disasters should be teaching us is to 'keep ourselves from idols', in the biblical phrase. The mythologies and abstractions, the pseudo-objects of much modern financial culture, are in urgent need of their own Dawkins or Hitchens. We need to be reacquainted with our own capacity to choose -- which means acquiring some skills in discerning true faith from false, and re-learning some of the inescapable face-to-face dimensions of human trust."

Last night, in the Bookshop at Queen's, I helped to launch the new book by my friend and colleague . Malachi really needs no introduction to viewers and listeners in Northern Ireland: he is one of our best-known journalists and broadcasters, who writes and speaks on politics, religion, art, poetry and culture generally. He does so with characteristic wit and candour, and with the vigour of a natural contrarian. Malachi's new book, , is an analysis of the recent history of Catholicism in Ireland. My speech from the launch is below the line.

Read the rest of this entry

The War in Iraq was God's plan. God want's a $30 billion natural gas pipeline through the state of Alaska. God likes tatoos if they mention Jesus and Alaska. Watch it all:

We could be hearing a lot more of Sarah Palin's theology. According to US actuarial experts, "there is a roughly 1 in 3 chance that a 72-year-old man will not reach the age of 80, which is how old McCain would be at the end of a second presidential term. And that doesn't factor in individual medical history, such as McCain's battles with potentially lethal skin cancer."

The money :

"For a man, that's above the expected lifetime at the present," said Michael Powers, a professor of risk management and insurance at Temple University's Fox School of Business. "The odds of a 72-year-old man living four more years, or one full White House term, are better. But for a man who has lived 72 years and 67 days (McCain's age on Election Day this year), there is between a 14.2 and 15.1 percent chance of dying before Inauguration Day 2013, according to the Social Security Administration's 2004 actuarial tables and the authoritative 2001 mortality statistics assembled by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners."

Even .

Northern Ireland becomes -- -- a battleground in the presidential race.

about the resignation of Professor Michael Reiss, the 's former director of education. to this year's Festival of Science, on September 11, titled "Should creationism be a part of the science curriculum?" This debacle does not seem to have done much for the reputation of Britain's oldest and most respected scientific institution. The Royal Society's official statement suggests that Reiss's speech was open to misinterpretation (like most speeches by intelligent people on complex subjects?) and that he had inadvertently damaged the Society's reputation. Reiss has now stepped down from his position at the Society and returned to his at the Institute of Education in London.

No official statement has mentioned the fact that Professor Reiss is also a non-stipendiary priest in the Church of England. The National Secular Society was unafraid to emphasize the Reverend Professor Reiss's clerical status. Without taking the time to read Michael Reiss's actual speech -- or , Teaching about Scientific Origins: Taking Account of Creationism -- some might conclude that the Royal Society's head of education had given a lecture defending flat-earthism. In fact, Michael Reiss's crime seems to be this: he proposed that it could be appropriate for science teachers to discuss creationism in classrooms with a view to explaining why this worldview perspective is non-scientific. Some teachers and academics may regard that as a strategically questionable proposal in the context of the continuing culture war over creationism and evolution, but is this really the basis for asking a highly qualified science educator to leave the room?

Richard Dawkins' official website has been banned in Turkey. Muslim creationists have persuaded a court that the site l.

The Bible Society is combatting biblical illiteracy in the media with pitched at working journalists. A download of the guide is available .

You can see my new documentary, Dying For A Drink, which examines Northern Ireland's curious relationship with alcohol, tonight at 9pm on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ One NI. I've written about the documentary for the Belfast Telegraph . The film was brilliantly directed by Brian Henry Martin, who writes about his approach . The programme was produced by Ronan Feely, who has since left the country. No -- he's not in hiding. Ronan recently re-located to the United States with his fiancée and will soon be a married man with a mid-Atlantic accent. I think Dying For A Drink was his last project at DoubleBand films before the big move to the Pacific North West. It was a blast, Ronan. I expect he will soon launch a take-over bid for a major American network.

Some more press coverage is .

UPDATE:

John Wright has suggested a poll on W&T bloggers and their relationship with booze. . More response to the programme on .

"Geneva, 10 September 2008. The first beam in the Large Hadron Collider at was successfully steered around the full 27 kilometres of the world's most powerful particle accelerator at 10h28 this morning. This historic event marks a key moment in the transition from over two decades of preparation to a new era of scientific discovery."

A moment of history: the biggest physics experiment of all time. Can CERN recreate the conditions that pertained in the universe within a fraction of a second after the Big Bang? And how will this massive undertaking advance our knowledge? Time will tell.

In the meantime, one significant voice had been raised in opposition to the breathless scientific consensus that this is so clearly a good use of money. The UK's former chief scientist, Sir David King, we can't spend the necessary billions of pounds to deal with the climate change crisis, defeat world poverty and eradicate HIV, malaria and TB:

"It's all very well to demonstrate that we can land a craft on Mars, it's all very well to discover whether or not there is a Higgs boson (a potential mass mechanism); but I would just suggest that we need to pull people towards perhaps the bigger challenges where the outcome for our civilisation is really crucial."

A shameless plug -- and a second chance to see my TV interview with Richard Dawkins as part of the William Crawley Meets series. Tomorrow night (Monday) at 10 pm on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Two NI. We filmed this interview in the chapel of St Peter's College, Oxford. I observed at the time that Richard seemed very much at home in an Anglican chapel; in fact he is arguably an Anglican Agnostic (rather than an Agnostic Anglican, like Bishop Richard Holloway). Many people have asked me how I found Richard Dawkins when we met in Oxford. Plainly some expect him to say 'Good morning' with a combative tone of voice. In fact, if anything he appeared personally quite shy; he was generous with his time and charming throughout. Richard obviously enjoys a good argument, as do I, which makes for an interesting encounter. To my knowledge, this was the first interview in which he added some significant caveats to his use of the word 'delusional' in his book The God Delusion. Watch it again here on the iPlayer.

William Crawley Meets was produced and directed by Stephen Douds. Stephen's most recent TV film will also be shown on Monday evening (³ÉÈËÂÛ̳1 NI, 9 pm). Last Man Hanging is by all accounts an extremely powerful dramatised documentary exploring the story of Robert McGladdery, the last person to be hanged in Northern Ireland. I look forward to seeing it.

On today's Sunday Sequence, Marie-Louise Muir interviewed Brian Garrett, who, as a young solicitor in the 1960s, campaigned against the death penalty and petitioned (unsuccessfully) for clemency in the case of Robert McGladdery.

My regular Sunday Sequence producer, Martin O'Brien, was back in the production chair this week after a month away. I saw him in the lobby of Broadcasting House this week and he had the look of a man who'd just spent four weeks enjoying life without a care in the world. We'll soon put an end to that. Welcome back, Martin.

is a defender of Intelligent Design Theory. It seems that Sarah Palin may prove divisive even with neo-Creationists.

Commentators are still picking over the bones of John McCain's acceptance speech last night. Watch it again . There were a number of interruptions from protestors in the hall, carrying banners challenging Senator McCain's support for President Bush's foreign policies, some of whom were escorted from the building. Supporters repeatedly shouted "U-S-A" to drown out the protestors. Even setting aside the resulting 'ground noise and static' (as Senator McCain put it), many commentators were less than impressed with . John McCain is not one of America's great orators, and this speech was in keeping with that reputation. Logically, there was a curious tension throughout: praising the Bush White House while promising to bring change to Washington. The president he has just praised has been in power in Washington for eight years.

He did have a few good sound bites, which rallied the convention ("I'd rather lose an election than see my country lose the war."), though the television audience outside the convention hall may be troubled by all the fighting-talk. God was name-checked a few times -- never substantially, but it was a necessary inclusion in a speech of this kind. McCain's domestic vision is of American hard workers fighting to keep the fruits of their labour; beyond that, he sees American soldiers fighting for freedom overseas. God-given freedoms, commitment to family, service to country, giving parents greater choice in education ('the civil rights issue of this century'), a culture of life (meaning a post-Roe v Wade America), lower taxes and drilling for more oil.

It was a confident -- if, at times, awkward -- sales pitch. About 29 minutes into of the speech, a convention delegate yawns widely. It was not great theatre -- John McCain is not likely to be seen in front of faux Grecian columns anytime soon. That modesty may still work to his advantage with the electorate. In American politics, what often seems like a weakness in a candidate to those outside America can seem like a virtue in the eyes of voting Americans. McCain is folksy and solid; his life-story is a character study in personal heroism; and he speaks, sometimes whispers, with a kind of quiet authority: "My fellow Americans, I have that record, and the scars to prove it. Senator Obama does not."

In the final section of the speech, Senator McCain tells the story of those scars. His service in Vietnam, being captured and imprisoned and tortured. He describes how his strutting hyper-independence was challenged when his life was saved by the two American soldiers with whom he shared a prison cell in Hanoi. He talks about discovering America in those moments, being saved by America; how his selfishness gave way to a new idea -- America. And how he surrendered his life and his ambitions from that day forward to this new cause -- America. It is a conversion story. I knew there would be some theology in here somewhere. McCain's motto in this campaign is 'Country First'. Not 'For God and Country'; just 'Country First'. Some evangelicals were nervous about a McCain presidency (hence the selection of Sarah Palin), and many have wondered what kind of religious faith John McCain actually has. Does this last section of the speech give us some clues?

I´ve been reading Justin Webb´s new book, Have A Nice Day -- a reasoned and impassioned defence (defense?) of the United States (or some version of that contested concept) against various forms of anti-Americanism. If anyone can make that case, Justin Webb can. And in doing so, Justin demonstrates his confident command of American-English ("suck it up", "OK", and the like).

It´s a potent blend of argument and style which, by my lights (is that American-English?) is extremely successful. In explaining why Americans are not like us (viz., people on this side of the pond, as they say, much too often, on that side of the pond), Justin starts with the landscape of the United States and describes how a natural history characterised by wildness, openness, vastness, adventureousness and danger has helped to create a culture of independence, individuality, single-mindedness and sometimes bloody-mindedness. The link, in respect of the US at least, between landscape and political culture is rarely given the recognition it merits. I could go on beyond this first chapter to comment on the other connections he makes, but I´ll save further commentary for my interview with Justin later in the month.

Instead, let me invite your comments on a few matters prompted by my forays into Justin Webb´s America and some of the developments this week. I justify this interest in the US, not merely because I once lived there, but also because, in a sense, we all live there. It´s often noted that the United States is the closest thing we have today to the Roman Empire, and I have no reason to doubt that comparison. As a consequence of America´s global political, economic and cultural dominance, one commentator recently suggested that the entire world should have a vote in the election of a new US president. It was only partially a tongue-in-cheek proposal.

Presuming, that the US government could actually manage a successful vote-count -- and I have no reason to suppose it could -- who would be elected leader of the free world? If it was a choice between McCain and Obama, I suspect the world might elect Obama. But if the world could also select the candidate -- from the pool of constitutionally available Americans -- who would then be elected? Perhaps Obama would still be in the running, but I have a sense -- OK, a psephologically unsupported sense -- that Sarah Palin might not.

Whatever you think of Sarah Palin´s qualifications for the White House, she is clearly a gift to political satirists. Apparently even her mother-in-law is thinking of voting for Obama. Did the McCain team properly vet Governor Palin? That´s another way of asking: Did they know in advance about her daughter´s pregnancy; did they know she was once associated with an Alaskan independence group; and did they know she has been pictured quite so often shooting at things (often living things)? It´s just possible the McCain team knew all this and still chose this candidate because of her gender, her life-story, and her evangelical Christian moral views. On this side of the Atlantic, Sarah Palin looks unelectably cartoonish. But then, so did George Bush. And he got elected. And the world just had to suck it up.

Which brings me back to anti-Americanism. Is it likely that anti-Americanism within Europe generally will decline after November´s election even if the the leader of the free world turns out to be John McCain, and his running mate becomes the first former beauty queen to actually get a chance do something for world peace?

Your thoughts?

Last year we broadcast my interview with Bishop Gene Robinson, the first in a series of encounters I had with thinkers and activists who are, in their own ways, challenging key social, religious and moral ideas. The series is being re-run currently. You can watch the interview again on the iPlayer. My second guest is Richard Dawkins -- that's next Monday night at 10.00 p.m. on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Two.