The World Economic Forum’s meetings this year have been rather pushed out of the spotlight they’ve enjoyed of late. The protestors are still there, but the small matter of governments scraping the barrel to find a reason for war in the middle east seems to have the media somewhat preoccupied.

Nevertheless, a certain amount of digging on the BBC website brought this to light. Sadly it seems that they still don’t get it. I guess it’s a vain hope, but perhaps one day those inside the summits will realise that the protestors aren’t necessarily saying they’re all bad people. Rather, it’s the gross lack of transparency and the back-handed deals which are the current issue at stake. If we’re going to elect these leaders, we’d kinda like to be told what they’re up to. Yes, most of those protesting probably wouldn’t like what they are up to, but then that’s their right. How exactly are they supposed to make constructive contributions to the relevant debates unless someone lets on about what’s actually happening. How exactly is democracy supposed to work if our politicians hide their activities from their electorate.

So colour me sceptical, but I don’t expect this to be terribly successful.

Yesterday, I failed to stand still for half an hour. I put it down to my failure to eat properly over a couple of days, a failure which resulted from a combination of factors, chiefly: not having much food in the house and not being in the house to prepare it if there had been any. So it was that after 25 minutes, I had to walk over to a bench and sit on it.

You see, inspired by an article in Adbusters which had confronted us in a couple of different contexts, the participants in ‘sus’ (a small worship collective recently started) decided to go and stand still for half an hour in the centre of Reading on a Saturday morning. Nudging aside any questions of reasoning or purpose, we resolved to do it and we set out to do it. And the others all succeeded.

It’s a strange experience, standing still in a public place for a length of time. I think one of my problems was that I simply launched into it and didn’t find time to make myself comfortable. It doesn’t take long for the muscles to relax, but you have to provide them with the space to relax. It doesn’t take long for the sensations to become distinct, and that’s something to savour.

As the time wore on, my mind wandered. Whether it was the itching at my ankle (one of the others scratched her nose. scratching an ankle can’t be done so subtly) or the gawking faces of passers by, there was plenty to occupy my mind. The latter was more condusive to standing still. The passers-by mostly just stared as they carried on with their shopping, but a few stopped, some tried to get us to move and join them in the pub, and a few special people stopped and stood with us for a few moments. Many wondered about the significance of the clock tower.

We plan to be back next Saturday. I’ll end this week with a better diet.

For those interested in the future of the web, the current debate about XHTML2 raging in blogland is essential reading. For my part, I’d understood that if I engineered my pages to fit the XHTML standards then a few tweaks aside that would be it, there would be the appropriate XML definitions in place and I wouldn’t need to use XHTML 2 unless it were appropriate for my documents. But that does make the naming unclear, version 2 suggests to me a suggested upgrade path rather than an alternative offered.

How are we supposed to believe our government is truly concerned about Saddam Hussein’s treatment of his own people when we wake up to news stories about how pleased they are that they’ve cracked down on Iraqi Kurds seeking asylum in this country? If we were truly concerned, surely we would be finding ways to welcome these people, to strengthen them, and to prepare them for a time when they could go and rebuild their homeland.

Is a corporation a virtual person? Does freedom of speech mean the freedom to lie? Who knows?

New Statesman’s close connections to New Labour have put me off in the past. Aside from one fun party all they seemed to be giving me was ridiculous articles about how the anti-globalisation movement was like al-qaeda. So I gave up on them.

But yesterday’s cover grabbed me and I had another read. Something would appear to be afoot when a magazine of this sort runs a cover story asking “can the church stop war?”.

To be honest, the article didn’t quite live up to my instantly rocketed expectations, contrasting as it did two understandings of Christ’s death or resurrection (exemplary or penal substitutionary) which could be a whole lot more interesting integrated than contrasted, and not being terribly clear. I guess I can’t really go far in criticising a magazine of this sort for its grasp of theology, especially when its focus was more on the historic settlement between the church and the Roman empire than on the theology of redemption.

The article did certainly make some good points and brought into play some questions I’m very glad to see there. The suggestion that political journalists may be starting to see Rowan Williams as leader of the opposition raises my hopes that we are beginning to see important changes in how the church relates to politics. And we do after all need a leader of the opposition.

With yet more troops heading towards the Gulf, let’s hope that this leader of the opposition can hold our hellfire and brimstone prime minister to account.