Churches and Cultural Climate-Change Denial (Part One): Learning from Canute

Dry Stone Wall, Orkney
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The myth of King Canute is one of those stories that you may remember from your childhood. Like one of Aesop’s Fables, we may have lost the original point of the story long ago, but the tale nonetheless persists.  Cnut the Great ,also known as Canute, (born 975?; died 12 November 1035), was King of England, Denmark and Norway, which were often referred to together as the North Sea Empire during his rule.

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Feeding the Five Thousand

Some years ago, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Louvain took an interest in how people feasted and celebrated. As part of his research, he asked one of his students to write a thesis on the following subject: ‘How do children, aged 9-11 years, experience the phenomenon of feast?’. The student approached the subject in various ways, and one of these consisted of showing a controlled group of 100 children three different drawings of a birthday feast.

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