Loads a' money!

I'm a poor teacher right? I can't afford to buy my own house, or own a car. I certainly can't afford to go part-time and study for a PhD. And worst of all, that guy sitting opposite me on the bus, I bet he earns so much more than me.

In a society that defines how wealthy you are by your material possessions, and then sets the standard at around the level of the Beckhams, it is rather easy to get our perspectives all wrong. To see just how wrong you are go here.

Turns out that I am the 213,648,696 richest person in the world! Which puts me in the top 4%.

Turkish Elections

The citizens of Turkey head for the polls tomorrow with the ruling Justice and Development Party expected to be returned to power.

There is a good article by Richard Falk on secularism in Turkey which is the main question underlying the election here.

James Skillen also wrote on Turkey's struggle with secularism earlier in the year, see here.

There is a full account of the background to the election in the Economist here.

More on van Prinsterer

Thanks to Steve Bishop I have a copy of Sander Griffioen's "Origins and Growth of Revolutionary Thought: An Outline of Lectures". Griffioen discusses Groen van Prinsterer's thought and makes a similar point to that made by Goudzwaard quoted in my earlier post. He writes:

For Groen history is irreversible; one cannot go back to pre-revolutionary days, and he introduces the distinction of counter- and anti-revolutionaries. The former desire a return to the pre-revolutionary period, the ancien regime, whereas the latter can decry the revolutionary spirit but accept the revolutionary status quo as a point of departure and as material for acting. Contrary to this, the counter­revolutionaries somehow refuse to acknowledge the revolu­tionary reality. Groen tried to find his own, position between the revolutionary and the counter-revolutionary position, in that he attempts to deal with the real situa­tion in order to transcend it. There are norms for the actual historical situation, without accepting the situa­tion as a norm in itself.