Category: Blog Series
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A Plea for Christian Piracy [6] – Conclusion 1
[ Piracy 1 ] | [ Piracy 2 ] | [ Piracy 3 ] | [ Piracy 4 ] | [ Piracy 5 ] What pirates do, as a rule, is emerge from the underbelly of a ‘stuck’ orthodoxy and, by way of actions that are initially perceived as heretical, reinvigorate that practice. The heresy…
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A Plea for Christian Piracy [5]
[ Piracy 1 ] | [ Piracy 2 ] | [ Piracy 3 ] | [ Piracy 4 ] Captain Mission’s capture of a Dutch slaver, and his demand that those who claimed an enlightened view of God should have a more enlightened view of the whole of humanity, can be seen as a signifier…
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A Plea for Christian Piracy [4]
[ Piracy 1 ] [ Piracy 2 ] [ Piracy 3 ] Pirates are so hated by corporations because they represent a critique of the capitalist establishment, an insurrection by those who have been marginalised by the supertanker of economic growth and greed. It is well known that pirates robbed ships and made off with…
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A Plea for Christian Piracy [3]
[ Piracy 1 ] | [ Piracy 2 ] In the previous two posts I’ve been trying to build an argument that piracy functions not as the enemy of all mankind (hostis humanis generis) but as the shadow of mankind: umbris humanis generis. As rebels against a social order that is oppressing them, those who…
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A Plea for Christian Piracy [2]
[ Piracy 1 ] In the previous post I set out the tension between the godly meditations that St Paul urged us to – whatever is good, and pure etc. – and the raucously popular stories about pirates that outsold everything else in a bookshop around St Paul’s Cathedral. In Captain Johnson’s A General History…
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A Plea for Christian Piracy [1]
Following a piece I recently wrote for Third Way magazine, and a connected talk at Greenbelt, I wanted, over the course of a few posts, to set out some of the ideas around piracy that are percolating through the new book. We begin with a paradox: why do we encourage our children’s fascination with such…