Simon Hewitt
@LeedsHewitt
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Leeds theologian, Lay Dominican and socialist. Serial poster of dog photos.
West Yorkshire
Joined August 2019
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You can order my book on negative theology here:
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Just resigned as a
@ucu
rep. If the national leadership will not defend academic freedom in cases where they don't agree with the academic in question, they have ceased operating as an effective trade union in HE.
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An institution that does not teach the arts and humanities is not a university.
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Horrendous and mean-spirited takes from Catholics on here about Anglican women’s ordination. We need to rediscover a real, generous, ecumenism.
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I really wince at the language of ‘identifying as working class’, which I’ve just seen in an email. Class position is (a) objective, (b) economic, not an off-the-peg component of cultural identity.
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The tasteless celebration of American Catholic Twitter right now reflects the Catholic right’s success in turning the US Church into a single-issue campaigning organisation. Out of the window goes the complexity and nuance of the authentic Catholic ethical tradition.
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The only way forward is a single secular state in which all are welcomed and none are privileged. The two-state solution is dead.
netanyahu: “the two-state solution would be the greatest reward for the terrorists that you can imagine”
in disagreement w/ usa & most every other country in the world
israel policy to reflect this view until netanyahu & his war cabinet are out of power
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@janeclarejones
I think part of the problem here is that people just don't get how the neo-liberalisation of HE has transformed much student activism into a not-very-progressive consumer rights movement.
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@bevclack
@ClaudiaWebbe
Yes, professed socialists attacking workers is not a good look. University workers have put a monumental amount of effort into online teaching.
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@jewdas
I mean, perish the thought that there are actual, objective, connections between various issues.
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@JoshuaLWatson
Classical theists, like me, certainly don’t think the Bible is wrong to say these things. We just don’t confuse the poetry of scripture for metaphysics.
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Today is the Commemoration of the Departed of the Order of Preachers (All Dominican Souls). This is Herbert McCabe OP, one of my major intellectual influences. RIP.
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Incidentally, the doctrine of the virginal conception is precisely not that Mary was ‘impregnated by a deity’. Like every event, Mary’s pregnancy has God as a primary cause. As a miracle, it lacks a secondary cause. She was not ‘impregnated’ by anyone or anything.
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One of the worst legacies of capitalist modernity is the idea that work is, in and of itself, virtuous. Let’s hear more about creativity and doing things for others, about play and about rest.
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‘He’ language about God is fine, as is ‘She’ language, ‘rock’ language and the thoroughly scriptural language of God as a case of dry rot. Because God so transcends our concepts that God is not even ‘gender neutral’. God just is, and our words do not contain Her.
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Father Ted is trending on Twitter. That would be an ecumenical matter.
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The word ‘refute’ does not mean what a lot of people think it means.
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@juanvi1967
@Ned_Donovan
@OzKaterji
Ok. Now imagine a country where every citizen does *not* have an ID card, and where acceptable photo ID is expensive.
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A friendly reminder to clergy planning for next weekend: in customary Christian understanding, Pentecost is somewhat more important than the Jubilee.
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@SaraLUckelman
'Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.' - Marx, Theses on Feuerbach
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The hot takes of public scientists on religion are making me think that allowing people to give up the arts and humanities at age 16 may not be a very good idea.
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I’m an oddly reluctant revolutionary socialist. Personality wise, I hate conflict; disposition wise I’d much rather curl up and read a book than go on a demo. But I simply cannot realistically see a future which safeguards people and planet which doesn’t involve ending capitalism
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@Jackieme2009
@janeclarejones
Interesting they chose a female patient. Why are these scenarios never on male wards?
@NHSEnglandMedia
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As someone who has suffered from severe mental illness, I feel that much philosophy of psychiatry is committing an epistemic injustice against me. If I wrote something about this, would people be interested?
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Stop making the case against capital punishment based on miscarriages of justice. The guilty should not be murdered by the state.
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@janeclarejones
@Jackieme2009
@NHSEnglandMedia
I mean, it’s almost like some structural inequality between males and females is being reinforced. But surely not.
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Just booked a room for a reading group on resolute interpretations of the Tractatus. The university system asked me 'Does this meeting have any potential to create controversy?'
Well, yes.
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@janeclarejones
Like, she can wear what she wants, sad though I find this choice. But a man using his social network to normalise objectification is something else.
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Let’s be clear. Today’s UCU strike at
@UniversityLeeds
is entirely the fault of senior management, who have escalated the dispute by imposing 100% pay deductions for the marking boycott.
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@Keir_Starmer
@UKLabour
@JohnHealey_MP
You are a disgrace. As a lifelong Labour voter I will not be voting for you.
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@enzoreds
I think at least part of the answer is that this slogan comes from the oppressed themselves.
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I see the UK government Twitter account has a rainbow flag. I’m sure this will be appreciated by the LGBT asylum seekers they’re transporting to Rwanda.
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Quite a nice overview of 20th century history of analytic philosophy here.
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Happy Easter! The Resurrection is an act of civil disobedience. When the state kills you, you’re supposed to stay dead.
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@janeclarejones
I like that he thinks we’re criticising her, rather than him. Somehow it’s always a woman’s fault.
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Sorry to go on about referencing styles, but the academic obsession with them induces anxiety in students and stops them engaging properly with the subject. I get asked 'how should I reference' far more than I get asked about philosophy by students.
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@OxFeministUnion
@Docstockk
@SussexUni
If students are harassing a staff member, it should be the students, not the staff member, who has to leave the university. It’s as simple as that. Workplaces should be safe.
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The current layer of technocrats running British universities have no sense of the value of anything other than their own bottom line. Let’s be clear: they need to be defeated.
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McCabe - ‘[God] is always dressed verbally in second-hand clothes that don’t fit him very well’.
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I’m seeing institutions I care deeply about - the Church, the left, and academia - being damaged by the culture wars. It is a good time to reiterate my unfashionable Marxist take: these function as an ideological distraction from class struggle.
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@friel_raymond
I am profoundly uninterested in intra-church culture wars. But if priests want to wear clothes that mark them out as priests, rather than just one more middle-class professional, good for them.
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My paper ‘Herbert McCabe on God and humanity’ has been accepted for publication in New Blackfriars.
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@bourgeoisophy
Stop using the word ‘fascist’ to mean ‘person I don’t like’. You’re undermining anti-fascism.
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@janeclarejones
@Jackieme2009
@NHSEnglandMedia
Now imagine someone detained under the Mental Health Act.
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My hot take for today is that churches should spend more on theological education. There’s too much anti-intellectualism about.
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I agree with this. The amount of vitriol directed at
@Philip_Goff
is baffling.
I disagree with my friend
@Philip_Goff
on most things: he's a panpsychist, and I am an eliminative materialist; he is an atheist, and I am a theist. And so on.
But he is very smart and sincere, and I take his work seriously and learn from it.
🤝
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I wish students weren’t so anxious about the mechanics of academia: referencing styles for instance. I want them to be spending their time thinking about philosophy, not about bibliographies. Is there something about the school system that induces this anxiety?
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‘Woke’ isn’t a right-wing term for left-wing politics. It names a certain kind of liberal politics: elitist, moralising and language-obsessed. It is ubiquitous in academia, and damaging for the prospects of a real, mass, left-wing.
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As someone who has done quite a bit of work on Marx and Christianity, I can assure Gavin Ashenden and the Catholic Herald that nowhere do Marx or subsequent Marxists advocate synodal ecclesiastical structures.
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@AaronBastani
We came across a group of teenage boys chanting ‘we love you Farage, we do’. This phenomenon is real.
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@juliaisobela
Psychologists come out with this kind of crap far too often. I think it’s about demedicalising MI so as to carve out a professional place for themselves in contrast to psychiatrists.
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Ever since my manic episode last year, I've been really struggling with anxiety. I say this not to court sympathy but to help normalise these things. It's particularly bad at the moment.
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@ritchie97854981
@copyunism
@sazmeister88
You’d have a point if he wasn’t using his celebrity to attack a random.
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University tutors are not mental health professionals and should not be expected to fulfil that role. One decent response to the student mental health crisis would be an increase in funding for NHS MH services.
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Another thing: groups like Just Stop Oil have filled a gap which in a better political situation would be filled by an environmentally-minded organised left.
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@RosinaAKARosi
Right. It’s almost like these people have some kind of particular problem with women!
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Seeing a lot on here about what to do about falling church attendances. I really believe there’s a limit to what churches themselves can do about this under the social conditions of neo-liberal capitalism.
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Imagine being called a bigot by Alice Roberts. I mean she’s not wrong as far as it goes, but her own constant, snide, punching down on religion is utter bigotry in action.
The census results today are surely something to celebrate. We are a glorious multicultural society with such a rich diversity of heritage and worldviews. And contrary to the bleating of bigots online - it's wonderful!
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World mental health day again: never mind the warm words, fund mental health services properly.
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Pseudo-left anti-psychiatry. ‘Locating distress’ in a mental disorder no more ‘depoliticises’ the causes of that distress than a diagnosis of asthma depoliticises the air pollution that caused it. Real disorders have social causes.
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Disgustingly cruel and racist, this will also damage HE in Britain by discouraging international students from applying.
From today, the majority of foreign university students cannot bring family members to the UK.
In 2024, we’re already delivering for the British people.
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I really must react less to the Milbank family on Twitter, for the sake of my blood pressure. But really, they're a grim outworking of what it means to be Christian public intellectuals. Contemporary culture constantly gets a firm 'no', rather than a 'yes, but'.
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Picked up a nice early edition of this in a second-hand bookshop in York yesterday.
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Jo Cox was murdered by a fascist, not by some generic failure in the standards of public discourse. The best way to honour her memory is to relentlessly fight and defeat the far-right.
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Suffering quite a bit with a depressive episode at the moment.
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I’ll be on strike tomorrow because casualisation is bad for my colleagues and bad for my students.
#UCURising
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Having coffee in Store Street Espresso, an old grad student haunt. I love Bloomsbury.
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So much discourse around mental health is characterised by false alternatives: socio-political causes vs. ‘genuine’ illness, psychopharmacology vs. psychotherapy etc.
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Today is the 750th anniversary of the death of St Thomas Aquinas.
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More generally, not nearly enough thought has been put into thinking through the tensions of doing theology in an environment in which we’re expected to compete with one another.
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@philosophybites
‘Prestige’ or ‘promotion’ mean, very often, for an increasingly casualised profession, the ability to buy food or pay rent. They strike me as reasonable motives.
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Really inconvenienced getting into work today. And happy to be inconvenienced in a good cause. Victory to the RMT!
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Nine years ago a junior doctor admitted me to a mental health unit and undoubtedly saved my life in doing so.
If everyone who has ever been grateful for a doctor followed and retweeted we’d reach a million by midnight.
The more followers we have, the louder we can shout for all the NHS staff who are fighting against the Government right now.
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Philip North has been one of the most prominent Christian voices on behalf of the poor and marginalised in our society. It is good for all who care about this that he has a more prominent role. It is indicative of how little establishment liberal Anglicans care about economic…
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As someone considerably to the left of George Monbiot I believe in an afterlife. This belief doesn’t seem to dent my striving for a better world. I wonder if he might be mistaken.
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That said, I do think there’s a progressivist over-confidence in some liberal quarters, as though if we banished - say - masculine language about God, our words would somehow be more accurate. No; as McCabe put it, God always wears our words like second-hand clothes.
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Catholics in Britain and Ireland should worry about the state of the US church. A shared language puts us at risk of catching the conservatism bug.
"In the past several decades, the Catholic Church in this country has lurched to the right, among both the laity and the clergy. [...] This has spawned a schismatic tendency that has been evident for several years."
via
@NCRonline
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A weird thing about Twitter mental health discourse is that I end up, faced with anti-psychiatry and the like, presenting as a defender of current practice.
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Tony Benn was worth ten right-wingers from a working class background. It’s not your background that matters, it’s what you do with it!
Could the UK soon have the most working-class cabinet of all time?
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I think maths is great, and maths A-level a great preparation for studying philosophy. But the way to get more students to study maths post-16 is imaginative teaching which captures their imaginations pre-16, not compulsion.
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I'm going to completely redo the website this summer, hopefully.
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My oddest take on academic convention is that we shouldn't get so hung up on referencing styles. As long as references allow the reader to track down sources, the style doesn't matter. This goes for teaching and publication.
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@Philip_Goff
I just think that attempting to apply any gender concepts to God is a category mistake.
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This should not be difficult: not being in favour of criminalising women who have abortions does not make one ‘pro-abortion’.
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@ucu
I’ve already given you my ‘views on what this would look like’ by voting for NEC members. This is a cynical attempt to over-ride the union’s democratic mechanisms for factional purposes.
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In general people on the left need to wake up to the issue of academic freedom. Mark my words, any restriction of it will be used against *us*.
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