What with the horrors in France and the thousands of words spoken and written in reaction to them, it's been quite a week.  
The coverage of those events has been enormous.  I am so glad that I don't do Twitter or I would surely have been overwhelmed by verbiage.   The question that remains for all of us it seems to me is  - why ?   ow cold those eight or so killers have come to believe that by killing 13o innocen  what is it that has brought about this terrible sitaut  What is it that has brought about this terrible situation and how do we try to resolve it ?  There are as yet no certain answers and the ideas that have so far emerged cover the whole gamut of possibilities ranging from bombing places one of us had heard of until a few months ago to supporting some of the 100 odd groups that seem to be struggling for power in Syria, to trying to get the UN involved. For every suggestion there is a counter suggestion.     I have no more idea than I imagine you do about how to deal with this ghastly mess.   
So  -  OK I'm a coward  -  my view is we had best not worry too much about it, other than praying for peace as fervently as we can.   Prayer may not change things, but prayer changes people and people change things.  
But I do think that, along with prayers for peace,  it may be time we got to know more about Islam's teaching.  That means getting hold, as a first step,  of a copy of the Koran and making an effort to understand the basics.    I am not encouraged, I have to say, by discovering that the nineteenth century historian Thomas Carlyle, whose writings are not exactly light reading,  considered the Koran  as  " As toilsome reading as I ever undertook, a wearisome, confused. jumble " .   Well, let's give it a try.  That's my first message today. 
My second is about something quite different.  



   

  

