A specialist consultancy providing bespoke advice and creative solutions for complex cultural, ethical, and religious issues in contemporary geopolitics.
Oxford House Research publishes weekly briefing papers on topical and global issues authored by associates and a range of external contributors. Members receive these by email each week.
Renaissance German artist Adam Elsheimer’s (1578-1610) painting of the ‘Holy Family’s’ flight to Egypt (Matthew 2.13-15) is important at many levels. The story is well-known to churchgoers at Christmas. Hearing reports from spiritual advisors of a baby who Eastern astrologers and others believed to be the long-awaited ‘King of the Jews’, the vassal king Herod […]
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‘Animal rights’ activists at COP26 protested with environmentalists at inter-governmental inaction. PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), Viva! and OneKind hit the streets with banners that declared ‘Meat=Heat’, and ‘Fight Climate Change with Diet Change. Go Vegan.’ Glasgow’s blue buses agreed: ‘You can’t be a meat-eating environmentalist’. To support their cause, activists cited […]
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On Thursday 10 November 2021, in a closed-door meeting of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 370 senior officials re-appointed President Xi Jinping (b. 1953; Pres. 2014-present) for an historic third term and enshrined him formally as an era-defining figure of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) alongside Mao Zedong (1893-1976), the nation’s founder, and Deng […]
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For non-UK readers of Oxford House’s Weekly Briefings, on 15 October 2021 the 68-year-old British MP, Sir David Amess (1952-2021), was attacked with a knife in his constituency. Sir David died at the scene. On 21 October 2021, BBC News reported: ‘A 25-year-old man has been charged with the murder and with the preparation of […]
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On 9 November 2020, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali (b. 1976; PM. April 2018 – present) tweeted: Concerns that Ethiopia will descend into chaos are unfounded and the result of not understanding our context deeply. Our rule of law enforcement operation, as a sovereign state with the capacity to manage its own internal affairs, […]
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‘Many people come to my country offering help. What’s different about you?’ If I hadn’t had three fine colleagues sitting beside me, and been assured our host was a good man, I would have found the President of Albania’s opening gambit disconcerting. As it was, I still had to rummage in the dusty attic of […]
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I am delighted to have a chance to bring you up to speed on an event that I was privileged to attend in July, the first ever ‘International Religious Freedom Summit’. There are times when an event is so significant that even the news media misses it! Or, as is more often the case, the […]
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I had a wonderfully astute assistant some years ago. When asked a question she couldn’t – or sometimes didn’t want to! – answer, she would shrug her shoulders, like the delightful (but very dumb!) Spanish waiter Manuel in the British comedy series Fawlty Towers, and say winsomely, ‘I know nerthing’. It always lightened the mood […]
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Brazil has been – and still is – one of the epicentres of the COVID pandemic. To-date, it has recorded 21.3m cases and 593,000+ deaths. Horrendous statistics. The true figure is probably much higher. Few families have been unaffected. Tough times, indeed, for me and my family here in Recife, as it has been for […]
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Grief has many faces; as Anglo-American poet critic T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) said of death, it ‘has a hundred hands and walks by a thousand ways’. Shell-shocked military children at a father’s funeral. Mothers cradling photos of infants vaporised in an airstrike. Distraught professionals unjustly accused. Women silently abused. The dreams of adolescence turned to the […]
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