The Press Photographer's Year 2007

The Press Photographer's Year 2007 are awards for the outstanding press photography taken for, and used by the UK media in 2006. You can view a slideshow of 133 top photographs selected from the 6000 submissions.

Peter Nicholls

Daniel Berehulak

Timothy Allen

Christopher Hitchens on Religion

During the canonization of Mother Teresa in 2002 British columnist Christopher Hitchens was asked by the Vatican to testify against her. Author of "Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice" he was well prepared for the original role of "Devil's Advocate" (advocatus diaboli), in which he claimed Theresa was a political opportunist who had adopted the guise of a saint in order to raise money to spread an extreme and aggressive version of Catholicism.

In the lecture below Hitchens presents the case for his latest book, "god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything", a title well representing his abrasive, atheistic anti-fascist stance. Arguments can be made that he is inappropriately inflammatory and insensitive in a cultural landscape that is fiercely volatile, but my larger problem is that he ignores the inner development of psychological/existential/spiritual awareness from which religion derives it's energy yet so corrupts through institution. On the other hand his argument is humanistic, libertarian, informed, articulate and entertaining.

(Click to launch video on the intellectual odyssey that is fora.tv)

"the Pope having just repudiated limbo after a long struggle. The place where the souls of unbaptized children always went- apparently it was never there. Tell it no, but it’s serious, tell it to the parents of those children. I have met those people, the people who thought that’s where that poor kids had gone having died before they could breathe properly and not been let into heaven. That’s where they thought they were, so it was real to them. What characteristics is this to say oh it wasn’t really real enough, so we made that bit up. They can’t do this. It was real, it was a real place for those parents and for the brothers and sisters, of those children too they wept at the thought of where the little one had gone and to say, oh never mind. By the way we – we are wrong about this, but we are now ready to be, infallible all over again. This is disgusting and in the same week as he does this the Pope repeats, that we need to teach the children more about hell. Go back again to terrify the composure of young and the innocent with these horrifying stories told them by maladjusted elderly virgins."

I wonder what the famously anti-ecclesiastical Voltaire would have replied to Hitchens? Perhaps,

"La superstition est à la religion ce que l’astrologie est à l’astronomie, la fille très folle d’une mère très sage. Ces deux filles ont longtemps subjugué toute la terre."

"Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy, the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth."

Instamatic Focal Point: Siwa, Egypt

And
For no reason
I start skipping like a child

And

For no reason
I turn into a leaf
That is carried so high
I kiss the Sun's mouth
And dissolve

And

For no reason
A thousand birds
Choose my head for a conference table,
Start passing their
Cups of wine
And their wild songbooks all around

And

For every reason in existence
I begin to eternally
To eternally laugh and love!

When I turn into a leaf

And start dancing,
I run to kiss our beautiful Friend
And I dissolve in the Truth
That I Am.

- Hafez (خواجه شمس‌الدین محمد حافظ شیراز)

The Gift

The next sunrise shall find me in a plane headed to Cairo. Two years after the memorable Holiday of Justice- Brodie, Tom and I are again convening in Egypt. Since our last trip, Brodie has been PAI, trained at a Zen monastery and now McKinzies eagerly awaits his arrival. Gara has transcended us all; after AI he returned to his Cairo as a full-blown, real world journalist writing for a Middle Eastern news magazine of high repute.

With me I shall bring two others who I've recently grown fond of- the Sufi poets Rumi and Hafez. I can imagine no finer backdrop by which to read their masterful expressions than the open desert sky.

Rumi is a 13th century Sufi poet- an Tajik-Persian author who has been very influential and popular in and out of the Islamic world. The poem I posted yesterday is a great example of the form; a beautifully emotive and revealing expression of the human struggle with a zen-like brevity. Hafez was a recent surprise to me. On Friday I was given The Gift by a bookmaster at a wonderful store here in Amsterdam. "The Gift" is a collection (a divan) of Hafez's poetry that has been completely enthralling me over the past week. From the first poem that I opened randomly in the store I was awestruck. These are the words of a 14th century Persian poet and Sufi mystic.

STOP BEING SO RELIGIOUS

What
Do sad people have in
Common?

It seems
They have all built a shrine
To the past

And often go there
And do a strange wail and
Worship.

What is the beginning of
Happiness?

It is to stop being
So religious

Like

That.

- Hafez (خواجه شمس‌الدین محمد حافظ شیراز).

The bookmaster spoke to me of savouring Hafez; of supping upon each poem, gnawing upon it's bones and sucking the very marrow of it's spirit, delighting in each sweet whisper.. and laugh... and gentle nod. The Gift was bound and offered, I bowed and took it with both hands in full gratitude.

Much of life is spent thinking back happily upon experiences like that which will unfold over the next six days. I cannot imagine any four greater souls to be journeying with. Such brothers in whom I constantly finding and losing the thousand fragments of my self.

160,000 years of human migration in 3 minutes

Click to watch flash video. The Bradshow Foundation.

Quietness- Rumi

Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
You're covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign
that you've died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.

The speechless full moon
comes out now.

- Rumi (مولانا جلال الدین محمد رومی)

If there was a heart that speaks other than the heart that knows, this would be their lovemaking. I sit forlorn and emptied, yet no shiver can touch my soul, for it too has gone with Rumi.