I've just been reading Freakonomics.

One thing that's remarkable about the book is its simplicity, that the authors do nothing more complicated than ask slightly bizarre questions of large amounts of data.

I guess they aren't scared of the numbers, they know what to do with them, to control some variables whilst focussing on others.  But it's the questions that unearth the pearls, the bizarreness, the freakiness that points to the truth.

So Levitt (the economist whose thinking is behind Freakonomics) asks "Why do teacher's cheat?", "Why do drug dealers live with their Mums?", "which are the most harmful to children - guns or swimming pools?" and "Who calls their daughter 'Madison'?"

When you fire these queries at the right block of data, you discover that teachers cheat because they are a part of a system which rewards exam success and doesn't audit properly, drug dealers live with their Mums because they are poorly paid but take that kind of job because it's the only path to success open to them, swimming pools are more harmful to children than guns and aspirational parents call their daughter Madison because they want to be like the family on the next block who have two nice cars, a swimming pool in the back garden and a daughter called Madison.

Faith beyond resentment – chapter four – page 86ff

Allison in scorchingly good form here, every sentence a potential quote.

His insight is of Jonah as a man caught with too much pride and too much shame.  There is a pride in his orthodoxy, in his chosen-ness, but also a shame that God might break through, to a shame that is the “underside of ordered righteousness.”

“Shame forces you prematurely to run away from yourself; pride forces you prematurely to expose yourself.  Most gay lives, I’m afraid, are full of an embarrassing abundance of both” – Andrew Sullivan.

For Allison, the sailors represent the compassionate representatives of primitive, unthought, reactive religion.  They “react as good pagans know how to when threatened with violence beyond their ken.  They cast lots, for they have known from time immemorial that if they sacrifice the troublemaker, then peace will come.”  Later on “these delightful stage extras saill off into the sunset, presumably to a barbarian island north of France and to the east of Ireland where to this day their religion is alive and well, and mistakenly thought to have something to do with the living God.”