We had an intensive week of Italian Language classes. They were a lot of fun! Our teacher was absolutely great – obviously someone who considers teaching to be an art rather than a science. He was cracking jokes in Italian, playing Italian songs (and singing along!) and supplemented the more tedious moments of trawling through Italian prepositions with fascinating insights into Italian culture and history.

Our classes on the history of Western civilization have focused on Gnosticism and Secularism so far. It was interesting to see how Gnostic thought (the concept of ‘secret knowledge’ for a special group of the ‘enlightened’) has been with us throughout the centuries and is manifesting itself today in popular culture through films like Star Wars and the Matrix. This has given us a great grounding in how we might go about interpreting the soundness of elements of popular culture that we might need to make judgements on. Harry Potter was up for discussion too- it's great to have a tool to distinguish betwen what makes these things entertaining, the good values they might promote and elelments of a troublesome underlying philosophy which they might contain. This gets us beyond the polemics or the heated and emotional exchanges we're familiar with in the case of the 'morality' of Potter!

We also had a crash course in Bioethics in preparation for a special day-conference on the sixtieth anniversary of the U.N. Universal Human Rights Declaration. We’re preparing for a second, longer Bioethics conference in November. At these conferences we’re getting the chance to play at being news reporters and writing up stories to see if we can get them published. - Anthony Errington