Daily Archives: July 4, 2022

General T&T, PNM, Politics, Schools

The politics of redemption

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By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
July 04, 2022

We must never forget that there is something within human nature that can respond to goodness, that man is not totally depraved; to put it in theological terms, the image of God is never totally gone.

—Martin Luther King, Jr, A Testament of Hope

PART II

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeI had hoped to write about another aspect of the Foster Cummings debate, but other questions arose since last week which means I have to clear a lot of ground before I continue these observations.

Reading (or the explication of texts) is not so easy as many people believe it to be. A theologian goes to theology school to learn how to interpret theological texts (we call it exegesis). The lawyer goes to law school to learn how to read legal texts (whether the original intention or from a contemporary setting). Literary scholars go to graduate school to learn the most fortuitous way to examine literary texts.
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Crime in T&T, General T&T, Violence

Power of the gun

By Raffique Shah
July 04, 2022

Raffique ShahWe are not the most crime-ridden country in the world, notwithstanding claims to that effect by organisations and individuals that manipulate raw data from dubious sources so that they can support whatever theory or argument their authors wish to pursue.

For example, there are academics and criminologists who rely on official police numbers that could be quite misleading. To support my argument, I ask: can the police or other government agency in many densely-populated, slum-infested countries and cities (think India, Nigeria, Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines…) accurately account for every living or dead soul in such human-jungles? Hell, in the comparatively minuscule Beetham Estate or Sea Lots in Trinidad and Tobago, people live and die and never appear on records, so wheel and come back if you expect me to buy “official” data as being accurate.
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