Where to eat in Finland

A few years ago now Elina and I finished eating at every restaurant in Leeds and published a book about it. That book is the Leeds Restaurant Guide. I believe it is the best and most complete guide to food in Leeds that has ever been produced.

But where do we go after that?

Eating at every restaurant in Finland is too big of a challenge even for us. However, there are a handful of restaurants over there that we love. So we have written the Finland Restaurant Guide to provide select highlights of some of them.

Flag football

American football is more popular than it ever has been in the UK. But it does have a couple of disadvantages. It can be slow, especially compared to proper football that is constantly on. People also get injured a lot, which is never nice to see.

An alternative to this is flag football. This is a non-contact version of the sport in which players attempt to remove a flag from the waist of their opponent rather than tackling them. Teams are springing up all over the UK, including in Leeds where the Leeds Tornadoes flag football team has just started.

Another advantage of flag football is that it is played during the summer so the weather is a lot nicer!

The football season is upon us

American Football is a strange sport. They finish at around January, drag it out for a little while with a few more games, and then end everything until September. Some would call it lazy, especially when compared to the season of proper football.

Never the less, it is that time of year again and this year sees the launch of a new football blog from the UK perspective entitled A Brit Talks Football.

It will be covering thoughts on how it fairs to be a UK fan as well as a review of some of the games and other interesting news and articles.

Gone, but not forgotten

Last year, Humanist Society of West Yorkshire member and Humanist representative on Leeds SACRE Gerry Hannant sadly passed away.

However, while he may be gone, he certainly is not forgotten, thanks to Worfolk Lectures, an online archive of atheist lectures, that recovered the only known recording of his talk "Scientific Standards: Does Religion Measure Up?" and published it on their website. The talk was given during Rationalist Week 2007, the first ever awareness week run by Leeds Atheist Society. Since then the awareness week has grown into a veritable festival of reason and many other talks from their archives are taken from such weeks too.

Brand new podcasts

If you haven't been keeping up with the latest updates on Chris Worfolk's website, last month he released three new podcasts. The long overdue return of the podcast features Norman Ralph, James Murray and High Clayton, all of whom have been buzzing around Leeds Atheist Society over the years.

The series features three new episodes. "Profiling Terrorists" looks at the comments made recently by Sam Harris on whether we could just target specific groups of people. "Freedom of Expression" looks at the Olympics and whether it is censoring freedom of speech and "Discrimination" looks at whether positive discrimination can ever be justified.

Humanist Library of Leeds

At the end of last year, and I do mean the end of last year (it was started over Christmas!) my charity embarked on a new project, to bring together a great collection of literature on humanism and the surrounding subjects.

The idea was to create a Humanist Library here in Leeds which could be a world class collection made available to researchers and in the long term the general public as well.

Similar collections already exist at places like Conway Hall and the Bishopsgate Institute, both of which have excellent collections, unfortunately these are relatively inaccessible to people based up north who don't have the time or money to travel to London on a regular basis.

While the project will no doubt take a long time to really build up a great collection, I'm happy to say that the initial building blocks for the project are in place and we have a good foundation to expand out from.

Humanist Chaplaincy Network

In recent years the demand for non-religious pastoral care has grown significantly. As more and more people lose their faith, the demand for occasionally needing "spiritual advice" or someone to talk to has continued as ever and as such as gap in the market has opened up if you will as non-believers search for the same service on their own world view.

As a consequence a number of chaplains have sprung up, most notably Greg Epstein at Harvard University who gained notoriety with his book Good Without God. Here in the UK, the universities in Glasgow are now supported by a humanist chaplain too, in the form of Mandy Evans Ewing.

To help this much welcome growth continue, CWF recently established the Humanist Chaplaincy Network to provide support, training, networking and resources for those volunteering and working as humanist chaplains.