Good morning.
More news about the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification church, who's currently in jail for tax evasion: he was awarded an honorary degree last week by the Roman Catholic University of la Plata in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
In announcing the award in New York, the rector of the university, Dr Nicholas Argentato, described Mr Moon as a prophet of our time.
Next week a delegation of nine Protestant ministers from Argentina visits the Autumn assembly of the British Council of Churches; it's meant as a symbol of reconciliation between Christians, following the Falklands War.
Protestants, however, are a tiny minority in Argentina, and the delegation won't be including a Roman Catholic.
The assembly will also be discussing the UK immigration laws, Hong Kong, teenagers in the church, and of course, church unity schemes.
In the Free Churches there's some renewed grumbling about Anglican ambivalence to the British Council of Churches: though the Anglicans still talk about doing as much as possible with other churches, some Free Church people feel that, in practice, the Anglicans go it alone whenever they can.
An article in this week's Baptist Times asks: What Bishop wants to confer, when he can have a camera and a microphone all to himself?
When the Church of England's General Synod can now get so much attention from the press, the role of the British Council of Churches seems to fade into the background.
Of course, what concerns church leaders isn't necessarily what worries ordinary churchgoers, even less the general public: I can't recall ever having had a single letter on the British Council of Churches and its problems.
Going by my postbag, most people are worried about the problem of pain, the existence of God, and miracles.
They want to know whether, for instance, in a scientific age, Christians can really believe in the story of the feeding of the five thousand as described, or was the miracle that those in the crowd with food shared it with those who had none?
Is the aid beginning to flow into Ethiopia any less a miracle than the five loaves and two fishes?
Well, just recently, a day conference on miracles was convened by the Research Scientists, Christian Fellowship.
It was chaired by Professor Sir Robin Boyd, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and the key question was: When is a miracle not a miracle?
I suppose the popular notion of a miracle is an event unexplained by science or natural laws; but the scientists themselves weren't having any of that: on this definition, they say, very few events can confidently be called miracles because we have no idea what natural laws may be discovered in the future.
More important, however, is that the biblical writers themselves thought that events that followed natural laws could still be regarded as miraculous.
Take the crossing of the Red Sea by the Israelites, for instance: this was made possible by a strong wind; the wind itself follows patterns of natural law; the miracle is that it happened just when and where it was needed; so it's the timing that can be miraculous.
But the real problem, the scientists say, with defining miracles as events unexplained by natural law is that it springs from an understanding of nature as a machine which runs itself; it's the notion of an impersonal, uncaring universe relentlessly following laws of cause and effect.
That's a position recently expounded by Don Cupitt in his BBC TV series, The Sea of Faith.
This understanding, say the scientists, is in fact, unscientific, and the reason is, they say, that natural laws do not cause or dictate events: they're merely descriptions of what we expect to happen on the basis of previous experience.
The research scientists say that to claim that all events follow these patterns is a philosophical position and not a scientific one.
They call that philosophical position 'naturalism', and they say it is quite contrary to the Christian view of the world; the Christian view, they argue, is to see events that can be covered by natural laws as God's usual activity; we get so used to the usual patterns that we forget how amazing they are, but at times, they say, God does unusual things too.
The usual and the unusual are both God's doing, and it's miracles which confront us with God most clearly.
Don Cupitt was presumably one of the people the conference members had in mind when they emphasised their confidence in the miracles as stated in the Bible, and deplored the tendency of some to try to reduce them to merely mechanical events by suggesting scientific explanations.
It's a useful reminder that some scientists find Don Cupitt unscientific.
The debate goes on.
Correspondents seeking access to the PNC meetings were required, the other day, to fill in forms to apply for permission from the PLO.
At one point, the forms asked us to state our last contact with the organisation.
For many of us it was a brilliantly sunny day in the battle-marked port of Tripoli in Northern Lebanon last December.
Wrecks of ships, hit in the inter-Palestinian shelling, had been cleared away to allow ferries, flying United Nations flags, to take Mr Arafat and his men into their second enforced exile from Lebanon in just over a year.
The fighters looked a sorry sight with their suitcases and bedding rolls, their carrier-bags and kalashnikovs.
They departed without any pretence that this was a victory: on that day, it did finally seem like the end.
It wasn't, of course, and Tripoli seems like a decade ago; especially, seeing Mr Arafat here in Amman, with all the pomp and the incredibly tight security, laid on by the Jordanians for the Palestine National Council.
The atmosphere on that December day in Tripoli was sombre.
The fighters may not feel much different today, as they wait in camps around the Middle East, but, for Mr Arafat and the political movement supporting him, the atmosphere is anything but sombre: there's a sense of relief that, at last, something is being done to rebuild the PLO after so many depressing months of internal wrangling, even if it's a shrunken organisation, with pro-Syrian groups, for the time being at least, staying out.
Yasser Arafat, the master of compromise and of keeping all sides happy, the political chameleon, is at last saying: enough is enough.
He's seeking to take the boldest move of his life, and his decision seems to be going down well with his constituency at large, if not with all the groups within the PLO.
Like at all party conferences round the world, there's a particular atmosphere of camaraderie; but it does seem that this meeting is a little bit special.
Perhaps with the divisions that have opened up, and with all the recrimination, the Palestinian movement thought there was little hope for a PNC at all.
One lady in her seventies was brought here on a stretcher from a hospital in Beirut.
She was told that the journey might kill her.
'I'm going to die anyway,' she said, 'I'd rather die among my fellow Palestinians.'
So, suddenly, here it is, and in Amman, of all places.
No decision could have been calculated to annoy the Syrians more, and, as the red carpets are laid out for Mr Arafat and his supporters, it's hard to imagine Black September: the bloody battles in nineteen seventy between the Jordanian army and the PLO: a physical clash leading to regrettable events, as King Hussein put it, in his opening address on Thursday night; bringing out old ghosts, in the hope that they'd then be laid finally to rest.
Things do change in this part of the world in the most unbelievable ways: a forty-year-old Palestinian, who'd been a fighter most of his life with a Libyan- backed group opposing Mr Arafat - the one, in fact, that helped to force the PLO leader out of Tripoli last year - he's here.
He says he and many of his colleagues left their organisation just before the Tripoli fighting.
He's happy to be in Amman; not unhappy with the idea of a joint initiative with King Hussein; and there's the doctor I came across, who I'd interviewed in Tripoli, during the fighting last December, in a makeshift hospital in a school basement: he now works in Cairo, and says, only half jokingly, 'The next PNC could be there': that's how fast things change.
But while some changes occur, a great deal remains the same.
That form I mentioned earlier, for example: it should have allowed us all to be present for the historic opening session on Thursday night, which both sides desperately wanted reported, as much in Europe and the United States as anywhere; but the fact is, the majority of reporters and cameramen spent that historic evening freezing cold, with no facilities, in the car-park of the conference centre: there simply was no room inside.
Not like those embattled days in Tripoli, when any and every foreign reporter was always welcome.
Just one of the ups and downs, I suppose, of covering a revolution.
In a city where there's always something to see twenty-four hours a day, the latest attraction is the Federal courthouse in Manhattan.
Every morning, long queues are forming outside courts three-one-eight and five-o-nine: if you can't get into one trial, there's always an outside chance that a seat might be free at the other.
As ever, the American public and the world's press are hungry for drama, and the main protagonists in both trials seem to be going out of their way to provide it.
Ariel Sharon accuses Time magazine of committing a blood libel, recalling the medieval slander that Jews murdered Christians to use their blood in Passover rituals.
General Westmorland says CBS rattlesnaked him in a nineteen eighty-two documentary on the Vietnam war: 'They robbed my reputation,' he claims.
The two cases, then, have obvious similarities, and indeed, the same law firm is defending both Time and CBS.
Time's chief counsel, Thomas Barr, has no doubt that the same fundamental principle is at stake in both trials: the freedom of the press.
'Attacking that principle is becoming a popular thing for ex-generals to do,' he comments wryly.
But some people say the two libel actions go even further than that: that they're an attempt to rewrite history