Three of the UK's largest churches have slammed proposals to change the way poverty is measured. They say ministers are blaming the poor for poverty.

The Methodist Church say that children and young people will be able to “change and challenge the church, the world and each other” at this year’s Youth Assembly.

There have always been prophets of doom, says Dr Andrew Hass. History is punctuated by exclamatory voices crying, in one form or other, that catastrophe is imminent or the end is nigh. Sometimes they are seen as 'crying wolf'. In relation to the current global financial crisis, the issue of capitalism as religion, who and what we hope for, the ethical probings of counter-wisdom, and the insights of Walter Benjamin and others come together potently in their interrogation of who we are and where we are going.

Negation has ascended into the imagination of our culture and society not necessarily as something to be scorned or regretted, but as something with which to be, in some cultural, philosophical, or even religious form, reconciled, says Dr Andrew Hass. But before we can understand how this figure might work its way into and through our present world, we need first to ask, whence 'zero'? For its history is by no means one we might expect.