For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.
Something I have learned through my involvement in dramatic arts at various schools is that you cannot predict which children will be good on stage on the basis of how they behave in class. I have seen a boy whose public speaking skills earned him a place at the Junior United Nations Assembly freeze in... Continue Reading →
One of my favourite films is The Truman Show. It tells the story of a young man’s growing realisation that his whole life has been scripted, and he is in fact the unwitting star of a reality television show about his own life. When the creator of the show, Christof, is asked in an interview... Continue Reading →
Before you ever drew breath, death was at work, shaping you. The universe is a web of relationships in a process of becoming. And in this process, life and death are not opposites. Death is not simply something that happens when life fails; the disturbing reality is that at a biological level, death is one... Continue Reading →
It is just over a year now since Dad passed. Time does not heal. All it does is provide more opportunities to keep busy and temporarily forget. But lately I have been wrestling with the concept of death, trying to make sense of a world where one moment you can be here, and then things... Continue Reading →
Of all the movements in the Easter story, the Ascension may be the most puzzling. I can come to terms with a god who chooses to die on a cross. That makes a kind of sense to me: it upends traditional god concepts and reveals a non-violent god while simultaneously deconstructing the violent myths that... Continue Reading →
While I sincerely believe that the cross reveals a profound and beautiful truth about God – that God is non-violent and merciful – I think it would be a mistake to focus my Easter message on that. The reason is that I think we are too easily distracted by divinity. We are not living in... Continue Reading →
Often what stops us from making progress is the fact that we understand the nature of the challenges we face incorrectly. The conceptual revolution that allowed Isaac Newton to formulate universal gravitation was that instead of deriving a law of motion based on the intrinsic qualities of the apple, Newton recognised that the apple had... Continue Reading →
For much of human history, the question of why things fall seemed settled. The ancient world, following the formidable logic of Aristotle, offered an explanation that was elegant, intuitive, and, for nearly two thousand years, entirely persuasive. In Aristotle’s beautifully ordered cosmos, everything had a natural place. Earthy things belonged at the centre of the... Continue Reading →
What is the most significant biblical discovery of the last century? For Bart Ehrman, it isn't the Dead Sea Scrolls. It isn't the textual variations that reveal scribal errors or theological amendments. It isn't even the lack of archaeological evidence for the Exodus. The most important ‘discovery’ about the Bible might seem obvious, even banal,... Continue Reading →
Your God is a lie. A sincerely held one, a soothing and useful one, but a lie nonetheless. I don’t mean that to come across as accusatory or judgmental. After all, mine is a lie too. Our god‑concepts – mine included – are stories we tell ourselves in order to make life feel manageable. They... Continue Reading →
