For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.
The problem nowadays is that every Christian claims to have a Christ-centred theology. Not that a Christ-centred theology is a bad thing, mind you. I would argue that if Christianity is not Jesus-centred it is absolutely worthless. The problem is not with the concept of placing Jesus at the centre of our sense-making when it... Continue Reading →
If I asked you what it meant to “believe” in Nelson Mandela, say, or Martin Luther King Jr, or Germaine Greer, or Ché Guevara, or Charles Darwin or Donald Trump or Margaret Atwood, how would you respond? In all likelihood, you would understand that “believing” in a public figure entails resonating with their core ideologies,... Continue Reading →
We see the world in metaphors. Faced with the vast, chaotic, incomprehensible alienness that is life, we seek to impose order onto it. We try to make connections, we search for patterns: the only way to make life navigable is to impose some sort of order onto the chaos. Whenever we are faced with the... Continue Reading →
I can sympathise with Peter. In so many ways he is just like us. If you have grown up in the church, as I have, you will know what I mean when I say that “being on fire for God” is regarded as the optimal state of being for any believer. In other words, the... Continue Reading →
All of us will have stories of teachers who have – for better or for worse – shaped how we see ourselves, who we have become, and – by extension – the children we raise and the communities we participate in. Many of us will have unwittingly adopted attitudes, paradigms, habits that were engendered in... Continue Reading →
Somehow this advent season has felt different, which I suspect is a result of the journey I have been on in terms of interrogating my own theology. When we put up our Christmas tree recently, as Nathan hung ornaments on every available space on the tree and sang carols loudly, adopting a liberal creativity with... Continue Reading →
I am going to start off controversially: if you believe that entry into Heaven is the Christian hope, you have misread the gospels. More than that, I believe that this belief that Jesus’s primary mission was to win us a free pass through the Pearly Gates is the single most damaging doctrine preventing us from... Continue Reading →
Until you can answer the question of why we need to pray, you cannot begin to engage with how to pray. I have been making the case that The Lord’s Prayer is much more a theological statement than it is either a magical formula for unleashing the power of God (which I don’t believe it... Continue Reading →
With low, brooding rainclouds and gently rolling hills, the Oxfordshire countryside was everything I had imagined it would be. I grew up reading Enid Blyton, Billy Bunter, and William, so driving down narrow country lanes, flanked by hedgerows laden with berries, seemed a bit like coming home after years away. But this was not my... Continue Reading →
