For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.
The paradigms through which we engage the world shape the questions we are able to ask, and limit the truths we are able to see. Mostly our paradigmatic frameworks are invisible to us, and so we accept as normal and real the worlds with which we are presented. If you are a 21st Century Protestant... Continue Reading →
In a very real sense, I think, we become what we worship. Whatever higher power we regard as giving meaning to our lives – whether that is a deity, or an ideology (like democracy, or humanism, or Darwinism for that matter) – shapes our values, which in turn shape our actions, which inform the kinds... Continue Reading →
I used to believe that technology hated me. I am sure many of you will be able to identify with that. If you have ever had a video or sound-clip form a critical focal point of your presentation only to have it suddenly refuse to play at the crucial moment; if autocorrect has ever embellished... Continue Reading →
I first heard about Edwin Abbott’s 1884 novel, Flatland, when Sheldon made reference to it in Big Bang Theory, and I have loved it ever since as an illustration to explain theology. It is the story of a square who lives in a two-dimensional world, who has an encounter with a sphere from a three... Continue Reading →
I am painfully aware that to many of my fellow Christians, especially those who have walked some way along life’s road with me, my rejection of the inerrancy of Scripture and of a Penal Substitution understanding of atonement has seemed like an abandonment of my faith. I also realise that many take my criticisms of... Continue Reading →
I need to confess to being a bit of a cultural snob. Or at least that is the label that has sometimes been given to my expressed preference for artworks that indicate that their creators possess at least the semblance of cognitive functioning, and to my insistence that when those same artists communicate with me... Continue Reading →
As the saying goes, there are two types of people: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data. Which type are you? Don’t panic if you are not sure. It’s a trick question, actually. I think we are all both types: we make sense of the world – of which we only ever have partial... Continue Reading →
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 →
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 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 →
Vapors In The Wind 