For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.
Millenia ago in Judea a young man sat in the cool silence of a cloudless desert night. It could be that he was accustomed to solitude, had spent many nights out here alone. Perhaps – as always – he was enthralled by the hypnotizing vermilion of the campfire coals; perhaps his fingers sought the reassuring... Continue Reading →
I am still battling to find it, I must confess. Hope, that is. It is elusive. Please do not worry, if you are a long-standing personal friend and know my struggle with depression. This is not that kind of hopelessness I mean. It is not me, personally, that I have a problem with (although no... Continue Reading →
I am intrigued by the notion of liminal spaces. The transitional places, the spaces in between where we think we have been and where we believe (hope?) we are going. And it strikes me that at any given time, we tend to conceptualise ourselves as either occupying a particular space, or as moving between two... Continue Reading →
When my family gets together, things get loud. I have a very – how shall I put it?... animated family. We feel things deeply. We engage with life and with other people with passion. That has its downside, of course. It means that most of us have battled with depression or anxiety at some stage... Continue Reading →
I am not sure who it was who actually dodged the bullet. I was on a two hour flight this week and I sat behind a man who was an elder in a charismatic church. I shall call him Mr X. For almost the entire two hours, Mr X spoke to the man next to... Continue Reading →
The reason I get passionate about theology is because it matters. Not because of any eternal consequences, but because theology determines how we treat others in the here and now. If our picture of God is of an angry and violent brute, we tend to become violent and brutish ourselves. And it so happens that... Continue Reading →
If you read the Bible and find comfort there, then I suspect you are not reading the Bible properly. Almost certainly, you have not fully understood what you are reading. The various texts that comprise the Bible were penned for a lot of different reasons: to preserve the history of a people, and to tell the stories... Continue Reading →
It is impossible to condense a complex anthropological work into a blog-sized space, even a blog-sized space that is significantly larger than blog-sized spaces are supposed to be. So if you treasure the work of René Girard, please understand that what is to follow is a very much reduced (and thus inevitably inadequate) summation of... Continue Reading →
All faith is derivative. In other words, because nobody (at least nobody I wouldn’t regard as either a fraudster or schizophrenic) has personally interacted with God, all faith is based on individual interpretations either of religious texts or of personal experience. This means that the nature of the values we believe God to espouse will... Continue Reading →
If you move in vaguely Christian circles, or if you are part of the LGBTQ community, you have probably heard of the Nashville Statement. And if you have heard of the Nashville Statement, you almost certainly have an opinion on it. The Nashville Statement was the brainchild (I almost wrote brainlesschild, but I have reminded... Continue Reading →
