For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.
Tomorrow I turn fifty. It’s not a milestone I’ve dreaded, though I’ve certainly felt its weight approaching. But it’s not the weight of regret. It’s the weight of awareness—of having carried things, for a long time, that were never mine to hold. Of having mistaken anxiety for purpose. Of thinking I had to make something... Continue Reading →
The world feels as if it is holding its breath. The headlines sound like history clearing its throat: invasions, posturing, populist righteousness, tribal resentment, and the slow encroachment of another global bloodletting. You can feel it in the fear people carry, simmering just beneath casual conversation, in the desperate attempts to find who is to... Continue Reading →
There’s a kind of spiritual theatre that I grew up around—a world where the Holy Spirit arrived with fireworks: tongues and trembling, declarations and deliverance, prophecy and power. You were supposed to feel it. To be moved. To be filled with something electric, uncontainable, divine. And sometimes, people were. I never was. And there were... Continue Reading →
Hope is difficult to speak about with integrity. Too often, it is made to sound like denial—like a way to silence grief, soften injustice, or sidestep the complexity of human pain: “Everything happens for a reason”, or “She’s in a better place now”. I am frankly sickened by how Evangelical Christians celebrate God’s leading them... Continue Reading →
I want to share a thought with you – a sort of hypothesis I am exploring. It is the kind of thought that in certain churches will guarantee excommunication – or at the very least ensure that your name is only ever mentioned in hushed tones – but it is too important not to share.... Continue Reading →
Easter unsettles people. Being at the heart of the Christian story, it tends to polarise us: you either roll your eyes at its claims or feel deeply moved by them. There’s not much in between. Unless you count the chocolate, in which case there’s a whole aisle of middle ground in your local supermarket. But... Continue Reading →
If the Bible isn’t inerrant—if it’s a messy, human text shot through with contradiction and confusion—then what on earth do we do with it? Why bother? I want to stress that my aim in writing these posts has never been to reject the Bible, nor to reject God. Rather, I want to call into question... Continue Reading →
I have spent much of my life in some form of Christian ministry, and I can tell you this: one of the most consistent difficulties in handling God’s PR is that God’s CV is ... problematic. On the one hand, you’ve got Jesus, turning the other cheek, handing out free food, getting himself crucified rather... Continue Reading →
One of the problematic consequences of adopting a doctrine of the infallibility and/or inerrancy of Scripture is that we are blinded to the fact that what we read in a text is what we bring to it. We always read ourselves and our assumptions and contexts into texts. We cannot do otherwise. As a result,... Continue Reading →
If you insist that the Bible is inerrant or infallible, the question you need to answer is “Which Bible?” Even without the complications we explored in the last post – that human engagements with texts are always interpretive and subjective and that what we read in a text is what we bring to it, so... Continue Reading →
Vapors In The Wind 