For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.
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 →
You may have been wondering why you have not heard from me in a while, and the truth of the matter is that I have not really known what to write about. I have been working through a sort of existential angst. It is not depression: I have suffered from that for much of... Continue Reading →
As I write this, a week before your birthday, I am sitting four hundred kilometres away from you. It is nine o’ clock in the morning and it is already 30 degrees outside. The air is heavy with the heat. The cicadas hum steadily in the background and somewhere in the nearby acacias I can... Continue Reading →
Why are Christians so afraid of art and literature? I have worked in education all of my adult life, and if there is one thing I can guarantee, it is that if I prescribe a text with any hint of magic, sex, or swearing (funnily enough, violence is usually less of an issue)there will be... 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 →
I want to season this piece with grace, if possible. So I am going to ask your pardon upfront if it sounds like I am being dogmatic or bitter. That is not my intention. I don’t want to go on a crusade against certain types of Christians; that said, I do have serious reservations about... Continue Reading →
I have lived all of my life – nearly half a century – in South Africa. And I cannot think of a time when the land I love has not been deeply divided and plagued by violence. My daily reality is – has always been – a confrontation with oppression. The colonial plunder of my... 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 →
