For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.
American anthropologist, David Graeber, notes that “Western social theory is founded on certain everyday common sense, one that assumes that the most important thing about people is that they are all unique individuals. Theory therefore also tends to start with individuals and tries to understand how they form relations with one another”. This idea that... Continue Reading →
This was the question (or my summary of the question) posed at an online discussion group I have become involved in, for those who no longer find the church a safe space within which to wrestle with theological questions. I need to confess that I do believe there is a uniqueness to the gospel, and... Continue Reading →
Almost three weeks into lockdown and I need to admit that my skillset has expanded enormously. In the last three weeks I have been, at various stages, a lion tamer, a pirate, a snake handler, a super villain, a velociraptor, and a zombie pigman, to name just a few of the hitherto unexplored career paths... Continue Reading →
I need to stress this point: life is brutal and unfair. It has always been so. The Corona virus is devastating, no doubt about that. Moving forward in its wake, it will radically shift the way humans do things, I am sure. Much has been written and will yet be written on that. And that... Continue Reading →
I don’t think most Christians want Jesus. They would deny it, of course, but what they really want is a violent god. They want an angry god. They want a god who looks like everybody else’s god, only better. A mightier smiter; a my-god-can-kick-your-god’s-butt-Chuck-Norris-style god. We suffer from the theological equivalent of trying to keep... Continue Reading →
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 →
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 →
