For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.
When we talk about God we reach instinctively for royal imagery because it feels weighty and majestic. Kingship promises order in a world fraying at the edges. And goodness knows we need that hope. Yet the startling claim at the heart of Christmas is not that God arrives as a king, but that God arrives... Continue Reading →
I do not believe AI is a saviour, nor do I believe it threatens our existence. Even when its intelligence inevitably dwarfs our own to the point that we can offer no unique insight, I do not believe it will become a kind of machine-god. I hold out no hope for a deus ex machina, descending... Continue Reading →
We love stories with a happy ending. After a spell of struggle, our heroine learns what really matters and walks into the sunset, preferably with orchestral accompaniment. When The End lingers on the screen, we feel satisfied if all the loose ends have been tied up. The kiss in the rain seals the deal. The... 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 →
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 →
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 →
A dear friend of mine recently posted this picture. I was immediately taken with it. Doesn’t it sum up the human condition so succinctly? Too often, like the pigeon in the picture, our limited minds seem incapable of comprehending a bigger picture; sometimes they are unwilling to concede that there even is one. We will... Continue Reading →
When people find out that I am a teacher, they often look at me in the way one would look at somebody who had just confessed to being a substance abuser - vaguely distrustful, slightly embarrassed for having asked, and possibly possessing a morbid curiosity about what on earth it was that compelled me to... Continue Reading →
Vapors In The Wind 