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 →
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 →
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 →
Vapors In The Wind 