word | spirit | world | church
One of the features of Charles Taylor’s argument in his great (in every sense!) work A Secular Age is that we are a people who are disenchanted. We no longer readily believe in magic, or that hobs sour the milk. We find supernatural claims extraordinary, and all of us—even believers—find that our ‘social imaginary’ means… Continue reading The Myth of Disenchantment
I have been blessed over the last year by the books Every Moment Holy that have come out of the Rabbit Room. These are two volumes of liturgies for ordinary moments of everyday life—written prayers about normal stuff and about the horrifically brutal stuff that sometimes happens to us. After writing about how social media… Continue reading A liturgy for social media
There’s a principle in the Bible that’s foreign to our Protestant intuitions. When the people of Israel were dramatically saved by the Lord, they built a monument. Or at least, sometimes they did. The two famous examples would be at Gilgal in Joshua 4 or at Ebenezer in 1 Samuel 7. In Joshua 4 the… Continue reading A monument of gift
We struggle to understand the concept of rest. You might think it’s pretty obvious, but we live in cultures that are so formed away from the ideal for human life that we often get rest backwards. I’ve argued here at nuakh that rest is about the enjoyment of order, about stopping to be with the… Continue reading The story of rest
Last week I moved a lot of sand. We laid a patio out the back of our dining room and dug out and concreted the path down the side of our house. I hit a lot of things with a mattock—which I like telling people because I like the way the word ‘mattock’ sounds in… Continue reading Sand
I love to read. That’s probably not a big surprise, it’s an unusual writer who doesn’t. I read more than most—honestly the stats on how much the average person reads make me sad. This YouGov survey has around three quarters of respondents saying they read a book last year, but the median number of books… Continue reading On reading
David Foster Wallace starts his famous speech This is Water by describing two young fish. They’re happily swimming along and meet an older fish coming the other way, who nods in greeting and says: “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them… Continue reading Reframing stories
The gathered church sings. That’s what we do. It’s not the only thing we do, but it is what we do. For millennia, since song joined sacrifices in Israel’s worship at the dedication of Jerusalem’s Temple in David and Solomon's liturgical reforms, the people of God have sung. In innumerable styles, with words sublimely profound… Continue reading Sing when you’re losing
This article in the New York Times describes two tools that Facebook are developing for churches. Firstly, a subscription service, “where users pay, for example, $9.99 per month and receive exclusive content, like messages from the bishop” and secondly a prayer service “where members of some Facebook groups can post prayer requests and others can… Continue reading Commercialising Church
Jesus was executed on a hill outside Jerusalem that they named Golgotha, which we’re told means ‘the place of a skull’ (Matthew 27). I’ve always imagined a hill that looks like a skull, rocky with caves to highlight eyes and a mouth. Perhaps something a little like Lion’s Head Rock down Dovedale in the Peak… Continue reading Snakeshead Hill
