word | spirit | world | church
I wrote a few months ago about the so-called ‘quiet revival,’ which I argued is neither quiet nor a revival, but perhaps evidence of a reaction to the meaning crisis, or to sound incredibly pretentious, a metamodern turn. I was more positive about the reaction to the meaning crisis than about the metamodern turn. The… Continue reading On the ‘Quiet Revival’ again
Forgive me, this post is moderately pretentious. I’m intrigued by the idea of summarising someone’s thought. Particularly for a thinker who has a ‘project’ (in the academic sense), there’s an interesting thought experiment about which book or essay is the quintessential summary of their thought. For C. S. Lewis it’s Till We Have Faces—and for… Continue reading What’s your starter pack?
One of the reasons we struggle to make good judgements about a given technology is that we assume that any good use justifies the technology as a whole. Because our basic assumption is that technologies are neutral—they aren’t—we think that if a good use can be seen then we should assume that difference between good… Continue reading Making judgements on technology
It was evening, it was morning, it was the eighth day. All was bright and new in a garden cradling a rich man’s tomb. Spices floated on the air. A gardener met a woman wandering and called her name. The first humans’ first scene replaying on the sixth of April, the year of our Lord… Continue reading The Eighth Day of the Week
This is a large topic that, as is the nature of blogs, I’m going to think out loud around the edge of. It’s common in Evangelical spaces to be told that you shouldn’t necessarily trust your emotions, instead we’re pointed to eternal truth found in the Bible. It’s common in more Charismatic spaces to be… Continue reading On Emotions
The same reason its always sunny on my birthday. Some of you might want to point to a particularly memorable Easter weekend when it was a washout, or it snowed, or that you live in a part of the world when Easter is not a springtime festival and so my claim makes no sense (whether… Continue reading Why is it always sunny at Easter?
I recently read Jayber Crow. This was my first Wendell Berry novel (I’ve read his essays previously). I think I’m supposed to now buy a straw hat and try to purchase a smallholding in rural Kentucky? It’s a superlative novel, powerfully evoking a sense of place and the character of a community. The story itself… Continue reading Rooted in Place
To celebrate that 1993rd anniversary of the Christ walking out the back of death, here's a poem I wrote during lockdown (I've shared it here before) about the wonder of the resurrection's 'bright surprise.' 05/04/33 A day of shadows, hope was kept at bayThe weary sun’s attempted upward riseakin to our heart’s toil to comprehendA… Continue reading Easter’s Bright Surprise
The charismatic gifts, whether we mean the dramatic ones like tongues, interpretation, prophecy, and healing, or the behind the scenes ones we could mistake for talent, like administration, are a vital part of church life. The British New Church movement, of which my own reformed charismatic corner is a part, has had an enormous impact… Continue reading 5 reasons we drift away from the charismatic gifts
When you first touch biblical languages one of the first things you learn is that words have a semantic domain. What that means, in the simplest terms, is that a given word means different things in different contexts; you look up a word in a lexicon and that doesn’t mean it carries all of those… Continue reading Symbolic Domain
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