word | spirit | world | church
Language is a powerful thing. I think we underestimate its power regularly in our lives. Christians often scoff at this, because it sounds like magical thinking: manifesting things doesn’t work, however many copies The Secret has sold. Some charismatic circles go the opposite way and get hyper vigilant over it, scolding friends for ‘speaking something… Continue reading The Power of Language
Someone asked me this a while back and I’ve been chewing on a substantive answer, that clicked for me in conversation the other day. We could phrase it another way: ‘why is the Holy Spirit not a ‘she’?’ To be fair, they asked me a slightly more nuanced question: why is God presented as male?… Continue reading Why is God male?
The ‘problem of evil’ is a philosophical way of framing a challenge that every Christian and everyone who has considered Jesus’ claims knows intimately. The ‘problem’ is simply, if God is good, if God is all-powerful, and if evil exists, one of those three premises must be false. We know the challenge more simply in… Continue reading Six Ways that Christianity answers the Problem of Evil
This morning I sat on the floor in a house I dearly love, emptied of all its things. The three of us—Helen, me, and the cat—sat on the floor after the removal guys had taken all of our earthly possessions and packed them onto a van. We’re moving a few hours south, a long way… Continue reading A Theology of Place
There is no chance after. This line, emblazoned on the wall above my desk, comes from the undisputed best of C.S. Lewis’ fiction: Till We Have Faces. It may seem a strange book to many Christians, the retelling of a Greek myth that you’ll only be very vaguely familiar with (Psyche and Cupid) from the… Continue reading Die before you die
And that’s phenomenally good news. We often hear people declare that they ‘didn’t want to be a burden’ to their loved ones, especially their immediate family. Right now, in the zeitgeist, people might be talking about why they might choose to commit suicide when they’re diagnosed with some sort of life-altering or life-ending illness. We… Continue reading You Are a Burden
It’s a dreary winter Saturday. Frost has limned the limbs of trees with a stark outline against the grey sky. The house is slow and lazy as we sleep and read and emerge into the world. A small bowl of hastily made dough has been waiting overnight, doubling in size as it prepares itself for… Continue reading The Story of Bread
I’m a charismatic, and an occasionally whacky one. It’s not uncommon for people in my circles to highlight the importance of a 'spiritual realm' to how we understand the world. That’s where it can start to go off the rails. There are many mad things said under that heading, but it’s having a resurgence in… Continue reading Seen and Unseen
In evangelical theological thinking we tend to use the category of whether or not something is ‘allowed’ a lot. Our disposition is that if it is not disallowed, then it’s allowed, and we can pragmatically decide whether that might work for us. You see this on display especially in relation to questions of ecclesiology: how… Continue reading Is it Fitting?
Stretching Minds I When exploring Matthew Lee Anderson’s book Called into Questions—which I blogged my way through earlier in the year—I kept returning to this theme that the church should be a community of enquiry. Essentially, churches should be places where it’s both safe to ask the actual questions that you have and where you’re… Continue reading A Community of Enquiry
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