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Thickening Communities I The lack of male friendship is nothing short of an epidemic. The rise of therapy and a therapeutic culture for men and women is, not always but more often than we’d like to admit, a substitute for friendship. We’re lonely, we need friends, and you need good friends to live the Christian… Continue reading Friendship is a Discipleship Issue
Men don’t know how to be friends anymore. Have you noticed? Ancient literature expected men to have close friends, who could bitterly betray them if they proved false and be the close loves of their hearts when they proved true. We could think of Achilles and Patroclus, Damon and Pythias, or for an example that… Continue reading We Can’t Be Friends
Is the Church a 'Family?' An obvious yes, right? Except, where does it say that? You’re about to have a harder time than you expected. You might point to the use of genos in 1 Peter 2, though that’s usually translated ‘race’ and if we translated it family we would mean in the very broad sense that… Continue reading Stop Calling the Church a ‘Family’
Over the Summer, on Mondays, I’ll be reposting some of my favourite posts from nuakh. This post explores how Christians turn everything that should be an 'instrument' into a 'device.' Evangelicals love magic. On the face of it that doesn’t sound like a true statement, perhaps you remember the mild panic over Harry Potter in the… Continue reading Repost: When Christians Love Magic
We are in a discipleship crisis. Caused, perhaps, by the many other crises in the air, but here in the UK our faith is shallow. To be more precise: our churches are not forming us into deep and rich faith. I’ve been writing around this for a while, but I don’t think we’re talking about… Continue reading The Discipleship Crisis
Technology changes our lives. That’s a truism, you wouldn’t find anyone to disagree. The disagreement comes when we speak of particular technologies—whether pesticides or automated looms or Bluetooth speakers—and the particular ways they change our lives. Then we need to add an extra layer, not only are there specific ways that technologies change our lives,… Continue reading The digital world shapes us
Have you ever pondered God’s economy? I don’t mean what is God’s opinion on our economic structures, or a typically American apologia for capitalism as the sine qua non of the Kingdom. Let’s put such thoughts aside for now—though if you want a typically provocative thought on the subject: I’m queasy about capitalism for Biblical… Continue reading Faith’s Economy
Everybody loves community, or they say they do at least. We live in a land that is parched of the life-giving water of friendship and stripped bare of many of the settings that used to make this easy for people. Robert Nisbet in his book The Quest for Community argues that what he calls a… Continue reading The Quest for Community
So, before you lose it, I’m not going to try and argue something clearly mad like “slavery is ok, really,” slavery is evil. I do think that why we argue that it is evil turns out to be an interesting question for theological method. Several years ago, I remember having very long debates with someone… Continue reading Why is slavery wrong?
A little over two years ago the Prime Minister got on our TV screens and told us we had to stay at home. We crashed into our first lockdown that we all thought would last a few months and then slowly began to realise was a two-year waking nightmare. If you don’t live in the… Continue reading After the Plague
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