word | spirit | world | church
When I write on modernity, I suspect I give off the ‘vibe’ that everything was better in some golden age in the past. At the very least I sound like something is profoundly wrong with the moment in which we find ourselves. This codes me as ‘conservative’ in the broadest way: conservatives are those who… Continue reading On Nostalgia
What does Jesus mean by that? I've got a new article out at Mere Orthodoxy exploring this saying of Jesus. This is one of those flashes of inspiration I had, sat in a conference that was expounding why it's a difficult saying, three different books I'd read collided in my head. It took me a… Continue reading Blessed Are Those Who Mourn
We live in a strange moment of time and cultural winds that gets called all sorts of different names, but we can all agree its ‘modernity.’ Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, how concerned we are by it, and what features it has that we should embrace or push against are all… Continue reading The Bombadil Option
Honestly, so does everything worth having. We always have to die in order to rise. The scriptures command us to rejoice with those rejoice and weep with those who weep (Romans 12). That’s a lot harder than it sounds. It is, I think, almost impossible to rejoice with those who rejoice until someone has wept… Continue reading Joy requires sacrifice
The Church’s worship should include the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, with the gathered people of God eating and drinking Jesus’ body and blood together in order to receive from him. The Lord is the host who has laid the table for us. This is the plank of my eucharismatic manifesto which makes the charismatic… Continue reading A Eucharismatic Supper
Walter Bruggeman, in his book Interpretation and Obedience, said that: The key pathology of our time, which seduces us all, is the reduction of the imagination, so that we are too numbed, satiated, and co-opted to do imaginative work. We’ve lost our ability to imagine, and the world is flattened for it. The horns of… Continue reading Reenchanting the World
Have you ever felt like there was more to life than this? Known some sense of longing for the future? Perhaps you’ve enjoyed a great steak done exactly how you like it, or a really well poured beer, or the absolute delight of seeing your team triumphant in your favourite sport (Curling, in the Suffield… Continue reading Feeding our Longing
What is joy anyway? It’s one of those words we all think we understand, but sometimes I wonder. I’ve written before on how longing is the ground of joy, but a friend pointed out that I didn’t actually define joy in that piece. A fair criticism, that if I’m honest was because I was still… Continue reading On Joy
We live in the Between, this now and not yet time stretched by our waiting for the Kingdom to come on the one hand and by its grand arrival in the ascension of Christ on the other. Our eschatology is firmed realised, present and not yet present. The Kingdom is here, the Kingdom is not… Continue reading Longing, Lament, and Joy
Jesus came to give us life, and life to the full. Life that is abundant, excessive in quantity. We know the words of John chapter 10 well enough, but I think it’s difficult for us to picture what that means. I hear the phrase “life to the full,” and I inevitably picture someone into extreme… Continue reading Life to the Full
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