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
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
As I write I’m on the third of three days of prayer and fasting. This is a normal practice for our church, we have corporate times—often three days—of prayer and fasting two to three times a year. Which is weird. In some ways I’m only waking up to how weird it is as I write.… Continue reading On Fasting
This is the time of waiting. It doesn’t look like it if you look around you though. We must be one of the most impatient cultures yet to grace the face of the earth, which is why I’m convinced we need to recover some sense of Advent as a counter-cultural act. This is the time… Continue reading Learning to wait
It’s been 10 months since we had church. We’re in our third so-called Lockdown (it’s our second formal national lockdown) and for much of the time in between we’ve been in local lockdowns or had significant restrictions on our daily lives. At no point since March has life returned to anything I would recognise as… Continue reading Longing in Lockdown
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