word | spirit | world | church
Our age loves unfettered desire. This sounds like I’m talking solely about sex, but if you allow desire to take its broader meaning and think of wants, then it’s true isn’t it? We all intrinsically feel that we should live in a way that fulfils us, that gives us what we want. We all intrinsically… Continue reading Fettered Desire
Dust hung in the air. My skin was rough from living in this house for so long. The taste thick at the back of my mouth, though I was getting used to it. Somehow that was the scary bit. It was brick dust, the one with the thicker, grittier texture and almost biscuity taste: dry… Continue reading Dust
The renowned psychologist Jordan B. Peterson has, as I write, just released his new book Beyond Order. It’s causing the usual early splash you’d expect. Most media interviews are fairly negative, not least because Peterson stands in for a certain sort of conservative adjacent thinking they dislike strongly, even if that isn’t what he represents.… Continue reading Exploring Jordan B. Peterson
Tara Isabella Burton’s wonderful 'Strange Rites' charts some of the wide array of movements among Millennials that are taking on religious character. The book takes us on a journalistic tour of some examples of ‘pick & mix’ religion before describing three movements that Burton describes as religions. I’ll briefly outline them below, but the book… Continue reading New religions for a new age
We live in nihilistic days. We live in quotidian days. Or, in more familiar English: we live in days that are both humdrum and meaningless. The days blur into each other. We go to our workplace; we do the tasks that our employer has assigned to us; we return to our homes to relax and… Continue reading In defence of wonder
The snow melted today, and the world is drab. We’ve had four days of it. We awoke to a crisp blanket laid over our garden, and then it kept going. We did the thing that you do when it snows: we stopped and stared. Every time you glance out of the window or walk into… Continue reading Ode to Snow
I’ve recently finished Tara Isabella Burton’s superb book Strange Rites. The book’s central argument is that descriptions of our age as secular are overstated, and there are three great quasi-religious movements on the rise. More on those movements another time; on her way to them Burton explores a range of subcultures that behave in religious… Continue reading Re-enchanted?
Our world is made of atoms, of spinning particles of energy careering around one another in a fabulously chaotic and surprisingly ordered way. Or so the story goes. I don’t mean to suggest that I doubt the scientists whose work informs our understanding of physics and matter; I have no reason to do so. What… Continue reading We are made of stories
It was sat at a table in the University Starbucks that some of the things I’d read over the last few years about apologetics and Gen Z became real and urgent. I was having lunch with a student who had been around our church for a while. He had come along to my Life Group… Continue reading Useful and True
