word | spirit | world | church
Autumn’s final blast of anger against Winter’s unthinking hate is over, every leaf that cannot cling to life has lit the match to self-immolate in protest. We have enjoyed the beauty of that unconstrained rage. This is the story the seasons tell—or one of them at any rate. Snow lay on the ground earlier this… Continue reading All Creation Waits
There’s a trope where we see pictures from a concert or a festival or some other notable event and no one in the crowd is watching. Instead, they’re looking at their phones. Of course, they’re taking pictures or videoing the event for posterity or to share with their friends later. It’s not that they’re not… Continue reading Uncapturable
We think of time in a very distinctive way, which many of our forebears did not. We think it’s linear, we think it’s homogenous—progressing in ordered sections we call days or years or hours—and we think it’s largely ‘empty,’ a container that is indifferent to what we fill it with. I’ve been reading Charles Taylor’s… Continue reading Time and the Table
Once a day dawned dark, the clouds hanging limp like wisps of smoke that clog the lungs after a fire has burned beyond its life. Tear-stained faces watched a man displayed, his torn body nailed to a tree torn from the ground and weeping over its foul fate. His face contorted with pain as his… Continue reading It is Finished
Have you ever stood next to something truly huge? The typical examples are the Grand Canyon or a giant Redwood tree, but I’ve not been to North America. My huge things are smaller—in part because my green and pleasant nation is. I remember how small Edinburgh looks from the top of Arthur’s Seat, or the… Continue reading None Greater
How often do you look at the sky? I’m sure the answer is multiple times every day—even if you live in a major city like I do there’s still an awful lot of sky, but how often do you actually look at it? I think we know implicitly that there’s something bad about not being… Continue reading Sky Painting
“What’s the worst that could happen?” Dr Pepper asked us repeatedly—since I don’t like it, I always assumed that drinking it was punishment enough. They also printed this under the ingredients which is wonderfully self-aware marketing, if a little dark. Though, I read that this was not their slogan outside of the UK, so perhaps… Continue reading Taking the Long View
At the height of the pandemic, I was invited by one of my best friends to preach at his church in Manchester, which of course meant via Zoom from my living room. This collided with the height of our house renovations—we had a labourer in to strip the old plaster off the halls, stairs and… Continue reading Eternal Surprise
One of the features of Charles Taylor’s argument in his great (in every sense!) work A Secular Age is that we are a people who are disenchanted. We no longer readily believe in magic, or that hobs sour the milk. We find supernatural claims extraordinary, and all of us—even believers—find that our ‘social imaginary’ means… Continue reading The Myth of Disenchantment
There’s something about trees. Being around them is good for us. There’s a wealth of evidence that our mental health is positively affected by being around trees, but for now let’s take that as read and try to think a little more theologically about why that might be. The Bible uses trees a lot. We… Continue reading On Trees
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