word | spirit | world | church
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
Do we need more evidence of divine love and affection than the existence of the egg? Most of you will be thinking, “yes Tim, stop being weird.” Which is unfortunately not in my gift. So, you’re right, we do need more ‘evidence’ than that—we need the incarnate Son to give himself over like a lamb… Continue reading The argument from eggs
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
Christians believe in life after death. We believe that God is in the heavens and we are on earth, and that death isn’t the end. We often would say that when we die, we “go to heaven” forevermore. While that’s not wrong per se, the Bible doesn’t teach what I think most people imagine. Having… Continue reading On the hereafter
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
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