March 2010

“… Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.”
W.B. Yeats, from “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop”

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Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a fraction of a penny. Calling his disciples to him, Jesus [...]

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“… Thus John Howard Yoder’s claim: ‘The cross is neither foolish nor weak, but natural.’
“‘Natural’? What an odd claim. Yoder, the advocate of Christian nonviolence, claims that the cross is ‘natural.’ What could that possibly mean? For example, we think nonviolence names an ideal, a possibility that requires we ask how [...]

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Christian preaching can never rest on my human experience, or even the experience of the oppressed, as some forms of Liberation Theology attempt to do, because human experience tends to be limited by the world’s deadly, deathly means of interpretation. The world keeps telling Christians to “get real,” to “face facts,” but we have – [...]

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I read a little while ago about a Facebook campaign to get the Christian band Delirious? to the no. 1 spot in the charts. I learn today (from the always splendid Dave Walker at the Church Times blog) that it is gaining a head of steam.
The campaign has since progressed very well without my endorsement [...]

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I don’t think I’m going to be able to be at Greenbelt this year, which is a shame as the lineup looks quite exciting. If I can make it possible to go and listen to Stanley Hauerwas, you can be sure I will. Sadly, the odds are against it.
One controversial invitee is Peter Tatchell, the [...]

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Later they sent some of the Pharisees and Herodians to Jesus to catch him in his words. They came to him and said, “Teacher, we know you are a man of integrity. You aren’t swayed by men, because you pay no attention to who they are; but you teach the way of God in [...]

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On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple area and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves, and would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the temple courts.
Mark 11:15-16 (New International Version)

The 3 synoptic gospels tell us [...]

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At ReadWriteWeb, Rob Cottingham wonders if banning texting while driving might lead some to abandon their cars.
A lot of us treat mobile connectivity as a compulsion, and the enforced hour-long severing from the hive mind for twice-a-day commutes is a genuine pain point. And the growing strength of everything from location-aware apps to augmented reality [...]

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By popular demand…

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“God, for Thomas, is what is (intermittently) shown in the mind’s attempts at stillness … ‘at the frontier’… There is therefore no possibility of speaking directly of God with any truthfulness. Probing directly for the knowledge of God is like the ‘forbidden’ search for one’s own interiority. It will deliver only emptiness and [...]

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Funny and (absolutely) true.

(There’s one rude word in this video, but it can’t be offensive because I got this from Bishop Alan)

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The latest roundup from Allan Bevere.

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JESUS comes with all his grace,
Comes to save a fallen race,
Object of our glorious hope,
Jesus comes to lift us up!
Alleluia!
Let the living stones cry out!
Let the sons of Abraham shout!
Praise we all our lowly King,
Give him thanks, rejoice, and sing!
Alleluia!
He hath our salvation wrought,
He our captive souls hath bought,
He hath reconciled to God,
He hath washed [...]

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I’m a non-Catholic will a high Roman Catholic theological viewpoint 68-71% (according to the online quiz, “What’s your theological world viewpoint?” ) I have a good number of Catholic relatives and friends. As a kid, and often as an adult, I found much deeper theological and spiritual grounding in Christmas Eve masses sponsored [...]

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“Every Christian has to make a transition from the child’s ‘We believe still’ to the adult’s ‘I believe again’. This cannot have been easy to make at any time, and in our age it is rarely made, it would seem, without a hiatus of unbelief.”
W. H. Auden, quoted in Roger Lundin, Believing Again: Doubt [...]

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On this day (March 24th) in 1980, Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of El Salvador, was assassinated by a US funded death squad while preaching at Mass.* Here are five quotes from the man whose statue stands with nine other twentieth century martyrs (including Maximilian Kolbe, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Martin Luther King) above the Great West [...]

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Last supper ‘has been super-sized’, say obesity experts
The food portions depicted in paintings of the Last Supper have grown larger - in line with our own super-sizing of meals, say obesity experts.
The Cornell University team studied 52 of the most famous paintings of the Biblical scene over the millennium and scrutinised the size of the [...]

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Heading south again to a meeting in Cardiff with my colleagues there, and from thence to ministerial synod. Can life get any more exciting? However, going by train is much easier than driving and doesn’t take much longer when going to the capital. Elsewhere is a different story, but as I’m not going elsewhere [...]

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