No, really. I’ll explain. As historical records go, the Bible is pretty weird. I guess I’ve always known that on some level, but it came really clear after I wrote about history and how we get it wrong. In that article, I mentioned Chinua Achebe’s quoting the proverb about how the history of the hunt is …
Category archives: Christianity
3 types of church people (just for fun)
Readers, Talkers and Singers It occurs to me that one can group church people into 3 rough categories, based on their preference for expressing faith. The readers. Aka “Bible students.” Spend at least half their quiet time quiet — I mean, reading the Bible.Favourite verse: Matthew 4:4 But he answered, “It is written, “‘Man shall not live by …
Babel, Babble and the Bible
What an ancient story can teach us about getting through to one another Talking to one another is so easy to take for granted. There’s a particular Bible story about language that (whether you believe in the Bible or not) is quite instructive. It’s about the tower of Babel, and the part that has a bearing …
It’s OK to insist that faith make sense
Or, Why St Thomas is my kind of guy I was in church one day and Thomas came up. You know, the guy who insisted on seeing the resurrected Christ with his two eyes before he would believe in the idea of a resurrected anything. The guy who was practically the first to say, “Pics or …
Beginnings
Or, a Christmas 2016 word-gift In the beginning God thundered, “Let there be!”And there were molecules and mountains the word moulding mice and men and meteors In the beginning again God whispered, “Let him be.”And Omnipresent came in present tense the Word into a world almost too noisy to hear… Almost. To new beginnings. Merry Xmas. 🙂
Are mental illnesses spiritual?
I’ll never forget the woman. She was middle-aged, visibly sick, and surrounded by a foul-smelling odour that on closer examination, emanated from her breasts. Her diagnosis: stage 4 breast cancer. It had been diagnosed over a year earlier, at an earlier stage. Surgery had been advised then, but that had been the last anyone saw …
What a wizard story taught me about the Bible
The fantasy of Ursula K Le Guin, Adam’s first job—and me ADAM NAMED THE ANIMALS, we were told as kids. And if you heard anything like the version I heard in Sunday school, he was apparently going round saying, “Hey, you’ll be ‘Monkey.’ And you, you’re ‘Lion,’” and so on. (You had to wonder about cockroach …
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Who says you can’t question God?
It’s one thing to say God isn’t bound to answer questions—but entirely another to say one dare not ask them.