The Lord Jesus is a doctor to the sick, a friend to the outcast. His gospel is food to the hungry and life to the dead. Would the same Lord reserve the joy of singing for the happy and the contented and the certain?
Category Archives: Christianity
On being dark and cold
The sound of God in my ears is an occasion of great joy, which is for now ‘inexpressible’. There is blessing in the longing and the looking. We remember that at Advent too, but in Lent as we trace His footsteps through the desert and the parched land, we draw comfort in the confidence that it will burst into blossom like the crocus. We fast because of the feast. For now, I wonder how to sing: the answer will be ‘Alleluia’.
We are not worthy of the potato
Like Mephibosheth, Christians will dine at the King’s table out of an overflow of his kindness. Every earthly meal is a mere foretaste.
Home, rejoicing
Of course we rejoice to return there, but importantly home is also where (wherever?) others rejoice to receive us.
Timing the Reads?
What Augustine found in the Neoplatonists I have glimpsed in the New Statesman, but like him I do not find there anyone who says ‘Come to me, you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.’
The nth greatest story ever told
H. Richard Niebuhr famously summarised liberal theology as describing how ‘a God without wrath brought men [sic] without sin into a kingdom without judgement by the ministration of a Christ without a cross.’ I have no interest in engaging in theological polemic here. I raise this rather because Flynn’s narrative arc is the other way around – she describes wrath without a God, judgement without a kingdom, and, most disturbingly, a cross without a Christ.
Care, Ovaltine, and Multiplicity
Carl R. Trueman’s new book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, is a conservative thinker’s attempt to understand how western society’s attitudes towards sex have shifted so much, so quickly. Trueman is careful to avoid diatribe – this is not a book about how far ‘off-base’ modern society has drifted, or one proneContinue reading “Care, Ovaltine, and Multiplicity”
Exhaust fumes, earwax, and ecclesiology
Who are you? More precisely, what is it that constitutes you? This is the question that lies behind Daisy Hildyard’s elegant and probing The Second Body, published by the stylishly minimalist Fitzcarraldo Editions. We’re generally pretty confident to call our physical bodies part of ourselves even though they’re inhabited by a huge array of micro-organisms,Continue reading “Exhaust fumes, earwax, and ecclesiology”
Offence and the Gospel
“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that IContinue reading “Offence and the Gospel”
Yikeiatry 