This blog post is part of a series (starting here) exploring what Charles Taylor can teach us about how faith and secularity interact in his (enormous) work A Secular Age. One of Taylor’s main points seems to be that there is a big story in our culture that Science inevitably replaces Faith. Matthew Arnold’s poem On […]
When we look outwards, we see the wheeling, uncaring universe. When we look within we are stirred by the call to self sacrifice of ANZAC day. How do we make sense of our lives in a way that joins the little picture of my life to the big picture of the universe?
In a video on the Oprah Winfrey Network, Brene Brown talks about how she “fell in love with the faith and the mystery piece.” However, over time her experience of church, “became less about faith and mystery, and more about politics and certainty.”
What does it mean for a church to live in “faith and mystery” rather than certainty? What is the relationship between “certainty” and “mystery” in a community of faith? Is the preacher really quite as certain as she or he seems? What lies behind the drive to certainty, and is there another way for a church to live with faith and well-honouring the mystery at the heart of life?
What is the Gospel? This is a harder question to answer than you might think. Especially when you’re put on the spot. And especially when you have been studying theology for most of the last ten years like I have. It’s actually not a question that comes up much in one’s life in such a […]
A sermon I preached at Glen Iris Road Uniting Church on 19/11/2017 on the Parable of the talents – Matthew 25:14-30 The video I just showed is a trailer for one of my favourite comedy series – the Detectorists. It’s a gentle, wry comedy about friendship and love and the deep desire for buried treasure. […]
What I learned about suffering from the story of Jonah and his whale.
I’ve been very preoccupied by my CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) unit these last few months, which has put paid to my desire to blog. However, at college this week we did a sequence on public theology. This is what I had to say. Life, said the Buddha, is difficult. This seems like a very basic […]
What is the church for? As you can imagine, this question often comes to me as I work my way through my three years of ministerial formation. There seem to be a lot of committees – and I don’t think renaming them “councils” makes them any more glamorous, a lot of OH&S, a lot of […]
People claim we live in a secular society, from whence the gods have fled. But, on the contrary, the gods walk among us.
In Carlton, where I work and spend a lot of my time “studying” (aka drinking coffee in cafes, occasionally adding a little cake, (purely for my health’s sake)), the local government has built a beautiful library called the Kathleen Syme Centre. It is a state of the art facility, including a space for the senior […]
Alister Pate