What is church for? In Australia hardly anyone goes, even when it’s livestreamed and there’s not much else to do. Is it important? And if so, why? What does Jesus’ interpretation of the law have to do with it? And what’s with the picture of the suspension bridge?
As the lockdown drags on in Melbourne, gratitude just gets harder. Suffering becomes a kind of blindness as we are turned in on ourselves. But could suffering be an ironic teacher that knocks us out of our limited ways of seeing the world? Could gratitude be a way forward?
What is freedom? Is it browsing down an eternal supermarket aisle searching for breakfast cereal? Or is it more like being a tree growing into full tree-ish-ness beside a river?
What is the Good Life? Is it the firm thunk sound your Mercedes’ door makes as you shake your impeccably coiffed hair and drive off into a beautiful future? And what does the Good Life have to do with being of the mind of Christ?
What does believing in three impossible things before breakfast have to do with the transformative possibilities of a life in touch with that base reality we call God? What does Google Maps have to do with the Pacific Ocean? And can can Astronaut Mark Watney help?
What does a classic call to adventure story from almost two thousand years ago tell us about the relationship between Discipleship and the self-actualisation that we desire?
For a lot of people, Christmas is an ambivalent time. Emotionally complex. It holds a lot of stuff – both good and bad. For some, it is easy to enter into the spirit of it, perhaps reclaiming that childish delight. For others, it is marred by grief or difficult family relationships. As children we might […]
Christian leaders go wrong. We should talk about it. A few unstructured thoughts from a Cafechurch session.
What is the Gospel in our age of anxiety?
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 […]
Alister Pate