What does it mean for Jesus to promise abundant life in a world beset by COVID-19? What does it have to tell us about abundance?
Category: Faith
What do you are you looking for? It’s a fundamental question. What is it that you really, deep down, under all the surface nonsense and trivia of your life, long for?
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 […]
What is the Gospel in our age of anxiety?
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Love Your Enemies
Jesus tells us to love our enemies, do good to those who hurt us, not to judge, to do to other people what we would have them do to us. Is that possible? Is it even desirable?
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Do Not Be Afraid
Imagine yourself a tourist in New York City on the 8th of November, 2001. You’ve gotten up early in the morning to take in the sights, and you find yourself gazing up at the enormous glass and steel man made mountains that were the World Trade Centre….. If even something as permanent seeming and invulnerable as the Twin Towers can come down, glinting in the sun one moment and a nightmare of ash and collapsed building materials the next – then what can you trust? What can you have confidence in?
What does the festival of All Saints have to do with understanding the Book of Revelation? Surely in this world come of age the time has come to turn our backs on such highly coloured images from our ancient past?
Or has it?
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What do you want?
Jesus asked James and John: “What do you want me to do for you?”
It’s a hard question – As the psychologist Abraham Maslow said: “It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.”
There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. That man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil. Job 1:1 So begins the book of Job. It’s a kind of fairy story really. Job is an archetype of the good man. He has no […]
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 