The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world Matthew Arnold On Dover Beach […]
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?
What I learned about suffering from the story of Jonah and his whale.
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 […]
One of the controversies I often find myself embroiled in is my use of business style language when I talk about church. This is especially true when I use words like “entrepreneur.” So, I wonder: can a church be entrepreneurial? What, in other words, does Donald Trump have to do with Jerusalem? The resonances of […]
I was recently blown away by Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty. From the huge, decadent party in the opening scenes during which Jep Gambarella, writer and aging roué, is revealed grinning mischieviously at the camera, king of the high life, through the crisis caused by the discovery that the only woman he ever […]
A nun of my acquaintance (actually, I think she might be a sister) told I class I was taking that “your restlessness is what is right with you.” That really struck me because it is so counter-intuitive. The idea that this uncomfortable feeling of restlessness, of always wanting more was in any sense a good […]
This post is about the experience of doubt – what it can be like to question deeply held beliefs about what the world is really like, what makes life living, what the universe is ultimately about. What we might call existential doubt, when you find your whole faith-commitment challenged. A lot of different things can […]
What is doubt? What are its good and bad points? Why is it such a big issue in faith circles anyway? There is so much to say that it is really hard to know where to start. However, I was a philosophy student first, so it is most natural for me to start there, with […]
I’ve been struggling with finding some sort of way to write interestingly about my experience of being involved in Caféchurch. The problem it is unlike \anything else I have ever done. It is entirely all consuming, and has been amazingly rewarding and deeply costly – the most fun, and the most pain, I have ever […]
Alister Pate