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?
Category: Spirituality
What I learned about suffering from the story of Jonah and his whale.
I’ve been reading about Effectuation recently. It’s a way of reasoning characteristic of entrepreneurs, discovered by academic Saras Sarasvathy’s research into how a number of successful entrepreneurs got where they were. You can read about her research here. The top level way to understand this is to distinguish effectual reasoning from what she terms “causal reasoning”. […]
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 […]
Consider this archetypal story. A man named, let’s say, Gary is lying in the gutter, covered in his own vomit. He has lost everything – gambled it away, pissed it up against the wall, snorted up his nose. His wife, his kids, his house – all gone. He is absolutely desperate. Then, just as he […]
It used to be so easy. You got up at the crack of dawn to have your enriching quiet time. At church, which you regularly attended (Sunday evening, Wednesday house group, a couple of committees…) the singing moved you, the message was pitched right to your condition. The Lord was with you, and you were […]
This is a sermon I preached a couple of weeks ago about Mary and Martha. You can listen to it here (and marvel at how slowly I’m managing to speak) Or you can read it below. Luke 10:32-48 Sermon at Wesley Church Melbourne 16/7/2016 Life can feel very mysterious sometimes. Random, and often terrible, events fill […]
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 […]
So I’ve been even busier than I thought – I always bite off more than I can chew – but the dynamic site for Spiritus et Locus is up. Missing a few features? Clunky? Far from perfect? Perhaps all these things. But, nonetheless, it’s up, and you can now register, and start adding images. Let […]
Alister Pate 