How a fourth century thinker helps us challenge the meaningless universe of (post-)modernity. Was love the answer all along?
Tag: God
Jesus said “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No-one comes to the Father, except through me” Did he mean something like “if you want to get to the Father, you have to get through me first? Is Jesus standing in the way, preventing people from getting to God, like a soothsayer on a bridge asking impossible questions? Or is “the way” more like being the Mandalorian, where “this is the way” refers to a whole way of life? What do Jesus, Monty Python, and the Mandalorian have to do with one another? And was it absolutely necessary to bring Wittgenstein into it?
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Springs Gushing Up to Eternal Life
“So, I see you are something of a prophet. Well then, riddle me this. Where does God want us to worship?” Top quality banter? Maybe. But to ask where we are to worship is to ask how we are to do it, which is to ask the most important question of all: who, or what, do we worship? Because, as Bob Dylan put it – everyone serves something.
Also, one of my favourite topics: ancient religions groups that are alive today, and was the Woman at the Well really a bit of a “loose woman”? Or was she the aunty of half the village, who’d lived through some tough times and was well worth listening to?
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You Must Be Born from Above
What does it mean to be “born again”? What is that stuff about the Moses and the serpent on a pole? And what does “for God so loved the world” really mean? And, finally, what does all this mean for us in the everyday reality of our lives?
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Vulnerability and Triumph
What does the story of Jesus temptation in the wilderness have to do with me? Did Jesus mog Satan into submission? Or is there something for both “the universe was made for me” and “I am nothing but dust and ashes” people?
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The Good News of the Transfiguration
How do we live? This is the fundamental question. Our lives are a cascade of objects and events, joy and sorrow, all conducted in front of the backdrop of a world which just continues on as usual no matter what is going on in our own lives. What do we make of if all? Is it ever possible to say of our lives “this is my life, I want no other?”
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 […]
Advent is about waiting. It is the time between the “now” and the “not yet”, the darkness before dawn, the grain of wheat in the dark, silent earth. The night voyage. It is a time of waiting on the promises of God. One of my favourite stories is Jonah and his giant fish and how […]
Last week I posted about the situation of the Christian churches in the West as I see it. I posed the question “What does Christianity have to do with real life?” I, rather rashly, promised to share my thoughts about What Is To Be Done this week. All my thoughts are based on reflecting on […]
I don’t want this to sound like Cafechurch is a drag, a place where people sit around moaning about how hard life is, but suffering is a topic which we come back to again and again. It is often at the bottom of why people leave their big churches, and what people who search us […]
Alister Pate 