Sherif is home!
Following on from previous post, there is GOOD NEWS. Thank you so much for all your support of Sherif. Phase 1 of the campaign is complete! Fantastic. SHERIF IS HOME!! Now for Phase 2 – this should never have happened. And who knows how many others there are out there suffering the same fate but […]
Release Sherif Hassan – detained in Egypt because of his faith
On 9th November, we had the terrible news from friends at All Souls. Emma and her Egyptian husband, Sherif, who only got married at All Souls in the summer, were travelling to Cairo to visit members of his family. She was immediately put back on the plane she had come in; Sherif was detained. Over […]
Silenced by U2’s Miss Sarajevo… in Sarajevo
As a bit of change for the last night of the Bosnia conference here, I gave my seminar on U2. And as I was doing a bit of rejigging and final prep on it, I realised it was absolutely appropriate to include Miss Sarajevo at the end of the set list. (This (right) is the […]
A visit to Sarajevo’s Tunnel of Life
This rather unprepossessing, pock-marked (i.e. bullet-riddled) house was Sarajevo’s lifeline during the 4 year siege in the mid-9os. I posted about that siege the last time I was here. Am here for the first ever Bosnian Langham Seminar (the preparations for which brought me here in February) and had an afternoon off yesterday to visit […]
Carson on Titanic, Sacrifice & The Cross
Have managed to get round to reading Carson’s 2010 book Scandalous – to great profit and provocation. Will get round to fuller comments in due course. But for now, I was very struck by this section, in which he ponders the significance of some historical revisionism in James Cameron’s film Titanic. In expounding the divine […]
The gadgets of Q – Charles Fraser-Smith’s secret war
This is not quite the biography of the Man who was Q I was hoping for (for that you need David Porter’s The Man Who Was “Q”) – but then I should have read the small print! But it does recount a story that he was undoubtedly desperate to tell for years but prevented from doing […]
Beauty in the Business world: Andreas Gursky shows East meets West, Ancient meets (post)Modern
Was leafing through the Royal Academy of Art magazine this week – and encountered this photograph filling a whole page. Was blown away. It’s utterly mesmerising and bewildering all at the same time. Where are we? An airport? A fancy dress party? A film set? Who are all these people anyway? And what are they up to? […]
Orchid surveillance at breakfast
Not quite sure how it started, but a handful of very kind people have given us orchid plants over the last year or so. Lovely. They stand in a nice little row along our kitchen window. But over breakfast the other morning, I suddenly had this unnerving sense that I was under surveillance. And as […]
Handling King David’s Successor & the challenge of OT Narrative
Sunday morning brought the not entirely straightforward prospect of starting our series on the life of Solomon from 1 Kings, and doing it on Remembrance Sunday. The passage (1 Kings 1-2) is certainly a tricky one – an account of ancient realpolitik with all kinds of court machinations and skullduggery. But part of the challenge […]
Remembrance Sunday by Steve Turner
Here’s a topical one from Steve Turner Remembrance Sunday At the going down of the sun and in the morning we do our best to remember them, from comic books and photographs and films with Jack Hawkins. At the rising of the moon and in the evening, black and white memories slip away like soldiers […]
New All Souls beta website is now LIVE!
A small team of us have been working for months in planning and preparation – and, at last, the day has arrived. The new version of the All Souls website is OUT THERE! Hurrah. The basic pages have been created – i.e. the information needed by a visitor trying to discover what’s going on. But […]
Inconsistencies and Impositions in Victorian New York: the dangers of Christian presumptions
I didn’t quite know what to expect having picked this book up in the States last year. I think I assumed it would be something on the lines of a Victorian version of Hustle or the fascinating novel Dizzy City by my old friend Nicholas Griffin (who is certainly NOT to be confused with his odious BNP […]
