CHRISTIAN LIFE
Flooded Out: Can you HELP a dear friend in Romania?
I can’t quite believe it but I first met Dani Oprean 12 years ago now, during my first visit to Romania. We had little idea
27th June 2020
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faith
BOOKS/WRITING
Echoes from Eternity: 34. George Herbert (revisited)
The urge to return to Uncle George was irresistible. He is so lucid but honest; so lightly humourous, but theologically weighty. I actually filmed this
18th June 2020
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CHRISTIAN LIFE
Healthy Faith in the Coronavirus crisis
I meant to post a fortnight ago, but it kept slipping my mind. Ironic really because this project completely commandeered my headspace for 10 whole
21st May 2020
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20th Century
1917 and the Futile Pilgrimage
I got rather carried away after I saw the latest Sam Mendes film (in the cinema with friends in the States last October… who’d have
23rd April 2020
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20th Century
Echoes from Eternity 17. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison poems
This is Holy Saturday. It’s an in-between day, a limbo. It is deeply unsettling, especially if you need your world to be categorisable, identifiable, graspable.
11th April 2020
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20th Century
Echoes from Eternity 16: John Stott’s Cross of Christ
It is Good Friday so the subject matter for the day’s reading presented itself easily enough. Choosing what to read, however, was a very different
10th April 2020
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beauty
Echoes from Eternity 15: John Bunyan’s Doubting Castle
For this Maundy Thursday, here’s a favourite purple passage. If I’d been on the ball, I would have obviously put the Alan Paton passage tonight.
9th April 2020
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18th Century
Echoes from Eternity 13. Christopher Smart’s Cat Jeoffry
I know little about Christopher Smart (1722-1771), apart from the fact that the suffered the torments, like his almost contemporary William Cowper, of an eighteenth-century
6th April 2020
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18th Century
Echoes from Eternity 5. A letter from William Wilberforce
Today’s lockdown reading is unique. It’s never been published before (apart from being posted on this blog about four years ago) but I think you’ll
22nd March 2020
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19th Century
Q Marks the Spot 137 (March 2020)
Sacred Treasure There has been much heat and hurt recently about power abuse and church ministry. It is something that I’ve been working on and
1st March 2020
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20th Century
Promoted to Glory: the incomparable Frances Whitehead
Despite the relative freedom that singleness brought him, John Stott would never have achieved everything he achieved in his 90-year life were it not for
2nd June 2019
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art & painting
Q Combinations 21: The big IF of Easter (from AE Housman & Eugène Burnand)
There is an emotional complexity to this wonderful painting by Swiss artist Eugène Burnand. I know very little about him, apart from the usual resort of Wikipedia. But he manages to capture a moment of almost frantic inquisitiveness, as Peter and his young, fellow-disciple John rush in the golden sunrise light to the burial garden. Their faces seem filled with anxiety, confusion, hope, wonder, and longing all at once. Hoping against hope, but fearing a con, or something worse? Could Mary Magdalene, first to visit the tomb, possibly have been right…?
21st April 2019
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