reflections on and lessons from the worldwide church
Happy New Year Y'all! Sacred Treasure Tim Keller wrote a helpfully argued piece for the New Yorker last month: Can Evangelicalism Survive Donald Trump and Roy Moore. Chris Green has a good piece on sermon illustrations Ian Paul asks whether…
STOP PRESS: It is now available here from Langham Literature, and will be on all usual distributors soon. It came as a complete surprise to him, thankfully. But under the guise of a Langham supporters' evening, a number of us…
Sacred Treasure Good stuff: 7 Differences between Judaea and Galilee - Jesus was Jesus of Nazareth... from Dick France. Chris Green offers a rather unexpected but powerful reason to appreciate really soppy Christian songs once in a while. Emma Scrivener is…
IVP has been running a blog series on John Stott's thought - they've produced a number of short videos about it, accompanied by relevant posts. So I was delighted to contribute, writing the article to accompany the great David Turner.…
Having just heard of her death - see WAPO, Guardian, Wiki - it seems appropriate to repost my post from 2010. I can't now remember exactly what I was doing that day, but back in early 1989, I had a couple…
We are looking at ways to add value to the publication of What Angels Long To Read yesterday. So the first element of this is to make the graphics I made for the book (see right) available for download, in…
RANT ALERT (This is v abnormal for me, but I’m quite exercised about it!)
I’m getting tired of people complaining about immigration, and just wish politicians would have the courage to speak up for it. The UK has ALWAYS been a country of immigrants – you just have to look at the history of London’s East End over the last 5 centuries to see this. (more…)
At last year’s launch of veteran travel writer Dervla Murphy’s remarkable book, A Month by the Sea – Encounters in Gaza, she made a simple but telling point. “The Palestinians’ predicament is that they are the victims’ victims”. Of course, in Faith in the Face of Empire, an equally remarkable book by a Palestinian Christian pastor, victimhood (despite its postmodern attractions) is a dangerous mantle. (more…)
U2 can be pretty shocking. If you’ve followed social media recently, you’ll know they’ve caused global offence by giving away their Songs of Innocence album for free (oh, and a nice tidy cheque from Apple for $100 million). I do think that the sum is pretty obnoxious. There’s no way that anyone needs that kind of cash, least of all the world’s most successful band in history (more or less). I’d say it represents, at the very least, a rather grim error of judgment. I have enjoyed some of the memes that this has provoked, though (esp Who is U2 anyway?). But even though that all now seems rather an inadvertent PR disaster, the album contains some genuine shocks which are clearly more artfully deliberate.
This is the first of what I hope will be a regular posting. Yesterday, I was able to chat on the phone with a pastor friend in Aleppo in Syria. He is the pastor of a community that has witnessed in the city for over 150 years. But Aleppo is on the front line of the appalling conflict in Syria (as this helpful, interactive map demonstrates).
It was remarkable to be able to chat with almost crystal clear clarity, even if for only a few minutes – despite the fact that he lives with his family right in the heart of a war zone. (more…)