Sacred Treasure A friend who pastors in Hong Kong tackles the church's divisions in the face of political turmoil and social unrest. We would do well to listen, here in Brexit Britain...The Simple Pastor draws on some fascinating Pew Foundation…
Sacred Treasure David Robertson is often uncomfortably provocative - but he's probably on the money here: 10 'prophecies' for the church in 2018 An inspiring new tradition in LA, an annual Christmas performance of Handel's Messiah by the homeless, those with…
A couple of years ago, I reposted a little thing I had written 5 years before, An Arable Parable. Now that I'm back at my parents' home for a few weeks, I went for a wander in the field last…
For me, though, the standout of Francis Spufford’s reading memoir The Child That Books Built is the chapter entitled The Island. For it is here that he waxes lyrical about Narnia. It is not just because he chimes with the countless numbers who loved C S Lewis’ books (despite the likes of Philip Pullman and Polly Toynbee). It is the fact that he grasps something of their theological wonder (which will come as no surprise perhaps to those who have enjoyed his Unapologetic). (more…)
Every now and then a book comes along which demands serious attention. Ted Turnau’s Popologetics is just such a book. I should be up front at this stage and declare that he is a friend, so perhaps some will merely assume this is a question of mutual back-scratching. I can assure you it’s not (I’ve received no commissions… as yet). But still, this is a great book. For a whole range of reasons: it is very readable and lucid; it makes its case with wit and self-deprecating humour; it is a model of how to handle disagreement (theological and otherwise) with great grace and generosity; and it demonstrates extensive appreciation of the field and offers a rich mine of treasure to any reader. (more…)
Well, the boy’s done good again. For most of the weekend, Joshua (aka Bananamationman) worked on a very ambitious white-board stopmotion narrating the story of the Creation from Genesis 1-2. It’s frustratingly brief – but then when you realise it took around 11 hours of drawing and photographing each move, you can understand! There are some lovely touches – my particular highlights are the waves, the fish and the bird.
Awesome. Beams of paternal pride pour forth!
All is not what it at first seems. It starts out like the classic boast of the school playground. But the playground is certainly not where it all ends…
Steve Turner is a wonderful poet whose poems always twist and jive with the best of them. I just wish he’d get back on the case and write some more… Get on with it, Steve!!
So here’s My Dad, taken from his first collection for (not just) children, The Day I Fell Down The Toilet and other poems. (more…)
When Avatar came out, I couldn’t help but get swept up in James Cameron’s astonishing conception. This is because a hopelessly bad movie was redeemed only by an awesome visual feast of digital artistry, And others were equally swept up. So much so in fact that I noticed at the time that there was a popular sense of despairing yearning for a world as beautiful and stunning as Pandora. Which led me to start a slightly flippant post called Antidotes to Post-Pandora Blues. I never finished it for some reason, but the exhilarating new Hockney exhibition this morning at the Royal Academy brought it back to mind. (more…)
I’d guess that only the most hardened petrol-heads and urbanites will fail to be moved to awestruck wonder by episodes in the BBC’s latest natural world epic, FROZEN PLANET. Quite apart from the stunning (ant)arctic panoramas, there are the focused dramas of a pack of killer whales harassing and (hours later) overwhelming a minke whale. Or comic moments, like the waddling penguins slipping on the ice, or the traffic jam of two narwhal clusters, equipped with their unicorn-like tusks and having to negotiate a head on meeting in a narrow, one-way only ice channel. (more…)
Came across this fascinating morsel in a short New Yorker article by David Remnick from the run up to the recent Mikhail Khordorkovsky trial in Moscow. This fallen oligarch, it seems, has taken on the mantle of the dissenter from the…