It is an uncanny thing to be told that you shall die. This is an understatement for those given only a short time to live. But if one is young and hopeful, to be informed of mortality feels more like an uncalled-for affront, something strange and difficult to reconcile with one’s sense of self.
Continue reading “Ash Wednesday”
When the idea was recently floated that all children should study mathematics until the age of eighteen, it felt for a moment that Britain had become a classroom of baying teenagers, asking a question I am already well used to as a maths teacher: “Why do we need to learn this?” The cynicism was quite reasonable. Not only was the proposal senseless on practical grounds, but it also showed no appreciation for the real value of mathematics.
Continue reading “Why I Like Maths”
Then Bacchus and Silenus and the Maenads began a dance, far wilder than the dance of the trees; not merely a dance for fun and beauty (though it was that too) but a magic dance of plenty, and where their hands touched, and where their feet fell, the feast came into existence sides of roasted meat that filled the grove with delicious smell, and wheaten cakes and oaten cakes, honey and many-coloured sugars and cream as thick as porridge and as smooth as still water, peaches, nectarines, pomegranates, pears, grapes, strawberries, raspberries, pyramids and cataracts of fruit. Then, in great wooden cups and bowls and mazers, wreathed with ivy, came the wines; dark, thick ones like syrups of mulberry juice, and clear red ones like red jellies liquefied, and yellow wines and green wines and yellow-green and greenish-yellow[1]
Continue reading “Reformed Paganism”
Again, the traveller’s foot plunged into the snow, and he lurched forwards, his weight swinging his other foot out of the snow. Before, his crutches had taken weight off his twisted feet, but now they anchored him more firmly into the thick, thick snow.
Continue reading “Among the Fir Trees”
Meditations upon Christmas and community
Life, I have increasingly come to believe, is all about people; and that is because it is all about love. We were made to love, to give ourselves to others without undue attention to our own concerns. And in this sense the way of the cross, the cruciform life by which Christ has loved us with the deepest love, is not contrary or even additional to our natures, but proper to us in our truest being. The life of self-denial is the good life, after which the philosophers of old so longed and whittled away long hours contemplating, often to little avail. And, since we are such social creatures, that means that the way of Christ, for all its apparent disruptiveness to the fabric of an initially pagan society, creates community in the truest sense.
Continue reading “The gospel home”TO THE CHOIRMASTER: ACCORDING TO RUDOLPH THE RED NOSED REINDEER. A PSALM OF THE THIRD DISCOURSEMAN.
Jesus, the Word become flesh
Through him the world was made
And in the incarnation
The creator God’s displayed
In him was light and life
That shines in the darkest place
Darkness could not supress it
He came to save the human race
Giving those who received him
The right To become
Children of our God most high
Born again to never die.
No-one has ever seen God
How could we ever hope to know?
The Son was there at his side
Grace and truth he came to show!
Grace and truth he came to show!
The Third Discourseman
The following is a very lightly edited version of a practice evangelistic Christmas talk I wrote as part of my ministry training. I’ve edited it to be more ‘bloggy’, less ‘talky’. Feel free to share! It’s on Matthew 1:1-17, which I’d recommend reading and then having open in front of you.
Christmas is about the birth of Jesus. Hopefully most of you know this already, if not I’m glad we could get this point out of the way early. But of course, a birth doesn’t just happen, does it? Something needs to happen about 9 months before- again hopefully most of you know this already, and I’m not going to try to explain for those who don’t. But even that isn’t it. There have to be grandparents. Great grandparents. Each one of us comes into the world as the latest twig on the end of an enormous family tree, one stretching back to the start of humanity. A tree full of stories, couples, relationships. Some cute, some embarrassing, some disturbing. Muck ups and missed opportunities. First dates, dramas, deaths.
Continue reading “Matthew’s Christmas Tree”
At the messy, irritating ends of the human span, our society has put life under threat. Progressives in Britain are desperately trying to follow our Canadian cousins in killing the disabled, the old, the poor and the lonely under the title of euthanasia. Already, we kill myriad unborn babies when they get in the way of our modern lives.
Continue reading “Three Qualities of Life”A Response to the Third Discourseman
I
Perhaps some of our readers were perturbed by the Third Discourseman’s article on the essence of the gospel. We have been so trained to believe that penal substitutionary atonement and justification by faith alone are the central tenets of the gospel – particularly after the proliferation of Reformation-themed talks and books in the last few years – that the claim that these are ancillary (albeit deeply important) doctrines doubtless comes across as a radical one. But the Third Discourseman is right. The gospel is that Jesus is Lord: and it is good news indeed.
Continue reading “No Other Name”
Throughout my first year at university, I struggled to go to bed on time. I would work late and when I returned to my room I would spend hours on YouTube and Facebook and the like, before finally closing the screen, tired and distracted, at two o’clock in the morning.
It fed into a miserable cycle. I would wake late and work unproductively, and finish late again. Night after night, there was something stopping me from breaking the cycle and going straight to bed when I finished working. I would turn on my phone or laptop, fighting off sleep to indulge in the blue light of triviality.
Continue reading “How to Get a Good Night’s Sleep”
The Four Discoursemen