2024-04-07 09:02
I'm a bit of a fan of medieval mysteries especially where there are monastic and religious dimensions to them. That's what drew me to reviewing this one. My hope is that the history is well… Read More
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Nouslife Blog
nouslife.blogspot.com
not-nearly-random-enough loggings of what feeds my promiscuous curiosity. Your pay-off is some useful[?] links and provocative thoughts but also more insight than you may care on my thought-processes.
2024-04-04 14:42
An article recently published in Prospect magazine under the header The Marshall Plan, has a lot in it that seems well noted and there's a degree of sympathy in the writing, allowing for it… Read More
2024-03-14 17:10
Blurb that drew me in: Exploration highlights specific episodes and characters of the Biblical narrative from Moses to Herod. These details are later used as examples, specific in… Read More
2024-02-19 14:58
Intro
This is a paper I wrote for a recent gathering of people involved in thinking about spiritual accompaniment in our region.Reading Jane Shaw's volume, I was struck what a different
wor… Read More
2024-02-12 10:50
A very interesting development was reported from Austria. An heiress is giving away a big chunk of an inheritence. Her basis for doing so is that she has not earned it.I have inherited… Read More
2024-02-11 09:29
Some contributions to a Mastodon thread on wealth and the wealthy seemed to me to be worth further reflection Read More
2024-02-10 13:09
Lately, I've found myself more and more talking with other people about the Bible in terms of a kind of evolutionary pressures understanding of composition and preservation. In doing t… Read More
2024-01-26 07:41
It's funny sometimes how things that are related pop up together and yet there's no intrinsic necessary connection, or it's that, alerted, a mind notices what it might otherwise have s… Read More
2024-01-23 06:45
I came across this article recently that explores something I'd recently begun thinking about. In part I was thinking about it because of recent conversations and also the persistent t… Read More
2024-01-03 08:14
I found this informal survey being reported and the result seemed to me to be something really significant. Something that those of us interested in the future of Christian faith proba… Read More
2023-12-30 10:49
(If you want to follow suit before 31 Dec 2023 get some further info here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ew0EjM1b5MQwS8QmmI-UHLuX8xYh49A8JLv1kA8cEVw/edit ) Dear Mr Manning,As a popular… Read More
2023-12-28 09:57
I found this quote in a Toot today and find it thought-provoking as I have sometimes used 'allegiance' as a way to talk about following Christ. "Take the idea of loyalty. I don’t… Read More
2023-12-28 08:15
I've been watching the TV series 'Foundation'. I read the books about 50 years ago (I know!) but scarcely now remember anything but an outline and some character names. A lot has happe… Read More
2023-11-17 09:23
The starting point for this reflection is one of this morning's lectionary readings. Matthew 6:1 Beware of practising your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you… Read More
2023-06-24 11:52
The topic of this book is important as we are seeing a rise in all sorts of hatred across many societies. Social media seems not to helping -rather the reverse: fanning the flames. Our globa… Read More
2023-04-15 18:41
I think that formation is one of the key issues going forward for the church in relation to climate and environment emergency. This is because some degree of change -no; damage and los… Read More
2023-04-08 19:33
I find myself saying from time to time that we should make more of Holy Saturday. I know that the Orthodox have a liturgy about the burial of Christ's body. I think that holding it as… Read More
2023-03-09 17:31
Issues of biblical interpretation are a constant theme in ministry among university (and other) students. From those trying to treat scripture as if it's a text book, to those who have… Read More
2022-08-25 13:54
It's not often that idolatry becomes a national news outlet topic, but last weekend it did. Though it seems that it's a story that's been rumbling on in more local reporting for a couple of… Read More
2022-06-11 12:19
Despite a lot of time spent trying to get people to recognise that our rational and cognitive life is only a part of what makes us who we are and -vitally- only a (often small) part of… Read More
2022-05-06 08:09
I got hold of this book because of two things. One is when I've seen stuff by Tripp Fuller, I've found it interesting. The other is that it's about Christology. If there was a third, it's th… Read More
2022-05-05 06:04
I've written before about liturgy and candles from the perspective of considering candles as technological artefacts and observing their base function of providing light to read by in largel… Read More
2022-04-23 06:37
Recently I've been thinking something along the lines of "What would Tom Sine say?" Some readers may recall Tom who wrote "The Mustard Seed Conspiracy" in the early 1980s and continued writi… Read More
2022-03-15 17:22
Here's the text of an email I recently sent to my bishop. Repro'd here in case anyone else wanted to do similarly. Amidst all of the domestic and international news lately it is easy t… Read More
2022-01-11 20:13
This article in the Church Times has prompted me to return to an earlier train of thought about Zoom (other platforms are available!) and communion. In this case the presenting issue is usin… Read More
2021-12-30 07:53
In a seminar about what money is I was at recently -on a certain online platform- in the chat someone asked, I think slightly tongue in cheek -but it does open up an interesting line o… Read More
2021-12-18 15:27
I got this because it intrigued me. You may get a sense of why from the blurb: The authors of Grounding Our Faith in a Pluralist World believe they've found the way out… Read More
2021-12-13 10:22
There are lots of good ideas for how we can begin to do things to help reduce our national carbon footprint and do so systemically and justly. However, many of us when we talk about th… Read More
2021-09-16 11:09
For a number of years, I've been using some odd moments to re-connect with economics which I learnt as a subject for A-level and which learning I have been able to marshal to understand the… Read More
2021-07-29 06:08
One of the biggest problems I think I come across in Christian education is what I think of as a flat reading of scripture. By this I have in mind treating the whole bible as some kind… Read More
2021-07-23 15:34
The title pretty much tells you, but here's what the author says:It is about two things, tightly interweaved but seldom thought of as connected. They are: Being a child, and being a peacemak… Read More
2021-06-15 06:32
I got interested in this book because its "call us to embrace the radical ministry of peacemaking in response to our destructive online world." is very much been on my heart and at the back… Read More
2021-04-10 15:00
Since the beginning of Lent, the first few lines of TS Eliot's Ash Wednesday have been revisiting. It's not that I have any great insight into the poem but rather because a phrase is resonan… Read More
2021-04-09 12:16
I just read this:Franklin Graham invested $10 million of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s money in his 2016 Decision America Tour to each state house in the country. Billed… Read More
2020-12-16 10:32
Lately, I've been finding myself appreciating poetic writing more, and that's what drew me to the description of this book: I really delight in fresh expressions of thought and feeling that… Read More
2020-11-14 08:09
Having now outlived both my parents, I find myself wondering more about funeral arrangements in a more personal way. And it is notable to me, being involved as I am, from time to time, in th… Read More
2020-11-09 12:09
We've been thinking about disposal of human remains lately, particularly our own when eventually it needs to happen: what do we want to do? Mostly our thinking has been around it being ecolo… Read More
2020-07-30 14:56
Reading about Tisha B'Av in the Jewish calendar, I understood that it is much about the destructions (yes that's plural: one by the Babylonian empire and the next by the Roman, there has bee… Read More
2020-06-04 06:51
A prayer for these times:Saving God whom we name 'holy';Cast down the mighty from their throneslift up the lowlyfill the hungry with good thingsand send the profiteers away empty.ձ… Read More
2020-05-30 16:39
I have just found a theologian saying what I've been thinking and trying to express well in the last couple of years. The emboldened clause is the key bit for me just now:In the long term, I… Read More
2020-04-13 14:36
A week or so back, I read an article which was suggesting that after Easter we would still experience an indefinite awaiting time until we would be able to re-assemble (re-member is a term I… Read More
2020-04-01 16:16
Our bishops have produced a brief service of Spiritual Communion When Unable to Attend a Celebration of the Eucharist which outlines a brief 'antecommunion' service culminating in an ac… Read More
2020-03-25 17:23
What drew me in to reading this was that this description rang important bells for me as someone who since my teens in (winces) the 1970s when I joined what was then the Ecology Party and sh… Read More
2019-11-25 13:36
I was looking at the religious-related statistics for my university and it seemed a significant milestone had been passed. For the first time, this year the number of those who ticked the &l&hell…Read More
2019-09-05 13:01
[I]t’s actually the non-angry god who appears morally distasteful, for ‘a non-indignant God would be an accomplice in injustice, deception, and violence.’Maybe, I can&rsquo&hell…Read More
2019-09-04 11:36
Psalm 82 has been intriguing me for some months now, each time it turns up in the daily readings for morning prayer. Here it is in the translation the CofE uses for worship.God has taken his… Read More
2019-09-04 06:44
I considered putting a question mark at the end of the title of this post. It's substantially the title of the CT article I'm about to comment on. However, I don't want to question the propo… Read More
2019-09-02 06:02
One of the motifs that stays with me from early adulthood reading science fiction is robots worrying about whether they have souls. I think I tended to think that if they worried about it, t… Read More
2019-08-10 08:02
Gotta say: this is one of the best articles on mission that I've read for a long time.Redeeming Evangelism: Authentic Mission in the Church of England | Salisbury Cathedral: A lecture by&nbs&hell…Read More
2019-08-03 13:36
One of the premises of this book is that we should look at what people do and how they experience worship, not just do theoretical mind games about it where we think and talk over the heads… Read More
2019-08-02 14:38
Okay, so I have to admit that I'm a bit of a liturgy buff, I have a particular interest in liturgies for daily prayer and I'm also drawn to litanies and preces. I had to consciously rein mys… Read More
2019-07-31 11:28
A commenter to an article I just read, wrote:Almost wondering if this is the onset of the death of democracy and its replacement by ad-campaigners who believe the voting public can be persua… Read More
2019-07-29 11:07
A couple or so years ago, I found myself in conversation about the ministry of university chaplains saying that I felt my ministry was more expressing my diaconal orders than priestly. And I… Read More
2019-07-10 20:39
I find myself thinking a lot in odd moments about rituals and the language of ceremony and how the churches often 'speak' gestural languages that are quite alien, that is, unintuitive, to ou… Read More
2019-06-30 18:17
I'm interested in the ontology of evil -or something like that. Partly because it seems to me that in popular culture we so often find dualism and the idea of 'goodies' and 'baddies' which h… Read More
2019-06-16 06:14
For me, as someone who leads mindfulness sessions is a modern unviversity, this article The mindfulness conspiracy | Life and style | The Guardian is interesting, provocative and c… Read More
2019-06-14 07:39
Join me in writing to EU leaders about taking action on climate chaos. Avaaz - Tell Europe: 100% Clean energy to tackle the climate emergency!:Here's what I wrote:-I'm scared for my chi… Read More
2019-05-28 09:10
One of the things I have noted in Praying the Pattern and which I will be reworking and expanding (maybe with this research!) in the forthcoming Living our prayer and praying our lives is ho… Read More
2019-05-06 11:00
I think that this paragraph really articulates where I've found myself after years of wrestling with scripture, systematics and life experience (my own and others'). It comes from this dialo… Read More
2019-04-01 06:40
I few years ago, I found myself gesturing in prayer. Well, it has happened several times. The first time I found myself shrugging because I didn't know what I wanted to say, what to pray. An… Read More
2019-03-14 08:12
For a long time I've been drawn to Jewish spirituality in relation to hasidic attitudes to celebration and pleasure. As a probable background to Jesus' own spirituality it has been something… Read More
2019-03-10 07:43
It has seemed obvious to me for a very long time that the Bill Gates, Richard Bransons and Elon Musks of this world are not the exceptional geniuses they are sometimes painted to be but indi… Read More
2019-03-03 16:15
The book which publishes the research underlying this article is now on my 'to read' list. Part of my interest is from having been vicar at a church where I was told, when I was interviewed… Read More
2019-02-18 20:46
I really read this article because I am having a bit of a bugbear at the moment about the use of the word 'pray' and 'prayer' in worship and, in fact, prayer meetings. I'm starting to find t… Read More
2019-01-23 21:09
I've loved getting this book into my hands (well, more accurately, onto my screen). It is addressing a missing piece in current thinking about Israel and Christian continuity and discontinui… Read More
2019-01-01 08:13
Just came across this, which says, more-or-less, something I've noted as a result of thinking about corporisations.These new hybrid organizations, although built upon digital computers, are… Read More
2018-12-31 07:22
This is a lovely book. I love that in reading it with children, many adults would be given pause for thought. The illustrations are lovely, making the book a desirable artefact in itself. Th… Read More
2018-12-07 20:48
This is a nicely written book about mission. It's nicely written in that it's based in personal experience which is well-narrated and gives a good understanding of why the author has grown a… Read More
2018-11-09 06:53
I've been involved, am involved, in curating worship which involves multi-media elements and often self-directed interactions with materials, prompts and stations. One of the things that reg… Read More
2018-11-07 21:00
I got hold of this book because I often find Matthew Fox's writings intriguing and stimulating. I read them not expecting to agree with everything but because I think he points his finger on… Read More
2018-11-07 08:51
Fundamentally, Halloween is a humorous reversal. We take bad, frightening or horrific things and treat them as if they’re good because it’s a funny thing to do. That’s not… Read More
2018-11-05 08:46
"Those who have called for the introduction of a four-day week include the Green party and Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress". I'm interested in the i… Read More
2018-10-31 19:27
It's interesting to me that the link between justice and anger is being rediscovered in more popular discourse."...people kept suggesting anger is irrational,” the US-based writer and… Read More
2018-08-08 08:46
I just thought that this was a really intriguing thing. I hadn't come across it before and I'll be on the look out for it among the students I work with.using the voice memo function on What… Read More
2018-08-08 07:53
I like this quote:What we must always be aware of are the deep ideological structures that bolster the myths by which we live, and to make sure that those myths exist for us, and not us for… Read More
2018-07-29 09:32
I'm always interested in language. I keep noting that the easiest way to distract me and get me off-topic is to raise something that relates to dialect or a foreign tongue. So this Guardian… Read More
2018-07-08 17:17
This is a book of essays but they share a family theme, so to say. The writer is a good communicator in prose. There is an amiable tone with a nice balance between well-chosen anecdotes and… Read More
2018-07-03 07:24
This is a very interesting potential precedent, perhaps. Under the Plevin rule, if more than 50% of a consumer’s PPI’s payments went as commission and this was not explained… Read More
2018-06-24 16:07
I few years ago I wrote some words. Light of the World |Now I have some further words to the same tune and using some of the same lines.Light of the world, of glory born,Focusing… Read More
2018-06-05 09:16
When I was a teenager learning Economics for A level, I tried out a variant of Monopoly I'd devised myself based on what I'd been learning in class and textbooks. More recently I've been rea… Read More
2018-05-31 16:11
In a course I teach which includes an introduction to Christian mission, one of the positions we try to get students to understand in outline at least is inclusivism (as per the John Root ch… Read More
2018-04-12 17:46
I just came across this in an article entitled Jordan Peterson, Identity Politics, and the Church – Covenant:"Gender is constructed, but an individual who desires gender re-assign… Read More
2018-04-11 08:17
At the moment, I seem to be making connections between stuff I happen across and things to do with mindfulness. Now this is a bit peripheral to what the linked article is focussing on but ne… Read More
2018-03-31 14:41
I have been hearing some people blessing a congregation using the phrase "And the blessing of God; Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer be with you....". I honour their desire to avoid rein… Read More
2018-03-19 08:29
It's a shame the article doesn't say more about the results that give rise to this assertion:"responses to false news include surprise, fear and disgust. True news tends to be met with sadne… Read More
2018-03-03 11:28
Now I'm not taking a pop at this guy because I'm simply seeing this as an illustration of a bigger matter which calls us to attend to the intersection of popular culture, theology and missio… Read More
2018-02-26 17:29
I think that this is in the same ballpark as a post of mine from a couple of years back.current practice seems determined to deny both the fact and the solemnity of death. We say “We a… Read More
2018-02-25 10:59
Given impetus by the just move to allow people to flex gender-related terms, the pressure to develop a gender neutral but animate pronoun (because 'it' seems to denigrate personhood), I reck… Read More
2018-02-12 11:24
This morning's reading got me thinking.Galatians 1:11-12 For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive… Read More
2018-01-12 12:21
I was recently asked how I thought about chaplaincy as a Christian minister given the secular context, multifaith nature and impacts of globalisation. This was my response. Perhaps I should… Read More
2018-01-03 09:50
A little while back I was teaching a class about leadership and introduced, to some surprise by the class, the notion of followership as being an important factor in thinking about lea… Read More
2018-01-03 09:19
I think this is really interesting and, at one level, not surprising: "Driven by economic scarcity, these individuals will consider the impact of their decisions on those around them an… Read More
2018-01-02 16:26
One of the characteristics of this book is to take Rene Girard's scapegoat theory of human culture and violence as disclosive and helpful for hermeneutics.If the mainspring of the Bible is n… Read More
2017-12-29 19:37
There are things that warmed me to this book before I even read it: I was pleased that the author, Meg Salter, had learned to 'do mindfulness' in everyday life -some of it rather busy and or… Read More
2017-12-16 16:19
Over the last few months, this passage has cropped up several times. The latest being this morning's readings (I started writing this on 14 December) for Morning Prayer. Perhaps noticing it… Read More
2017-12-10 12:01
The article referred to underlying the title text is about why some scientists are postulating that smell may be implicated in autism. However, for me the new learning was that we do, in fac… Read More
2017-12-10 10:54
Just to be clear that discrimination is a Christian issue -that is one which Christians should be concerned about and actively resisting. This research finding: "when an individual expe… Read More
2017-12-06 11:50
Advent has had a varied history. Sometimes in some places it's been a 40 day preparation season a bit like Lent. Sometimes it's been about a week. At some point it started to be thought of a… Read More
2017-12-01 18:41
“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” -This quote (By Garry Kasparov, or… Read More
2017-11-30 19:12
Now I quite like app maps for some things: they can map out a route more quickly and help you to follow it and they don't tend to blow away in the wind. I'm a bit of a technophile and genera… Read More
