Painting Fakes

In the home group I'm part of we're currently reading and discussing Palmer J Palmer's Let Your Life Speak, a connected series of essays on the subject of vocation.  Palmer's central idea is that discovering our vocation is not a matter of receiving a message from God, nor about becoming somebody or something, but about recovering our true selves.  He says that we are born as unique, intact selves, but that as we grow the forces of our families, our schools, our churches and our societies lead us to lose sight of our true selves and take on identities which we perceive that others value.  Discovering our true vocation is the process of digging through those adopted selves to rediscover and own the true self we are born to be.   Reading and discussing this book led me back, once again, to my favourite Ursula LeGuin novel, City of Illusions.  This book has featured in this blog before, but like all favourite books it continues to speak, and there is more...

Shane Claiborne loves to quote his friend, the late singer and songwriter Rich Mullins, on the way Christians read the Bible.  Mullins used to say that it was as if we had highlighters for certain verses.  Jesus says, "you must be born again", so we must all be born again. But didn't Jesus also say, "sell all you have and give to the poor"?  Why don't we all have to do that too? Since I read that, the story of the rich young ruler keeps coming up in my reading.  It features in two of Walter Brueggemann's collected sermons, as well as in the first two of the Second Series of George MacDonald's amazing  Unspoken Sermons, where once again he is contrasted with Nicodemus. All this started me thinking.  Are these stories alternative visions of Jesus - one 'spiritual', one 'political'?  Or is there something that holds them together? The story of the rich young man is found in Matthew, Mark and Luke, with only slight variations.  He...

Easter stretches over four days, with the day measured from sundown to sundown - for us it begins on Thursday evening and stretches through to the close of the day on Monday.  It is an emotionally harrowing time for those who take it seriously and hence requires preparation, which is why Christian traditions include Lent, a period of fasting and reflection, in the month beforehand. The period describes the four literal days of Jesus' death and resurrection, but also four figurative days or periods of time, four states of being in which Jesus' followers live and which we pass through over time.  Let me explain. Easter Friday  is a day of fear and anxiety.  Jesus and his disciples are in Jerusalem, defenceless and surrounded by powerful enemies who are closing in on them.  The idyllic, hopeful life they lived as a band of brothers and sisters, travelling together and creating a new Kingdom of God, appears to be collapsing.  As the day progresses, things g...

I haven't been blogging for a while because I've been too busy with other things - a couple of weeks holiday in Western Australia, lots of work before and after to clear two weeks for a holiday, a journey to a strange land to do a job I can't tell you about.... Anyway, I can tell you about a book I've just finished reading which provides a kind of counterpoint to our current moral panic about Islam .  It's called The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity,  and it was written back in 2001 by Philip Jenkins who at that point was Distinguished Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University although he has since moved on to other academic posts.  To some extent it may be a little aged, but because it deals with long term trends (both past and future) it remains largely relevant in 2015. We often think of Christianity as a Western European religion, centred on Italy, France and Spain if you are Catholic, and on Germany, Netherlands and Britain i...

Over the past couple of weeks I've been reading Thomas Talbott's book, The Inescapable Love of God.    I'm not really obsessed with the question of universal salvation but it does form part of my Christian faith and the question has come up in my church over the past year as some others move in a more Calvinist direction.  So I thought I'd provide a quick review just to keep the pot boiling. The Inescapable Love of God was first published in 1999, but has been out of print for a number of years before Talbott and Cascade Books released a second edition last year.  Universalism aside the author appears to be a fairly orthodox and even conservative Protestant, perhaps in a similar mode to Robin Parry whose book The Evangelical Universalist   was published in 2006 (under the pseudonym Gregory MacDonald) and dedicated to Talbott alongside my cousin Alex. Yet while Talbott's influence on Parry is clear, his book is very different to Parry's.  Parry concentra...

Reading Leo Tolstoy's religious writings earlier this year made me want to have another go at reading Jacques Ellul's The Subversion of Christianity.   I began to read this book some years ago, only to find that the copy in my hands was a misprint and half the text was missing.  Life intervened, and it took Tolstoy to remind me of it. In some ways, Ellul was a French equivalent to the Englishman CS Lewis.  Like Lewis he was a prominent Christian intellectual of more or less orthodox Protestant views.  Like Lewis, he had a depth of theological knowledge but was mostly self-taught (although Ellul did complete most of a theology degree before the Second World War intervened) while pursuing an academic career in a different discipline (Ellul in sociology, Lewis in literature). Of course there are also differences.  Lewis wrote for a popular audience and much of his writing is highly accessible.  Ellul was far more "intellectual" and his writing can be dens...

Well folks, there's been too much politics on this blog lately and not enough theology, so it's time to review a book I've just finished reading on Paul's letter to the Colossians. Oh, hang on a minute... The book's title, Colossians Remixed,  would not normally have got me in. Sounds dull, and Colossians is one of those books you tend to read quickly on your way between Romans and Hebrews. Still, the subtitle, Subverting the Empire,  was a bit more intriguing.  However, what really got me in were the authors. Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat are a couple from Toronto, where Walsh is a university chaplain and Keesmaat an adjunct professor of biblical studies.  A couple of years ago they did a speaking tour of Australia and although I didn't hear them I read the text of one of their presentations and found myself wanting more. The clincher, though, was Walsh's book Kicking at the Darkness , a theological reflection on the songs of Bruce Cockburn . Anyone w...