Global warming, acid rain, fuel shortage, hurricane and flood and fire. One of the gifts an ecological awareness has given us is a renewed sense of sin. It used to be hard to read a prophet like Baruch without taking it personally and either going into a decline over your own shameful life or going …
Monthly Archives: September 2005
Thursday Week 25 Year I
The little vignette from the gospel tells a tale of power and distance. It seems you can’t have one without the other. Herod might have the power to behead inconvenient prophets and the spies to bring him all the rumours buzzing around Jesus like flies but it’s a power that only buys him distance. All …
Maybe-Not-Intelligent-but-at-Least-Tasteful Design
Here’s a rib-tickler by Paul Rudnick about the problems of Intelligent Design: Day No. 1: And the Lord God said, “Let there be light,” and lo, there was light. But then the Lord God said, “Wait, what if I make it a sort of rosy, sunset-at-the-beach, filtered half-light, so that everything else I design will …
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Friday Week 24 Year I
Following Jesus sounds almost straightforward in Luke’s gospel today. He makes his way around the place, doing his stuff, speaking Good News. And we follow. Physically follow after him. In his steps. Not too much to it. The author of the letter to Timothy paints an altogether messier portrait of what it means to follow …
Catching My Eye
The morning papers had a few items that made me pause and think: In the Guardian Simon Schama, with his own convoluted eloquence, is comparing the twin tragedies of 9/11 and Katrina. The Independent picks up a frightening possibility that the US may adopt a strategy of nuclear first use against WMD. The Guardian Online …
Sunday Week 24 Year A
‘He who exacts vengeance will experience the vengeance of the lord’. That’s what the folk wisdom of Ecclesiasticus says. So why can’t I preach a homily underlining that? Let the parable be Jesus threatening us into forgiveness—making an unforgiving heart an unforgivable sin. Partly it’s because I don’t want a schizophrenic God who can be …
Hurricane Theodicy
Hurricane Katrina, like the Christmas Tsunami, has had us all interpreting and excusing or blaming God in one way or another. I’ve mentioned several opinions in my recent posts but wanted to add a few more. Edward Rothstein in the New York Times raises the subject of disaster and theodicy. Today’s Guardian has a piece …
Seeing What Isn’t There
What sex is your brain? That’s the question a BBC programme, Secrets of the Sexes, asked a short while ago. I didn’t see it but a number of people pointed me at an online quiz based on the programme. Not surprisingly, given my profession, I scored quite highly on the skills supposedly belonging to ‘female …
Complicity
Jeff over at Preaching Peace is saying some important things about New Orleans and what is revealed ‘in the poisoned mirror of the waters covering the city’. ‘We are complicitous. We elected people because they promised to keep our taxes low. They kept our taxes low at the expense of the levees. We elected people …
Sunday Week 23 Year A
New Orleans has haunted me this week. Watching what happens when the wind and the waves take our presumption of civilization and slap us in the face with it. Some commentators have agonized over such an act of God. A few bigots have taken that phrase literally and gloated of God punishing New Orleans. I …