There’s a lot of lousy theology out and about on the web, especially from christian and catholic sites. Usually when I’m roaming the net I get more and more dismayed by what people say they believe and even more by how they express themselves. So it is a great delight to come across a blog, …
Yearly Archives: 2005
Wednesday Week 17 Year I
To be honest, after a week or more of Matthew on the kingdom I still don’t know what or where or how it is. I’m sure I’ve learned something along the way with all those metaphors of sowing, planting, growing, reaping. From the people who nurture the crop or maliciously mess it up. From the …
Theology and Experience @ Liverpool Living Theology
This end-of the-day slot and its title, ‘Talk on Theology and Experience’, poses a bit of a problem: isn’t there something contradictory or at least a bit disjointed about ‘talk’ and ‘experience. We talk before an experience and we talk after it but when our experience is underway we are somehow too busy to be talking about it–we are doing it, being it, living it. If we keep stopping to analyze our experience we never get to have any. But if we never talk about our experience we never really understand it, we never grasp its significance, or let its significance shape our lives.
Anyway, it’s my task to introduce the sessions that will follow on the other afternoons this week by saying something today to get you thinking and talking about theology and experience and the relationship between the two…
Wednesday Week 15 Year I
Where should we look for our own epiphanies? Should we wander the far side of the wilderness waiting for a bush to burn for us? Should we shun learning and cleverness and strain to be mere children ripe for revelation? Elizabeth Barrett Browning sees God hidden in plain sight under every interested nose: Earth’s crammed …
Friday Week 14 Year I
Promises, promises… Both our readings promise a lot to those who do not fear but act boldly and decisively. To Jacob and his tiny tribe straggling into Egypt. To the Twelve and the little band who will come after them struggling in a hostile society. Do not worry—you have God on your side. Do not …
Thursday Week 13 Year I
There’s something very disturbing in that first line of our first reading: ‘It happened that God put Abraham to the test’. Especially when we discover the ‘test’ is: go and slaughter your son. Now although the story has a happy ending—if you discount the bills for Isaac’s lifelong therapy—I’m still left with a niggling doubt—maybe, …
Sunday Week 12 Year A
“I hear so many disparaging me, ‘Terror from every side!’”—so says Jeremiah. … Fear runs through the heart of today’s readings. Jeremiah sounds a little paranoid—they are all talking about me, plotting against me—but it seems he was right to be afraid. And the charge his enemies bring against him too is one of fear—they …
Breathing, I Pray
I’ve been reading an excellent new book on praying by Ivan Mann who used to be part of our team here and now lives and works on Cumbrae Island. Ivan uses his own story and experience to make prayer as basic as breathing, freeing it from jargon, technique and theory and, along the way, instilling …
Wednesday Week 9 Year I
Listen to them pray. Listen to Tobit and to Sarah. They are both beyond the protocols of prayer. Tobit wants to die. His life is a misery. He is blind. He has to rely on charity to keep him, or—worse of all it seems to him—women’s work. And he’s going a little mad with it …
Sunday Week 9 Year A
Every year when the winds of winter blow we see TV footage of cliffs crumbling and some poor guy’s house falling into the hungry waves. Why do they build there? Every year we see homes ruined when rivers break their banks. Why do people live there? I was in California for a while: there it’s …