Category: Emerging Church
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Some Ideas for Commemorating 9/11
It’s that time of year again, so how might we begin to find a rhythm for commemorating 9/11 and/or the July London bombings? Perhaps, in our local communities, we could build huge bonfires, and all gather round them, faces glowing in the heat. We could make effigies of Bin Laden, or Mohammed Siddique Khan, and…
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Signs of Life in the Churches
As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been really enjoying Roger Deakin’s meditation on trees ‘Wildwood‘. In one passage on ‘The Sacred Groves of Devon’, Deakin goes in search of the ‘Green Man‘ – the woodland spirit of rebirth often seen carved into beams in old churches – in various villages. He notes the…
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Rites of Passage | Atheists Marking Life’s Big Events
Interesting piece in this week’s Time Out: atheist Tim Arthur talks about the privilege of being asked to be ‘celebrant’ of friends’ marriages. He has done so four times, and wonders if he’s asked because he is a theatre director and has a degree in religious studies: people think he’s like a vicar, and he…
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Web 2.0 | It’s All About the Sacred | Festival and Carnival
I guess sometimes you can’t see the woods for the trees. I recently posted a piece about René Girard’s thoughts on the essentiality of the sacred to human experience – something Dawkins et al ignore in their anti-religion positions – and I also posted something on Facebook and friendship. But it took a beer with…
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The Dead Console the Living?
I am reading through a manuscript for a friend which is partly a memoir of his growing up during ‘the troubles’ in Northern Ireland. As I’ve been doing so, I was reminded of a quote by the Irish journalist Jack Holland, who wrote that “the tragedy of Northern Ireland is that it is now a…