Category: Emerging Church
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‘The Referee’s a W*nker!’ | Sport and Divine Violence
April is the cruelest month… Easter always coincides with the culmination of the football season in Europe, and a number of things have been leading me to think about the nature of sports and games and their connection to aggression and violence. Enlightened religion is very big on peace and harmony, but I’ve begun to question…
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Piss Christ | Sanitising Death and Torture
Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ is back in the news again after Christian fundamentalists took a hammer to a print of it in a gallery in France. If you’ve never seen the photograph ‘up close’ then I’d highly recommend it. It’s far more beautiful than the title suggests, and a subtle piece of trickster-work. It is…
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Religion as Theatre :: A Willing Suspension of Disbelief
I’m reading Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare at the moment. It’s a brilliant book, grounding the often mythic character of the bard into his real world of Elizabethan London. I’d highly recommend it. One quote that jumped out at me the other day in within a discussion of Anthony and…
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If you don’t die to self, then Heaven will be Hell
I’ve just finished reading Rob Bell’s book Love Wins – and will be reviewing it for Third Way magazine (ie, buy that too, it’s not this post, I promise). It’s a really great book; I highly recommend it. It’s very very readable – which, for some, may be read as a euphemism for ‘dumbed down’…
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Crushed Testicles | Living in Theological Fear
I’ve just been reading a post by Frank Viola over on his blog, where he’s put up an interview with Paul Copan, author of ‘Is God a Moral Monster.‘ Part of it really made me sit up and think: Question: Deuteronomy 23:1 says, “No one whose testicles are crushed or whose male organ is cut…
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Free Will | Determinism | Heaven | Hell
Very good episode of In Our Time this week, which looked at free will. 50 mins or so – and very well worthwhile listening to, especially in the context of the debate on heaven and hell which is still rumbling around the publication of Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins. There are serious problems on…