Tag: Religion
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Gravity and Grace (1) ¦ Wild Blue Yonder ¦ Living Between Two Oceans
Last night I went with my good friend and doctor of film Gareth Higgins to see Werner Herzog’s latest film ‘The Wild Blue Yonder’. It’s a deeply comic, deeply environmental parable about space travel, aliens, shopping malls, complex math and hyperspace. And quite wonderful for it. Speaking to Gareth afterwards, I mentioned that the path of the…
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Second Life | Second Incarnation?
I was curious. I had to have a look. So ‘KFrank Repine’ entered the Second Life universe and judderingly wandered around trying to make some sense of it all. I couldn’t. So I walked into the sea and logged off. Have I drowned now? Part of me simply wants to mock this whole world, but…
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Salvaged Faith ¦ Baptized in Arial Black ¦ RS Exam Bloomers
We’ve been having school examinations the past week. I had to mark a bunch of scripts (the kids are 11/12 years old) of an RS paper on Christianity. Some of the answers were just priceless: In a series of questions on parts of a church – what is an altar, what is a pulpit……
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Is Islam Violent? | Funding Moderation
The government has just announced £1m funding to support Islamic Studies courses at universities, in the hope that wider student bodies and better courses will encourage moderate Islam to prosper where fundamentalism currently reigns. It’s a course I’d be interested in doing, if only to answer some troubling questions even my basic explorations have thrown…
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Interview in ‘Prospect’ with Rowan Williams | Russia, Suffering & Personalism
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“For most of us it’s a question of what authority we are prepared to recognise, and I think authority often comes from something endured, either by ourselves or someone else. Think of Nelson Mandela. Think also of Gee Walker, the mother of the murdered Liverpool teenager Anthony, who forgave her son’s killers. Suffering confers a…
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Why Does American Christianity Always Seem to Wait for the Real Thinking to be Done Elsewhere?
A few of us have been reading Marilynne Robinson’s wonderful novel Gilead recently. I can’t recommend it highly enough. One episode jumped out at me last night. The trickster, the Prodigal perhaps, of the novel is debating faith with the protagonist, an old preacher, when he asks: ‘Do you ever wonder why American Christianity always…