Connecting with Culture - Church

Fan into Flame

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:20:05 +0100

The controversy surrounding this week’s Lambeth Conference will be seen by some not simply as in-house fighting within the Anglican Communion, but as the final nail in the coffin of Christendom. For some, the ongoing debate over homosexuality marks a divergence between secular and biblical worldviews that cannot easily be reconciled.

Defender of the Faiths?

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:39:39 +0100

Extremism. Irrelevance. The twin evils set to destroy the public image and persona of religion worldwide. The first fuelled by minority elements amongst people of faith, and the second foisted upon religion by a majority of those of no faith, dismissing it as outmoded superstition.

Into the breach steps Tony Blair – as our newly appointed defender of the faiths. The former Prime Minister has set up a Faith Foundation whose goal is not just the nurture of harmony amongst different faiths and the eradication of extremism, but also the enlightenment of secular western society in regard to its debt to faith, past and present.

Seven Ways to Change the World

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 14:55:47 +0100

God, according to Alastair Campbell’s diaries, is a political ‘disaster area’.

‘British people are not like Americans,’ he wrote on 20 March 1996, who ‘seem to want their politicians banging the Bible the whole time.’ In Britain, by contrast, those ‘who didn't believe didn't want to hear it; and the ones who did felt the politicians who went on about it were doing it for the wrong reasons.’

This can be frustrating for those British Christians whose faith leads them into politics. But before we start yearning for a culture in which we can talk openly about God in public, we should read Jim Wallis.

rowan in the wrong direction?

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 16:58:54 +0000

‘People may be surprised but I hope that that surprise will be modified when they think about the general question of how the law and religious community – religious principle – are best and most fruitfully accommodated.’

how’s your resolve?

Fri, 05 Jan 2007 12:11:06 +0000

It’s an uneasy time of year: the ghost of Christmas turkey past still haunts your waistline, the shriek of a multitude of battery-driven toys still assaults your ears and your feet are blistered and sore from foraging among the buy-one-get-one-frees.

journeys and stories

Fri, 15 Dec 2006 11:34:20 +0000

Why would anyone become a Christian in Britain today?

Why, when God is dead, religion a cause of global conflict and the church inflexible, illiberal and irrelevant, would anyone in their right mind embrace the Christian faith?

velvet elvis

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 12:59:46 +0000

There aren’t too many figures in the Christian world who are causing a stir right now. Some of us are probably relieved, having grown weary of personalities and ‘power ministries’. We don’t reach out to touch the screen of Christian TV, we reach out to turn it off.

choose your words

Fri, 05 May 2006 14:58:56 +0100

When I interviewed Eugene Peterson for Church Times recently, the author of The Message had a few choice words for Christians who speak jargon without thinking.

‘A cliché is as bad as a blasphemy,’ he observed.

the price of peace

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 10:47:49 +0100

The release of Norman Kember, James Loney and Harmeet Singh Sooden from captivity in Baghdad last week was greeted with relief, rejoicing, heartfelt thanks - and a barrage of questions.

Had Dr Kember, especially, expressed an appropriate degree of gratitude to the soldiers who secured their freedom? Had he and his fellow Christian Peacemakers been right to go to Iraq in the first place, to risk not only their own lives but the lives of the men who in the end were obliged to rescue them? Had they even taken adequate care for their own safety?

beyond the fringe

Fri, 20 May 2005 13:00:05 +0100

If there were one big question you wanted answering, what would it be?

That was the question addressed to interviewees in ‘Beyond the Fringe’, a newly published research project conducted by LICC and the Diocese of Coventry, in which 60 ‘non-Christians’, of all ages and walks of life, discussed their attitudes towards God, society and many other issues.

the funeral of the Pope

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 09:10:31 +0100

Few today can stop the world when they want to get off. But Pope John Paul II has done just that.

His lingering curtain call gripped a mass audience - unused, as we are, to seeing physical degeneration modelled publicly in such style. The eulogies that sprang from a myriad sources flowed like an overwhelming river of praise to the See of Peter. Surely, an incomparable icon for the i–Pod generation.

the twilight of atheism

Tue, 01 Feb 2005 09:35:13 +0000

Atheism has had its day. Once a robust, confident and attractive philosophy eagerly tearing at religion’s ‘moth-eaten musical brocade’, it is today intellectually dubious, morally bankrupt and socially uninspiring.

changing church

Mon, 08 Nov 2004 08:40:20 +0000

Good news! The church is beginning to catch up with the big changes that have been shaping society. Philosophical, technological, political and social upheavals of the last few years have re-moulded the way we live and breathe and have our being – and much of the church has come to realise that it must engage or slowly die.

godly play

Fri, 03 Sep 2004 10:38:29 +0100

Truth has had its day. Or so say the postmodernists. And Christians are beginning to acknowledge that although we wouldn't buy into such a claim outright, nevertheless there is some, er, truth in what they're saying.

when is a Christian not a Christian?

Thu, 12 Aug 2004 11:30:12 +0100

My eight-and-a-half-year-old friend teaches me to follow Jesus. Thankfully, she hasn’t yet learned all the Bible-blurring jargon of the Christian world. She believes with child-like depth, curiosity and wonder – which sadly we lose as we grow up into socially constructed, rational human beings.