Christianity
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One thing I managed to leave out of my post on Cove Park was any mention of just how emotional an experience it was. Several of us, myself included, were in tears at one point or another in the week. This is not surprising, as it was demanded of us that we go deep into
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I was asked by my church leadership a while back to write something based on the prayer from chapter 2 of the Book of Jonah to be used in a sermon series on the prophet’s story. Requests like that are always tricky, but I accepted and, having managed it, I read the piece at the
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This weekend’s* Saturday poem in The Scotsman was the title poem from The Ambulance Box**. Great publicity for the collection! I’d heard several weeks ago that it was happening and knew the date but it only occurred to me in the middle of the week that it would be the Holy Saturday poem. An appropriate
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Technically, I’ve let the 250th anniversary of Robert Burns‘s birth pass without comment, but I could hardly let it pass without mention, even if a touch belated. I’m not going to regail you with an online immortal memory; I’ll simply point you in the direction of one of my favourite pieces of Burns. I love
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Interesting short post about Christianity and poetry on Todd Swift’s blog Eyewear. Swift says: Christian poetry, in Britain, has become nearly as invisible as God – partially due, no doubt, to the fear on the part of would-be practitioners of such verse, that such discourse would lead away from the irony, or ambiguity, expected (or
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“The joy of the Lord is your strength.” (Nehemiah 8:10) It’s a verse often used in certain quarters, under the rubric of encouragement, to bludgeon the hurting for a failure to demonstrate happiness in pain. No thought given to the harm this misapplication does or what it implies, namely that God is not to be
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I don’t know where Simon Barrow came across this quotation on grief from Rowan Williams, but it’s worth reproducing here: “[G]rief and desperate loneliness aren’t political things but human things. It’s only when we can get to the humanity can we begin to get beyond the sterility of historic racial and religious conflicts. Facing the
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Just finished reading Alistair Findlay’s The Love Songs of John Knox, a sophisticated but hugely entertaining collection. It’s not often a book of poems has me chuckling aloud to myself almost every page. Even rarer is the collection I pass round colleagues at my day job to watch them chuckle and giggle aloud. Findlay takes
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I managed to scoot up to the Ingleby Gallery on Thursday to catch Alison Watt‘s installation “Dark Light” on its last day. Her shift from white canvases to black is logical: a further step in the stripping down that is represented by her progression from full-blown portraits to paintings of fabric to paintings of purely
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David Taylor at Diary of an Arts Pastor has a very good post on the stoushie about the
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Not that I’m given to watching Sunday morning TV, but I happened to see the art historian Brian Sewell pontificating disdainfully about modern art in churches on BBC 1 this morning. I assume the item, which was part of the Heaven & Earth show, was a brief televisual extension of his BBC Radio 3 show
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I’ve added a couple of new links to the “Faith” section: Foundation is an emerging church group in Bristol in which a friend of mine is heavily involved. The site has some basic information about the group and links to blogs by Foundation members, but consists mainly of intimations of events. Perhaps Virtual Theology is
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Yesterday’s opening of illuminate went well. Just about the right number of people came to make it feel busy without being crowded. The mulled wine, mince pies and lebkuchen went down a treat and everyone enjoyed the exhibts (some of the children who came particularly enjoyed standing in front of the video projector). Photographs were
Amy Jo Philip 