Christianity
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Crisis and Calling: Discipleship after Desolation
I learned what feels like to be called growing up in the Texas hill country. We lived in a small town that was just country enough where kids could roam, but just close enough to the city where we couldn’t get into any real trouble. We would wander, climb trees, play in a creek, run over to a friend’s house down the hill, but we knew we always had to listen for mom’s call. She would walk outside, put two fingers in her mouth, and perform that miracle it seems only mothers can do: whistle. She would call us home. I learned early on this is what it means to…
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What would Reinhold Niebuhr now be saying about events in Ukraine?
It is of course rash to suggest what Reinhold Niebuhr would now be saying about Ukraine: first because he has been claimed by both those on the left and the right of politics, and secondly it is difficult to separate one’s own views from those one posits might be his. But rash though it may be, the question is still worth asking. First, I suggest, he would be looking critically at the position of NATO supporting governments. What is their responsibility for this tragedy? Even when the cause was undoubtably right, as it was for the Allies in World War II, Niebuhr was keen to eliminate any hint of self-righteousness.…
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Curating Spaces of Hope: Embodying Leadership in Uncertain Times
The Queen is dead, long live the King! A post-Elizabethan era begins, and with it an existential shift unlike anything experienced, certainly since World War Two, maybe in our history. When the pandemic hit, Her Majesty said that ‘we will meet again’ and so it was, but in so doing we note the depths of uncertainty surrounding us. Something has changed; deep, intangible, fundamental. Life is more fragile than it was. The cost of living crisis bites, catalysed by Brexit. The Climate Crisis continues, exemplified by catastrophic floods in Pakistan and temperatures in the UK over 40 degrees for the first time. The war in Ukraine rages, displacing millions and…
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Clothing Shame
“I’m on the bus at the moment, can you call me back?” Mandy[1] was homeless and when she left a message on the clothing bank’s answer phone she was clearly desperate for help. It seemed strange then that she wanted now to postpone a conversation. The penny always seems to make the loudest noise when its drop is slowest. “Would you like to speak to Rebecca, one of our other volunteers?” I belatedly asked in an embarrassed fluster. “Oh yes please!” I handed the phone to Rebecca and retreated to the back of the chapel where all our clothing stock is stored. I started to sort some clothes donations into…
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The Future of Democracy
In its 2019 annual Audit of Political Engagement, the Hansard Society asked if Britain ‘needs a strong ruler willing to break the rules.’ Whilst 54% of respondents said yes; only 23% said no.[1] Even given the long drawn-out stalemate over Brexit in that year – in which the “will of the people” seemed to be thwarted by parliament itself – this is a disturbing outcome. The nation promptly went ahead and elected a ruler willing to break a number of rules, before and during the pandemic. Democracy is not only under pressure in Britain. In 2020, the Cambridge Centre for the Future of Democracy warned that democracy worldwide is in ‘a…
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Minifigures and Ministers: Formation in the Church of England
There was a time when a Lego figure was as simple as the plastic person you put in the house you’d built or sat in the car you’d made out of oblong and sloping bricks. There was a time when the great Archbishop Michael Ramsey’s description of a minister in the Church of England as a distinctively full time Christian, ‘the beacon of the church’s pastoral, prophetic and priestly concern’[1] was a fully adequate description. Today however, like Lego minifigures, ministers have evolved to be more diverse than Ramsey’s image. If Ramsey were to comment on ministers today, he would see much that he would recognise; some ministers are that…
