As the Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill went through Parliament, Channel 4 aired a documentary about “the rising influence of Christian fundamentalism in the UK”, which I watched with very mixed feelings. The documentary was very selective and frustratingly one-sided. It failed to properly define fundamentalism: the way it portrayed it seemed to be Young […]
On Sunday, you may have noticed I wished you a Happy Resurrection Day rather than a Happy Easter. It seems that I’m not the only one who prefers to refer to our saviour’s resurrection than a pagan fertility festival. I’d been planning to make exactly the same point as Ted Slater does in his blog […]
[Disclaimer for those who are hard of humour: This post is a ‘joke’, and as such may contain hyperbole, exaggeration, gross caricature and stereotyping, satire, irony, and downright inaccuracies. You have been warned.] Don’t know your Calvinists from your Catholics? Pull up a pew in our handy spotters guide to the various types of Christians […]
I just discovered a website that claims to “offer the finest in Christian evangelical teaching to the world, for free, forever”. It’s got four main categories by audience: non-Christians interested in finding out about the Christian faith, new Christians just starting in the faith, the “man in the pew” who wants to learn more, and […]
Here’s the translation of the first half of the sermon I preached in Welsh in the Capel Isa and Capel Soar in Nefyn. We decided to do the same service at both chapels on both the first and second Sunday. Since we wanted to talk about what we were doing at that point in the […]
I’ve just got back from Contagious, the Bible-centred youth conference. It was amazing, and I’ll write more about some of the talks and seminars and stuff soon. The theme was the Resurrection, and while there I wrote and performed a poem on that theme, “inspired by” John Donne’s sonnet Death Be Not Proud. Death Be […]
Part one in a series on a Christian view of literature, based on my undergraduate dissertation on that subject. Why do we need a Christian view of literature? Over forty years ago, literary critic Harry Blamires lamented in his book The Christian Mind,“There is no longer a Christian mind”. By this, he did not mean […]
One last post on the PSA debate, since I promised I’d write this a while ago. As I discussed before, there’s a lot of controversy at the moment in Christian circles about Penal Substitutionary Atonement – essentially, the idea that Jesus died on the cross to take the punishment for our sins to bring us […]
Here are some of my articles for Quench’s Debate page over the last few months: Dating: An individualistic, consumerist and self-centred method of relationships? (website, pdf) The Meaning of Life: How the glory of God gives meaning to all we are and do. (website, pdf) Space: The final frontier or a distraction from life on […]
I’m currently working on a couple of posts, specifically: a discussion of the ideas in the shocking final episode of Life on Mars editing some of my contributions to online discussions of Penal Substitutionary Atonement (such as on Ship of Fools), defending the idea that Jesus died in our place to take away the punishment […]