October 2022

Over the years I have grown to love this time of the Christian Year when we remember the departed; those we love but see no longer and miss terribly; those we never knew but whom we respect the memory of and those called ‘saints’ by the Church. When we sing; ‘For all the saints ...’ saints for me means not just those ‘official’ saints but those hidden saints as well.

In the ‘official’ lists of saints we have those remembered for their pious lives our courage in the face of adversity and they are listed as; saints, martyrs, teachers and writers, doctors of the...

The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the first thinkers to make the point that words are living and dynamic. He put it like this:

“The written word is not only the vehicle of thought, it is the wheels.”

The wheels of thought. Wheels enable things and people to move. Words, Coleridge was suggesting, can move us in the sense that they can inspire us to change and to grow. He shocked his contemporaries by urging them to read their Bibles as they would read any other book. They were shocked because they didn’t understand that Coleridge was a...

What is this that I hear about you? Give me an account of your management. (Luke 16: 2)

How many times have we listened to rumours about someone or something without checking the facts or speaking to the person themselves?  In some strange way there is something attractive about a rumour. We can elaborate on it or embellish it particularly if we do not like the person anyway or they have hurt us in some way in the past.  After all, will anyone actually believe that the rumour is true? We have only to look from time to time at...

It’s surprising how much religious controversy there is on social media. Reading today’s Epistle, it sounds almost as though St Paul anticipated this, for he tells Timothy to warn the members of his congregation

…that they are to avoid wrangling over words, which does no good but only ruins those who are listening.

And it’s true that too much theological argument never gets above the level of wrangling over words. Yet the corner of cyberspace that you might call Anglican Twitter can be quite rewarding. At the moment, there is a passionate but well-informed debate about the rights and...