Rev elations

This week we saw the General Synod of the Church of England narrowly defeat the measure to allow women to become Bishops. I am fully in favor of the consecration of women as bishops and am thoroughly disappointed and shocked that the measure has been voted out at this late stage; a measure that has been the result of many years of prayer, discussion and compromise. And many people in wider society are asking themselves whether the Church of England has lost credibility and legitimacy because of its failure to introduce this Measure. As the Archbishop said this week: We have, to put it very bluntly, a lot of explaining to do.  Whatever the motivations for voting yesterday, whatever the theological principle on which people acted, spoke; the fact remains that a great deal of this discussion is not intelligible to our wider society. Worse than that, it seems as if we are wilfully blind to some of the trends and priorities of that wider society.  We have some expl...

Wilfrid Owen’s poetry (see below) introduced me to the reality of war as a student at secondary school, along with Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves these were the writers that helped me see the sacrifice that we ask others to make on our behalf when we send them to fight for us. These writers showed us what they suffered in war, as well as revealing their courage. It is young men and women just like them who today continue to offer their lives for us that we may live in freedom that we honour and respect on this Remembrance Sunday.  All of us have some contact with war today, even if it isn’t with the actual experience of fighting. One experience that stays with me is visiting the S21 prison in Cambodia and seeing the remnants of the appalling Pol Pot regime. It was an experience similar perhaps to those who visit Auschwitz, a chilling and frightening one to witness to the remnant and memory of what people do to one another in war. The element that I found so sca...

Another Angle on the Book of Job Of course, the story of Job is very familiar, at least in terms of its basic parts. The Book of Job is usually considered as a book about the ultimate question: why do we suffer? [See below!] What I want to explore in this blog post is, how the story presents to us what happens when we are confronted with the limitations of our world-view and how a conceptual mind-shift can occur. Most of us have a certain way of thinking about the world, about how things work – and we interpret our day to day experiences with reference to our wider concept of ‘how the world works’. For Christians and other believers, God takes a central place in that appreciation of ‘how the world works’. Who we think God is; what we think God is like, will inform our world-view, and our actions. Well, one centrally important thing that the narrative of Job shows us is what happens to a man or any person when their worldview is demolished by something that happens to...