"If Christians have anything to offer this contentious age, it is truth, and we should not shy away from that truth." "It is only loving to hold to Biblical truth if that truth comes wrapped in love." These two sentences, heading up consecutive paragraphs in a chapter called "Challenging the Church" serve as a great summary of the ethos and intention of God and the Transgender Debate by Andrew Walker, a book that succeeds so admirably in what it set out to do. Up until a few years ago, to question gender would have been an absurdity. I don't think it would be a stretch to suggest that, a decade ago, even Phillip Schofield would have raised an eyebrow at the thought of someone believing themselves to be of the opposite gender (or something completely non-binary) to the one they were born with. But now, in 2018, we find ourselves, as a society, adrift in a new wave of ideologies that challenge so many of the basic cultural practices and assumpti...

I found this post whilst doing a bit of housekeeping in Google Drive. It's a bit old now I think, maybe three or four years, but it seemed like it was worth sharing. Enjoying life A couple of weeks ago Katie and I were out and about, foraging. A good couple of acres worth of free food exists along the cemetery path near our home and we collected enough blackberries to make two litres of blackberry gin and a dessert! I was wondering, though, why we were able to pick tasty, ripe, nutritious fruit from what was meant to be God's curse on the earth, a thorn bush. Surely a curse is void of positive, and should not be accompanied by signs of life and sustenance... Oh, wait, we're still alive! We find the account of God cursing humanity with toil, labour and thorns in the book of Genesis. But what's even more surprising than a fruit-bearing curse is found earlier in the plot. In Genesis chapter 3, God promises Adam and Eve that they will surely die if ...

Brother Lawrence was a French monk, born in 1611. You can read about him in translated copies of autobiographical work entitled The Practice of the Presence of God. It's well worth a read, being full of the beauty of a life lived wholly to the glory of God. Lawrence practised being in "constant conversation" with God and developed a consciousness that every single act that was done in the day, from cooking to picking up single strands of straw from the floor, was a potential act of worship if done with a correct attitude and mindset. It's a pretty thrilling encouragement towards holiness as a lifestyle, and probably warrants a few more posts after a re-read. One thing in particular that has always struck me about the book, however, is from the translator's introduction. In the midst of explaining Lawrence's journey into monastic life, the writer comments on the rather melancholy introduction the monk had to his new religion. Brother Lawrence, he notes, wa...

In my previous post, I gave a brief philosophical outline of the necessarily nuanced approach one must take when considering the nature, and reality of freedom. The reason for doing so is to respond to the difficulties often incurred when thinking through difficult doctrines lines predestination or election. As humans, we are usually opposed to restrictions on our freedom, even if we can agree intellectually with a legal requirement for instance, such as stopping at a red light, we can often find ourselves instinctively compelled toward rebellion at the thought of our autonomy and persona authority being overridden. And so we can find it particularly difficult to yield our consent to paradoxical realities presented in the Bible. The doctrine of predestination, for instance, jars with our sense of free will, in particular, and makes us uneasy in the knowledge that if some of predestined to salvation, others are necessarily predestined to not salvation. We struggle to reconcile ...

We live in a society that values freedom immensely. Perhaps even above all else. Having recently commemorated another anniversary of armistice day on the 11th November, we are reminded that freedom is one of the very few things people will actually be willing to die for. So precious is our freedom to us, that we go to great lengths each year to remind ourselves not to take it for granted and to remember those who gave up theirs, for ours. And it's true, isn't it? To be free is a symbol of human dignity, of value and worth. Freedom is integral to how we perceive our identities, and to know we are free is an essential component of being confident in our self worth. The freedom I'm talking about is, of course, the freedom to choose and to determine, to a large extent, our own destinies. Think back to your school history lessons when you learned about the slave trade. It's seen as one of the greatest injustices in recorded history, that one man would enslave another,...

It's rather obvious from nature that things are not equally beautiful. Compare, for instance, the paving slab mentioned in the previous post, to a flower. Or yet again compare that flower to a carefully arranged bouquet or, again, the bouquet to a well cultivated botanical garden. It's not that the single flower, plucked fresh from the bush, is not beautiful in an of itself; of course, it can and should be admired for those qualities it possesses. Yet to add the imagination, the creativity, and the skill, as well as the greater quantity and variation of flowers into producing an elegant bouquet, reveals beauty greater still, both in quantity and quality. A botanical garden is even more glorious in proportion, displaying an even greater wealth of variety; each component combined to complement another for the sake of being pleasing to the senses. Beauty appears to us in increments, in order that we might experience it in differing amounts and qualities. The purpose of beaut...

I mentioned in an earlier post how knowing the reason behind something's existence can influence our experience of it. I use the example of my wife cooking a meal. I said that the knowledge that she has gone out of her way to cook me a meal I am particularly fond of, enhances the aesthetic experience of eating said meal. I called this tasting the love. There are two elements of beauty at work. The aesthetic beauty of the food which interacts with the taste buds on my tongue that my brain interprets as pleasurable sensation in my mouth is one element. The knowledge that the food exists because another person has counted me as valuable enough to warrant such an undertaking as cooking it, is the morally beautiful experience. And one certainly informs the other. A good meal will always taste good, and knowing my wife loves and values me will always feel great, but the opportunity to experience the meal because of the love is an experience beyond either individually. And the two t...