More of the same?

A thought-provoking reflection by Alison Atkinson-Phillips on the current Assembly meeting. I don’t agree with it all, but it’s well worth reading (for more stories, go here):
Sunday, 19 July 2009 04:57
As he presented the report of the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress to the Uniting Church’s 12th Assembly on the evening of July 16, [...]

Read Full Post »

Jesus, Christianity’s burning bush

I looked up a book review on The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany here.
Surprisingly, it began with these remarkable words, which I am going to be dwelling on for a while:
Jesus is Christianity’s burning bush. His presence beckons to his followers in each generation, calling them to stand before him [...]

Read Full Post »

Holy! Holy! Holy!

Today, we celebrate a great truth: God is one, as Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The early church leader Irenaeus once said, ‘The glory of God is a human being fully alive.’ God’s glory is indeed seen most clearly in the lives of women and men open to the Spirit, and no more [...]

Read Full Post »

The dark side of liberalism

An interesting article by Giles Fraser in Ekklesia on the way liberalism can imagine it exists independently of language, culture and tradition:
Few words are bandied about with such casual abandon as “liberal”. In contemporary theological disputation, it is often assumed that everybody understands what the word means. Yet it can refer to so many different [...]

Read Full Post »

Seven Words: A Good Friday Meditation

The First Word
Luke 23.26, 32-34
As they led him away, they seized a man, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming from the country, and they laid the cross on him, and made him carry it behind Jesus… Two others also, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with him. When they [...]

Read Full Post »

Memory & Hope

Sermon for Holy Thursday (9 April 2009)
John 13.1-17, 31b-35
At this time of year, we look back to the foundational event of our faith. We look to the time when the inner logic of Jesus’ life and ministry ended with his betrayal, his arrest and trial, his horrifying execution and his final victory over death. We [...]

Read Full Post »

Mother and Child

For Holy Week…

Read Full Post »

‘To find my own life is a task I cannot undertake without the neighbour.’

I’ve had many formative experiences as a Christian; one of the most significant was the period between 1977 and 1983 as part of the House of Freedom Christian Community, centred in the inner-city Brisbane suburb of West End.
In that time, I was sometimes in the thick of things, sometimes more on the edge; for two [...]

Read Full Post »

Stations of the Cross

A beautiful Stations of the Cross prayer exercise:

Read Full Post »

Yet more on faith — “the turn to the personal”

Today’s Eureka St has an interesting article on Irish poet Seamus Heaney called “Non-believer drawn by the sacred”, which says:
…the language of his Catholic past has found new power now. In the poem ‘Out of This World’, he traces the journey from his childhood immersion in ritual to the present, saying of his mature understanding:
And [...]

Read Full Post »