I Was Wrong About Mastodon: The crucial mistake of social media was trying to force people with wildly incompatible views to co-exist in the same space. In real-life, I can choose who I associate with. Now, I’m most certainly not looking for an echo chamber. I need my views to be questioned and debated, but it must be by people capable of civil discourse. We should discuss, we should reassess, we should admit when we’re […]
We’ve just finished putting up the Christmas decorations today. Doing that at the beginning of Advent represents a pretty big change in my thinking. It’s not a recent change though. It happened years ago when our daughter was younger and my wife and I were losing the argument with her that Advent was really a penitential season of the Church Year. I tell that story and describe the moment my own thinking changed as part […]
When we say Jesus is Lord, or that Christ is the King, we’re making a deep theological claim. Essentially, we’re rejecting all the secular structures of the World, and because of how Jesus comes to his Lordship, saying that the existing structures are fundamentally flawed and unjust. But Christ’s Kingship isn’t just about a sustained critique of other’s leadership or use of power. St. Paul sees the Holy Spirit working even now in the World […]
We are nearly to the end of the liturgical year. The whole of the Church Calendar is meant to be a tool for teaching about the Christian life and faith. We start the year in Advent though, not Christmas, the officially Advent is supposed to be about the triumphant return of Lord Jesus and our longing and our hoping that day will come quickly. In Christmas we remember the story of Jesus’ first coming and […]
We enter the world in tears. The world greets our entrance with joy. If we live our lives well, we leave this life with joy, and the world mourns our passing.
We are in the midst of the eight days of the celebration of the Feast of All Saints. Almost everyday of the year we remember the story of the great souls that have lived among us, marking the date of the death, because it is the day they are born into the full reality of the Kingdon of God. But there are many more people who have lived heroic lives of faith than the hundreds […]
Given the failure of all Dark Matter detection experiments so far, some have suggested that maybe classical understandings of Gravity (both Newtonian and the more complete General Relativity) are incomplete. The idea is that we have to tweak the equations a bit to explain the anomalous observed behavior at larger scales in the galaxy (and the local Universe). The tweaks are generally all thought to be part of a rethinking of our understanding of gravity […]
This is the last interaction Jesus has with an outsider (who repents!) before he enters Jerusalem where he is rejected. This particular story has many echoes of the previous ones, Jesus calling Matthew the Tax Collector and the healing of the blind man who called out in spite of the crowds attempt to silence him. Jesus seeks the outsider who seeks him – that’s clear in these accounts, particularly in the story of the healing […]
We all have met people who are sure that they are doing God’s will. We have met people who are living lives that inspire others with their public goodness. And we’ve met people who are ashamed of and afraid of God. People who hear God’s voice as one filled with judgement and rejection. People who are in the church and people who won’t come to church. (Some of each of the previous categories are in […]
At first glance, this seems somewhat silly. God is being broadly compared to a judge who finally is badgered into giving an old woman justice. As one of the commentators on this passage points out, we all sort of know this woman – people like her. A person, a man, or a woman who has no family, no friends, no social network of support. A person who is certain they have been wronged and who […]
Entangled States 