Category: Current Affairs
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Voices in the Wilderness of Time and Space?
“Welcome to planet Earth – a place of blue nitrogen skies, oceans of liquid water, cool forests and soft meadows, a world positively rippling with life. In the cosmic perspective it is poignantly beautiful and rare; but it is also, for the moment, unique. In all our journeying through space and time, it is, so…
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The Frustrations of Travelling – What’s New?
If you think the 70 mile Christmas trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem, by donkey and foot, couldn’t have been much fun, compare it with the 50 mile trip from Edinburgh to Dundee in 1848 ….. You took train no.1, from Edinburgh Waverley down to Granton harbour on the south bank of the river Forth. You…
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“The Combat” – a ‘Sacred’ Poem by Edwin Muir
What is this strange, moving, fascinating poem about? It’s about an ongoing fight to the death between very different creatures. It seems to be a decidedly “unequal battle”. One of the combatants looks like a ‘no-hoper’. There is a “crested animal” resembling the mythical griffin, with “eagle’s head” and “whetted beak”; “body of leopard” and…
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Love – Open, Honest and Unconditional
These words, moving and heartening, are from the blog of Bart Ehrman, the perhaps uniquely agnostic/atheistic Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina. He tells how his mother found it very hard to understand and accept his eventual departure from his early evangelical Christian faith. Their relationship, however, managed to work through…
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“Here comes the Sun”
WE’RE inclined to forget that the Sun, which we so enjoy when it’s shining on us (but not too fiercely), and which we so much miss when the days are short-lived and freezing, is a furiously raging nuclear furnace. It’s turning hydrogen into helium, and releasing the resultant energy in everything from blistering surface bubbles…
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Riches and “the Gospel”
I think about what’s currently happening in my country … here’s my ‘starter for ten’ … I reflect on the fact that mine is still, by some, said to be a “Christian” country. If, so, it seems that something’s gone badly wrong. Perhaps for too long, we’ve had a wrong idea of what “the gospel”…
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Openness and Inclusiveness
The man in the photograph is, of course, the world-renowned pianist, Evgeny Kissin. Born of Jewish parents in Russia, while still a young boy he wrote, “When I die, bury me in the region around Moscow, in the forest, and let the stone read, ‘Here lies Evgeny Kissin, son of the Jewish people, a servant…
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My Little Wise Guy
I keep my little wise guy on my desk – to remind me never to take myself (or anyone else) too seriously ….. you could say that he’s the Apple of my eye ! “Too bad all your blogs aren’t as short as this one”, he’s telling me. You’re probably right, little fella …..
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