Tag: Love
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Food for Thought
It troubles me that some people have no interest in reading the Gospels because they can’t take seriously some of the things they read there. An example is the “feeding of the five thousand” from five loaves and two fish. As it happens, this is an instance of occasional patriarchal prejudice. According to Matthew 14:21,…
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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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Heart on (heretical) Sleeve
After sharing some thoughts with a friend, I want to try to put into words what ‘religion’ means to me. It’ll make sense to some, though not perhaps to all. Joseph Campbell describes the “game of belief” that leads to a “divine seizure”, his use of the word ‘game’ (as in Wittgenstein’s philosophy) not meaning…
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Unconditional Love (ii)
I wrote in a previous post that, for me, the symbolic image of Jesus with his arms outstretched on the cross, is a movingly powerful symbol of ‘unconditional love’, which I see as the ‘beating heart’ of Christianity, and its greatest gift to the world. I also noted that my own journey towards this persuasion…
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2022
THIS would be a good “fingerprint” for all of us to ‘make our mark’ with on the year ahead – whether religious or non-religious …..
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The Nativity Stories (v) Unconditional Love
I’ve been suggesting that the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke are two different stories that invite us, while enjoying what’s on the surface, to think a little more deeply. Some people might imagine that because I don’t regard these stories as historical, their meaningfulness for me must be sadly impoverished, but not so !…
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Elegy (Dylan Thomas)
Love rather than friendship … This, though not finished, is the last of Dylan Thomas’s poems. Completed in a notebook were the 17 lines quoted above, along with 2 following lines which he crossed out. In the notebook there were other lines not made use of, though some might have been if he’d lived to…
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A Unique Love Story (Brahms and Clara Schumann)
This tender and beautiful poem, about the deep though troubled relationship between Brahms and Clara Schumann, was written by Lisel Mueller (a German-born American poet). On October 1st, 1853, 20 year old Johannes Brahms knocked on the door of Robert and Clara Schumann’s home in Düsseldorf. Schumann was one of the first composers of the…
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