Zoomtard

In 2008 I saw many many fine movies. But depressingly few of them were in the cinema because this year has been a bit of a let down. Still, the three best films I saw, as I see it, are Batman: The Dark Knight, There Will Be Blood, The Visitor and best of all by [...]

Every year a few friends each make a CD of the best music we first heard in the previous twelve months. Some of us take it very seriously, even making websites to advertise their efforts and then not letting us show people their fine work! Others just scrawl BEST OF on some blank CDs and [...]

And ransom captive Israel.
What Christmas means for me in my better moments is summed up by this song.

In my sermon tomorrow morning I use this clip. It’s what Christmas means to most of us most of the time.

Nollaig shona daoibh a chairde. I’m off into the wesht until further notice.
Your Correspondent, He pisses excellence [...]

My disapproving ex-housemate suggested, inspired by the Pope’s latest crazy comments about homosexuality being an equally sized problem to climate change, that we design a wee app for the i-phone that measures your carbon footprint and compares it to your gay footprint. Simply by using the i-phone of course, you have stepped up your gayness. [...]

Relativism. Load of bollix, isn’t it? Absolutely.
But as Archbishop Rowan Williams writes today, “the 20th century built up quite a list of casualties around “principles””. In a deadly little article he considers how Barth offered us, especially relevant at Christmas, a way to acknowledge that there are no human truths that we are bound [...]

Tony Blair on how his faith affected his leadership. I don’t quite know what to make of this. Can anyone spot Miroslav Volf’s influence here?

Your Correspondent, Promises to restore theocracy if elected

While driving home from a fancy restaurant with the lady behind Transfarmer last night we laughed about how totally without “Biblical basis” the practice of ordination is. I am currently in the process of hopefully being selected as an official candidate for ordination by the Presbyterian Church in Ireland but if all goes well and [...]

It would have helped for Babette to post her excellent review of the latest Jennifer Connolly as an unfeasibly beautiful scientist-movie before me and Clairebo and Betamaxnomates (fresh from Japanainia) a few hours earlier. Then I would have been spared the embarrasment of having to lodge popcorn kernels in my sleeping friends ears as he [...]

It is always reassuring when your hunches turn out to be true. And one of the cool things that has happened during the last 12 weeks of college is that I have been reassurred again and again that theology must always be a positive endeavour.
Defensive theology barely deserves the name theology at all and [...]

“The work of Jesus was not a new set of ideals or principles for reforming or even revolutionizing society, but the establishment of a new community, a people that embodied forgiveness, sharing and self-sacrificing love in its rituals and discipline. In that sense, the visible church is not to be the bearer of Christ’s [...]