“As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen.” Matthew 4:18 He greeted me with a grin and said that he was glad I was ok. It had been a while. When…
Perversely, while everyone else sinks into the ‘January blues’ I’m smiling with relief that we’re as far away from Christmas as possible. Bah humbug? No, I hope not. Fingers crossed I’m not becoming one of those negative people whose opt-out tendencies mar the celebrations of others. Nevertheless, the closer Christmas came, the worse I felt.…
“Where are the Christian people today who see the status quo, who do not like what they see (because there are things in it which are unacceptable to God), who, therefore, refuse to come to terms with it, who dream dreams of an alternative society which would be more acceptable to God and who determine…
Is anyone else bored of this ‘emerging church’ malarkey? As with many words which used to excite me (‘missional’, ‘incarnational’, ‘holistic’ etc etc), this has rather lost its pizzazz, which perhaps says more about my fickleness than the speed at which innovation becomes institution. The point is I wasn’t enthralled by the prospect of this…
I am now officially older than Jesus. Well, of sorts. I’ve just had a birthday which has nudged me one year closer to oldness and means I’ve now been on the planet longer than Jesus was. I can’t help but feel that he achieved a bit more than I’ve done to date. And if that’s…
Yesterday I went to Doug’s funeral. He died on his 93rd birthday and the full church building was a fitting tribute to a long, beautiful, loving, wise, gracious and inspiring life well-lived. It is, perhaps, the right time to publish a blog post that I wrote a year ago and could never quite bring myself…
I came to Paris in need of good food and good company, along with a decent dash of energising solitude. The weekend kicked off with the former and ended happily with the latter. Tick box, as Anna would say. Nessie and I consumed our morning coffee and pains au chocolat in a little local square,…
*Ok, so I don’t actually mention conservatives in this blog post, although they’re lurking implicitly in the background. Nevertheless, I include them in the title for the satisfaction of a soundly evangelical three-points-beginning-with-the-same-letter approach for those of you who’ll appreciate that… My research proposal is getting me down. It’s technical, number-centred, and requires precision and…
Life hurts. I could’ve told you that anyway, but yesterday I was enjoying (?) an article entitled ‘the Anthropology of Suffering’ which spelt out the concept in greater detail. Recently one of my classmates critiqued an article we’d read by suggesting that while its writer had painted a picture of the injustice in the world,…
Yesterday I spent most of the beautiful sunny day hidden away inside SOAS’ library trying to pull together some thoughts about my first essay: ‘Does modernisation necessarily imply dependency?’ And I can tell you that it’s no small task moving, in just two months, from a place of knowing very little about development to trying…
emilyintheworld 