Risk is endemic in human affairs. To say to someone "I love you" or to say in church "I believe" can never be risk-free undertakings. They are to make investments in things that are not fully under on
The Bible's boring, everyone knows that. Phares begat Esrom and Esrom begat Aram and Aram begat Aminadab. When I was teaching public bible reading in our church, I made the lesson readers practice wit
Perhaps it's only when we fully accept that we will die that we can fully accept how alive we are right now.Death brings perspective, then. It brings us back to life and it asks of me, how, now, will
Few of us want to appear dependent: witness the rugged determination of many older people to resist support to which they're entitled; and the intense frustration of some who've spent a lifetime carin
In a more agnostic culture than the one I grew up with it's a challenge to know how to talk meaningfully about something so enormous when we don't really understand it. There is scepticism about the a
The Passover season is well and truly on us.We're preparing our homes for the festival of freedom, with its special foods and elaborate rituals, one of the oldest religious rituals in the world, and o
J. K. Galbraith once said, "Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." He could have been speaking of the decisions we keep putting o
These well-informed young people had a very modest interest in the print media. Unlike me, they didn't feel their day was incomplete without reading a newspaper.Total newspaper circulation has been de
The government and the Labour Party disagreed yesterday about what sort of enquiry there should be into the Libor scandal, but they both agreed there're needs to be such an enquiry. Something went wro
Surely nothing tests the faith of the believer as much as this - the sudden, frightening, violent death of those we love.There have been many attempts to reconcile intellectually such unbearable trage
The British propensity for non-deference militates against special treatment to anyone, unless of course you're the official underdog. "The last shall be first" is a biblical theme which could just as
Some time ago at a buffet lunch in a church hall - not quite a fine dining event - I recall a lively conversation between an unemployed man in early middle age and an older, wealthy industrialist. The
I'm hesitant here to quote anyone from the Bible because recently when I mentioned a saying of Jesus someone objected that he had never run anything in his life. The same's true of St Paul. But writin
The trouble about money is that it is often linked to power. Money well used can do great things which benefit many people, anything from funding the arts to bringing food and water to a starving nati
More recent and disturbing history will be reviewed this week by a court in Oslo. While Anders Behring Breivik will present his own warped view of reality, victims and bereaved families will confront
Two weeks ago while at a soccer match in Houston, the woman beside me said she was in London last year and "the Olympics will be a mess", or at least that was a polite paraphrase. It had been clear fr
Living in harmony with nature is so essential to our well-being that it is the first lesson of scripture. The account of creation in the book of Genesis tells of the idyllic Garden of Eden where man l
A burglary is often described as being a violation. And it's a good word for it because it's not just about what is physically taken, it's about what is emotionally done to the person being robbed. I
It's hard enough to describe the synergy between the idea of a soul and the material world. Talk of eternity is even more difficult. How does a person gain the whole world and lose his soul? And how d
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said love your neighbour as yourself. But how can we do that practically? Well, maybe there is an elderly person in your street who's got no family. Maybe you can hel
