Sofia
Christmas: Two Entangled Stories and a Huge Joke
Argues that Christmas combines a secular midwinter festival, the incarnation story and the fantasy of Father Christmas, and that religious stories can be true without being literal history.
Argues that Christmas combines a secular midwinter festival, the incarnation story and the fantasy of Father Christmas, and that religious stories can be true without being literal history.
A morning meditation in a churchyard among old trees. The author reflects on the Lord’s Prayer, offers his own non-traditional rewording, and cites the Dhammapada on thought shaping life.
Frank Walker, a Unitarian minister aged 87, argues against the ‘no-funeral funeral’ of unaccompanied cremation, saying it denies death and that marking death with words and ceremony is a human need.
Frank Walker describes his pictures of Mary and child and Vasily Grossman’s response to Raphael’s Sistine Madonna as a symbol of human strength against Stalinist and Nazi horror, prompted by Dominic Kirkham’s Horror and Hope.
Frank Walker tells how Sebastian Castellio opposed Calvin’s persecution of heretics after the burning of Servetus, and argues that Castellio became the pioneer of religious toleration.
Frank Walker draws on Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good and his experience of his wife’s cancer diagnosis to argue that the Good works through unforced compassion, and may be what ‘God’ and the kingdom...
Frank Walker reads the Adoration of the Kings in Rubens’s painting as myth. He argues that adoration, beginning with parents’ love for a newborn, is a basic human reality, and that government exists to serve...
Frank Walker reviews Emmanuel Carrere’s novel The Kingdom, which follows the author’s lost Catholic faith and examines Paul, Luke and the early Christians’ impossible ideals.
Frank Walker reads the Book of Job as great fiction in which God and Satan are characters. The Voice from the Whirlwind points to unnameable mystery, and Job accepts life as a package-deal.
Frank Walker, a Unitarian, reviews Andrew Furlong’s Tried for Heresy, recounting Furlong’s forced resignation and setting out his own radical view of Jesus as a sage, not a divine figure.