Edward Nickell reviews On Voice. Speech, Song, Silence: Human and Divine by Victoria Johnson Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd (Croydon 2024) Pbk. 189 pages. On Voice explores and promotes Christian worship, theology and culture by looking at voices in the church today and...
By Adrian Thatcher. SCM Press (London 2023) Pbk. 278 pages. Before reading Vile Bodies, I had no idea how alien the ancient understanding of bodies and sex were to ours. These ancient understandings seem risible to us now – and I did laugh many times reading this book...
Forgiveness is such a key Christian concept that it is unsurprising that scripture is full of it. Looking afresh at familiar quotations I find myself wondering whether we have accepted them too uncritically.
St Pancras Station then was not a pleasurable placeof grand departures, a destination in itself,just somewhere that East Midlandersmust go to catch a packed train home. She was already at the table, facing the engine,folder of papers at the ready for the journeyas he...
I enjoyed the recent issue of Sofia. The theme, of course, resonates particularly with anyone African born; my sister-in-law the Vicar would love Tony Windross’s article on baptisms; Dominic Kirkham was as ever excellent. I hope someone can be found to carry on the...
Letter published in the Church Times from Canon Stephen Mitchell. How disappointing to read that the late Hugh Dawes’s attempt, in his 1992 book Freeing the Faith, to find a new story of God which did not rely on supernatural assumptions, found little support from his...
Hugh Dawes, who has died aged 75, was a longstanding member of the Sea of Faith Network, and at one time a regular attender at conferences. He initiated and was one of the founders of Pro gressive Christianity Network Britain, which he chaired until 2010. He was a...
I am not by nature what I would call a great wine drinker, though I do have a slight fondness for claret, to which I was first introduced by a friend at SOF Conferences back in the late 1990s when these were invariably ‘live’ residential events. Each night at dinner...
When I was a child I didn't know anyone who was ninety. I couldn't conceive of being ninety. Nonagenarians inhabited the mythical world of Methuselah. In middle age, in my first incumbency, eager to ingratiate myself with the older parishioners, I sent some flowers...
Christianity, mainly in its Roman Catholic form, has been an integral part of Latin American life for five centuries. It was of course imposed as one of many aspects of Spanish or Portuguese colonial rule, which involved the domination of the local inhabitants and the transport of Africans to work as slaves on sugar plantations.