Paul Overend compares Nygren’s agape versus eros, C.S. Lewis’s four loves and Erich Fromm’s humanistic Art of Loving, concluding Fromm’s non-theistic account best fits today.
Three Early Twentieth Century Theologies of Love
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Saint Sophia and her Daughters, Saints Faith, Hope and Love
Short note on the legend of Saint Sophia and her daughters Faith, Hope and Love, suggesting they personify the theological virtues and the idea of virtues as offspring of divine wisdom.
God’s right hand
Explains what ‘seated at the right hand of the Father’ means in the Creed, as honour, power, permanence, rest, sovereignty and judgement, and argues it is metaphor rather than a statement about location.
Sea of Faith and Christianity: Easter, incarnation, prayer
Introductory page setting out a Sea of Faith reading of Easter as the victory of life over death, incarnation as seeing the divine in the physical, and prayer as a form of talking to ourselves.
Review: Bad Theology. Oppression in the Name of God by Leah Robinson
Reviews Leah Robinson’s Bad Theology, which examines apartheid, Puritan colonists, the Klan and Jonestown as oppressive theology; the reviewer doubts practical theology’s claims and contrasts Desmond Tutu.
The Body of Christ III: Real Presence and the Spirit
Stephen Mitchell uses Corpus Christi and Cupitt’s idea that the self is the analogy of God to reread real presence and the Holy Spirit as presence, imagination and attention to life.
The Body of Christ II: Death and Resurrection
Stephen Mitchell reflects on Jesus’s death and resurrection, arguing the risen body is a literary creation and that dying well matters more than debates about an afterlife. He also criticises ‘celebration of life’ funerals.
The Body of Christ
Stephen Mitchell argues that the language and ritual of Christian worship, including the ‘Body of Christ’, should stay poetic and not shrink to a historical Jesus. Faith is practice within a community.
That’s the Spirit!
Reflects on the Holy Spirit and the Trinity, arguing that God is a human creation, that Christianity is the mother of humanism, and that theology and poetry are sister arts.
Freedom to Love
A poem arguing that love is the source of life and that Christ died to show how to love, so that dogma is unnecessary and societies should be built on love and compassion.