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.
Review of Robert Crompton’s Stories in the Scriptures, which reads Bible stories as a novelist, asking what real situations led ordinary people to tell these tales rather than what must be believed.
Examines Saint Brigid as pagan goddess, saint and feminist symbol, and how Ireland’s 2022 bank holiday grew from campaigns on mother and baby homes and the Catholic Church’s treatment of women.
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.
William Blake’s Plate 11 from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: ancient poets gave objects gods, priesthood later literalised them, and men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast.
Edwin Salter’s meditation on water, flux and change, linking geology, physics, time, dance, art and Jung to the human wish for permanence and faith in heaven.
A priest argues that the Church guards the Christmas stories as history and fails to offer non-literal readings. He follows Marcus Borg’s stages of naivety and Wittgenstein on faith, and defends the stories as true.
A poem arguing that Yahweh, Christ and the Greek gods are products of human imagination, personifications and metaphors, whose mythic stories remain a common treasury to be sifted for wisdom.
Nicholas Peter Harvey reviews Chris Scott’s The Jesus Myth, which reads the Jesus story through Jungian archetypes rather than as history, and criticises dogmatic claims of religious superiority.
Brian Mountford argues that being human is defined by storytelling and religious yearning, then sets out a panentheist view of God as life force, drawing on quantum physics and Schleiermacher.