Superficiality or Sobriety

Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.1 Peter 5:8 Over the last year I have been in the process of discernment for Priesthood within the Church of England. This is been an intense period of self-reflection for myself and an examination into …

Is paedobaptism a prerequisite for Christendom?

Having a minority view on Baptism (That of a mixed approach accepting both paedo and credo approaches, albeit assuming a credo mode as normative) within my tradition means I spend a long time having to justify my position repeatedly to critics. What follows is a reflection on a recent criticism on paedobaptism being a prerequisite …

Reimagining the Parish and Beyond

Off the back of my recent post redesigning my Parish church after reading about the tradition of the Church of England when it came to the Lord's Supper I've been thinking about how Parishes, Dioceses, and potentially Provinces could be organised. What follows, I think makes sense, but I'm not under any illusions that there …

Inspired by the North Side. Reimagining my Parish Church.

I recently read an article on the distinctive way in which the Church of England has historically served communion. It opened: For three hundred years the Church of England was unique among all other churches across the world in relation to where the minister was to stand.  The Book of Common Prayer rubric from 1552 …

Technopoly and Myth

Recently I've been making a concerted effort to cut down on the volume of email I get but one of the emails I regularly look forward to is Alan Jacob's Newsletter Snakes & Ladders. I first found out about Alan Jacob's after reading his books on: Original Sin, and Christian Humanism in the closing years …

Thoughts on Hazony’s “The Virtue of Nationalism”

I recently finished going through Yoram Hazony’s book “The Virtue of Nationalism” which I have come away from with really mixed thoughts. Some things resonated with me incredibly powerfully but there were other areas that left me somewhat concerned. What follows is an attempt to articulate what I imagine are both the good and the …

Whose children are these anyway? Thoughts on liberalism and schooling

In the news recently there’s been a story that has kept coming back to me about a conflict in a school between predominantly Muslim parents and an initiative promoting same-sex relationships. The initiative itself was introduced by the Assistant Headteacher, who is gay himself, at Parkfield school in Birmingham. One news report stated that as …

Christianity as the urban religion

I'm currently reading David Frye's good book entitled "Walls: A History of Civilisation in Blood and Brick" and he uses the construction of walls to demarcate between 'civilisation' on one side and the 'wilderness' on the other. This got me thinking about the disposition and historic residence of the Church along these lines. Walls create …