This litany is intended for use in services or on occasions relating to grieving or lamenting climate change and environmental degradation. Feel free to use some or all of it with credits (see the end of this post) and to adapt it. I’d appreciate it if you do adapt it, if you’d email to me […]
Author: Andii
A questionnaire on social prayer
What happened and and How During March and April 2015, I Tweeted to likely accounts (like @C_of_E, @247Prayer and other church related organisations national and local) and then invited, by personal message, known Christian contacts related to my Facebook account. These were invitations to go to a survey hosted on Qualtrics.com where 14 questions were […]
Liturgy and “Vain Repetitions”?
I have sometimes had conversations with Christians from ‘free’ churches who dismissed my involvement in liturgy that involves set prayers. Informally, they often say something like, “We should pray from the heart. You can’t really mean a prayer that someone else has written”. If there is a scriptural backing for that stance it is usually […]
▶A Brief History of Humankind – co-operation is key
This is a really helpful video in setting out briefly and cogently about how culture makes a difference and what the basis of culture is. He contrasts Homo Sapiens with chimpanzees, noting that we can co-operate widely and flexibly in which our relative uniqueness is found. He mentions the shared cognitive space we have and […]
Gratitude and Kindness head off therapy
Given that gratitude and kindness are important parts of spiritual practice, this is interesting. both the kindness and gratitude groups showed measurable improvements over those who simply monitored their mood. Both the kindness and gratitude groups enjoyed a higher percent of happy days, where they felt optimistic and expected the best. They were also more […]
Mindfulness meditation -shorter training may help de-stress
I’ve been mulling over the reporting by attenders at mindfulness sessions that I run of a sense of calm even after a half hour session. And while I’ve been relating that the studies tend to show benefits over time, nevertheless it is clear that there are reported benefits even for one-off or irregular practice. So […]
Worship Through a Child’s Eyes
This left me wanting to see more and/or to have a go at getting a child to do similarly with other services. The basic exercise is simply to get children to attend worship services and to report back what the saw and noticed. It’s very interesting and revealing. Here’s Skye Jethani’s daughter’s report and his […]
Cracking the Binary Code: homophile relationships and Evangelical consciences
A freely available article from Anvil journal offering an evangelical affirmation of homophile relationships when exclusive life-long intention is present. Abstract: This paper offers a critique of the ‘binary’ nature of much biblical interpretation and ethical belief in the Church, rejecting simplistic ‘either-or’ approaches to both. Instead there is offered an interpretation of key biblical […]
Sanctification for Ordinary Life | Reformed Worship
In a useful article, James KA Smith writes, responding to the question of why corporate worship has a place in Christian life given that all of life is supposed to be worship. If we are going to be caught up in God’s mission of remaking the world, thereby sanctifying ordinary life, we need to be […]
Annotating Texts
JJames KA Smith has kindly shared his annotation techniques. His first piece of advice is the most important because in frames the rest: annotation is always determined by a telos: I mark up a book differently if Im teaching it vs. writing a review; similarly, my annotation will look different if Im reading the book […]