From the category archives:

Culture

Themes against verses? Arguments over women and men.

February 22, 2010

I’ve noted several posts recently on the ongoing rumbling about the roles of women and men. In the UK this has followed the blackmailing letter Reform published for the General Synod: “Give us our own episcopal enclave or we’ll hurt you.” Elsewhere in the world it has different triggers. It never quite seems to go [...]

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Etymology, puns and the preacher’s fallacy

February 10, 2010

My post on the preacher’s fallacy seems to have been quite popular. One thread running through some comments seems to be the desire to hold on to a) the idea that words have some sort of core irreducible meaning and b) that meaning has something to do with etymology.
Probably the best English example to refute [...]

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Desiring the kingdom: some observations on a good book

February 5, 2010

I’ve been reading James K A Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom and finding it quite stimulating. The book was awarded Christianity Today’s best theology / ethics book award for 2010, though I didn’t know that when I started reading it.
Smith begins by introducing the idea of cultural liturgies with an extended description of visiting a shopping [...]

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Assisted suicide: competing visions of human dignity?

February 1, 2010

Euthanasia in the form of assisted suicide is in the news again. Today’s story is Terry Pratchett’s Dimbleby lecture, and a Panorama documentary.
Six months ago, I asked in a fairly lengthy post, whether there were any compelling arguments against assisted suicide which did not depend on an underlying Christian (or other theological) understanding of human [...]

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Being Human: how not to do a review

January 29, 2010

Imagine a review of a series of novels in which the reviewer dismissed a trilogy on the basis of disliking the third chapter of the second book, in part because he didn’t understand the story. But that’s pretty much what the Church Times TV reviewer Gillean Craig does in today’s paper (sorry it’s behind the [...]

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Social Attitudes, News Headlines and Moral Relativism

January 26, 2010

Buried in the British Social Attitudes survey (a copy is currently available of the chapter on religion via Ruth Gledhill) is one result I wanted to abstract. I’m still digesting the rest of the chapter, which largely makes discomfiting reading.

Only six per cent think that people should faithfully follow their religious leaders; 89 per cent [...]

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Bless this Blackberry, and show love to the laptop

January 12, 2010
laptop_blessing.jpg

I’ve been trying to work out whether it is just the gimmick value that makes me uneasy about this story of the vicar who blessed laptops and mobiles at the start of the week. But I think my unease might just run a little deeper than that.
I note his justification for this as an updating [...]

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The End of Time and the end of an era

January 2, 2010

On the whole, the two and a half episodes of Doctor Who: The End of Time, were rather good. I say two and a half, because we effectively got a “these you have loved” extra reel added on to the end, as much Russell T Davies’ goodbye as the tenth Doctor’s.
I must confess, I ended [...]

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How things changed in the noughties

December 31, 2009

The millennium proved not to be the end of the world, just the start of a very noughty decade.
Okay, let’s get this out of the way first. I know that technically and pedantically 2010 is the last year of the previous decade and not the first year of the next, but sometimes pedantic technicalities are [...]

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Moon: a film that’s well worth watching

December 19, 2009
moon.jpg

I stumbled across Moon by accident. It got no theatrical release anywhere near here, and I must have missed what publicity there was when it was released in the summer. It’s currently out on DVD and Blu-ray here in the UK and coming out next month elsewhere.
It is a great example of a sort of [...]

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