January 2019 – For the fainthearted . . .

Interpretations

Interpretations and sources: Year 7 history lessons are very different from my memories of schooldays when we learned “facts” and the stories in which they played a part. Occasionally, there may have been a suspicion that the facts presented had been chosen very selectively, but there were never teachers who would have suggested that what we were told was just one interpretation and that we should compare it with other interpretations of the same events. There were certainly never teachers who asked us to think about the sources being used …

Bad teaching

Lake Wobegon, Garrison Keillor’s fictional mid-western town, is a place where religion is taken seriously. Whether it be at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility Catholic Church or at Lake Wobegon Lutheran Church, those who sit in the pews week by week are people who take careful notice of the words of priest and pastor. So it is that after one Thanksgiving Day service, Pastor David Inqvist from the Lutheran Church must have felt a burden of guilt.

Thanksgiving is an occasion treated with solemnity by Pastor Inqvist’s congregation. They have …

A grand stretch in the days

It’s that time of year when the Irish satirical website “Waterford Whispers” would carry the headline, “Stretch in the days upgraded to grand.” It was a greeting, a word of encouragement, a statement of the obvious, but welcomed, anyway. There was no need for a preface or further comment. Paying for diesel, standing at the supermarket checkout, passing someone in the street, the words “a grand stretch in the days” were sufficient by themselves to indicate a mood of goodwill.

It’s not as though the increase in the hours of …

No more books

It is sad that we hardly use books at school. Students are mostly educated on a diet of PowerPoint slides and photocopied handouts; opening books and reading them seems to have become a practice of former times. Even the library has been designated the “learning resource centre,” as if admitting it was a repository of books was somehow no longer appropriate.

Generations will grow up with no understanding of how much books meant to their forebears, with no concept of how books changed the world, with no appreciation of how …

Brexit and the English Civil War

England’s Civil War divisions are re-emerging.

In the Seventeenth Century, a London-based elite drew the ire of an ideologically-based populist movement. Charles I became a martyr in the eyes of supporters of the Crown and in the liturgy of the Church of England. The perception that he was aloof and indifferent did not endear him to those among his subjects who rallied to the Parliamentary cause.

The Parliamentarians were an amalgam of groups that would now be perceived as from the radical Left and the radical Right. The Levellers were …

Sunday thoughts for 27th January 2019

“‘ . . .to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour” Luke 4:19

The year of the Lord’s favour: what would the year of the Lord’s favour look like in a neighbourhood, in a church in a person’s life? Wouldn’t it look like a time of community, a time when neighbours, when church members, when families stood beside each other?

The Scripture readings today are about creating a sense of community. The reading from the Old Testament, from Nehemiah, talks about Ezra reading the Book of the Law of Moses …