I’ve spent the last hour watching the official video of Jensen McRae’s song “Wolves“. Watching … and crying … and crying. In our anti-trafficking research, Bella and I have been inspired by a particular approach to preventing the abuse of young girls in Fiji. In a program that used to be run by Homes of…
In Psalm 2, King David, or someone writing from his perspective, seems jolted out of complacency with a shock: the anointed leader is beset by enemies and mocked by them! (1-3) How does the writer imagine God responding? First, God laughs scornfully at the puny offence (4) and then in fury reaffirms the status of…
Over the weekend I attended the opening night of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible at The Young Peoples Theatre Newcastle. The direction, by a very young Nick Thoroughgood, emphasised fear and aloneness. But the aspect of the play that struck me anew was the way religion was co-opted by an agenda of power and subsequently…
While reading the First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, I paused over something he wrote about peace. This letter, written about 96 CE, is one of the very earliest documents we have (other than New Testament texts) from the young Christian movement. Clement was bishop of Rome and was writing to encourage the church…
An unstated assumption that underlies a lot of my culture’s thinking is that evil deserves to be punished. As of today, I no longer believe it. That change of heart comes from a long line of influences. I read Butler’s Erewhon way back about 1985. It’s a humourous saga in the same genre as Gulliver’s…
I have only just started to read Gil Bailie’s Violence Unveiled and have been challenged already to rethink the role of technology in relation to moral imperatives. Having read Jacques Ellul, I have largely accepted the thesis that technology imposes on us a drive towards a particular kind of “progress” beyond human control. In many…
A traditional Evangelical reading of the book of John’s Revelation seems to assume that the violent God of the Old Testament, after being temporarily assuaged by Jesus’ death, returns with the big guns to teach evil doers who is really the most powerful. I’ve never really thought about the violence inherent in that framework, and…
