This is a 3 part review of the Coen Brother’s film, True Grit. I’ll post it over the next 3 days. It is unashamedly meandering. But from the start you and I have a problem. I can’t really write about the film without disclosing information about the…
The God of Israel and the God of Jesus Christ invites expectation. Precisely because he has chosen (freely) to be a promising God and therefore an ‘expectable’ God; and precisely because (freely) he fulfils his promises through his sovereign patience and indefatigable persuasiveness (meaning that God is not at the…
For those who would not choose to grow old before the Son of Man comes. A woman with eyes painted on her boobs. Another reading ‘dodgy’, another inscrutable. Unfailingly matched to personal genre. Thematised Personalities of the latter Capitalism. World writ on the chests of post-Christmas shoppers. On their post-Christmas…
Last week I posted some thoughts on grief. It wasn’t meant to be a systematic or comprehensive treatment of the topic, just some travelling meditations. I ended with a series of questions that were really a set of variations upon the primary psalmic question: How long O Lord? (Psalm…
Sometimes, barrelling along the highway between here and there, I get caught up in the sense of history flowing. Our little jelly-bean bubble of conversation is a trapped pocket of air in the stream of time. The fixed point in a river rushing, the wheels of our vehicle madly spinning…
I watch the girl on stage. The spotlight is away from her, the cues which direct our attention direct it elsewhere. She is now a prop, a frame. She shifts posture slightly every half-minute. Clearly, the way she sits – weight on her one wrist, feigning watching TV – is uncomfortable. Her…
Last Sunday five Californian Giant Redwood (sequoiadendron giganteum) seeds germinated on top of my refrigerator. The seeds were cold stratified (floated in cold water in the fridge) for 45 days before being placed in damp paper towel and sealed in a humidified ziplock plastic bag (on top of the fridge)…
The woman conceived and gave birth to a son at the same time the following year, as Elisha had promised her. The child grew and one day went out to his father and the harvesters. Suddenly he complained to his father, “My head! My head!” His father told his servant,…