The Problems with Blessing II

The problem with blessing is, above all, a practical one. It’s about living in a particular kind of relationship with the world into which I’ve been thrown. Well, ‘world’ is a bit abstract. No one ever has a relationship with ‘the world’. Let’s say ‘neighbourhood’ and mean…

On Human Religiosity

What does it mean to have a sense of God? What kind of sense would this be? Is it a sense, like sight or taste, that is attuned to our environs, focussed on matters of substance? Or is it like a sense of beauty, another kind of ‘taste’ – not so…

Divine Beauty

For all those undertaking theological study this year (whether as a student at a College, as the theologian gifted to a christian community, or just for the love of God)… Karl Barth has a wonderful discussion of the attributes of God (his ‘perfections’) in the second volume of the Church…

Expecting God.

Last week I posted some thoughts on grief [http://andersonpost.org/2010/12/10/grieving-the-future/]. 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…

Piercing the Wall

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…

The Purpose Driven Space

The spatiality of created beings is not an accident. Much of the attention given to the explaining spatiality in our philosophical tradition has focussed on the necessity of space. Space is ‘necessary’ in the sense I was talking about last post: we find it impossible to think of objects in…

What makes you tiptoe?

What makes you tiptoe? I don’t mean when you want to spring unpleasant surprises on the unwary, none of my readers would be involved in that sort of thing. No, I mean, what makes you tiptoe involuntarily, like when you are exploring an old church and wander into the…