Christian

  • Hate Speech

    A few days ago, I tweeted a link to an article on the Spectator: “Revd Dr Alan Clifford’s ‘homophobic’ comments referred to the CPS” (it might be worthwhile reading the article for some background), and I noted that it had worrying implications for free speech. Anyway, someone replied to me on Twitter this morning and

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  • Does God LOL?

    For my birthday, I was given a copy of “Does God LOL” – a collection of brief thoughts by various people working in the field of comedy about the subject of God and humour. I actually found it a fascinating read! The book is, as you would expect from a compendium of different people’s thoughts,

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  • A Dreaded Sunny Day at Highgate Cemetery

    Today Mrs Phil and I went down to Highgate Cemetery to have a look round. (The title of this post, by the way, is a reference to “Cemetry Gates” by The Smiths). Although you can’t get into the West cemetery without going on a tour (and there were no tours today), we had a look round

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  • Is Atheism a replacement for Religion?

    I don’t know if you’ve seen the latest “storm in a Twitter-cup”, but Richard Dawkins has hit the news once again. You can read more about it here and here. Suffice it to say, he’s not made himself a popular man! Earlier today, I tweeted this: https://twitter.com/phillsacre/status/365807088443736064 This started a Twitter conversation with few people,

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  • Sermon: Psalm 1 – The Righteous and the Wicked

    Quick post! I was preaching at Christ Chuch Cockfosters this evening on Psalm 1. My sermon has already been uploaded, and you can hear it online on the Christ Church website.

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  • The Church is wiser than our secular society

    One of the articles that seems to have been doing the rounds on Twitter lately is “Our secular society is wiser than the Church” by Oliver Kamm (most recently I saw it tweeted by my friend @pandammonium). I often read articles online without responding to them, but sometimes one annoys me sufficiently that I feel

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  • Sermon: Resurrection [1 Corinthians 15:12-28]

    As I mentioned a while back, I was preaching a few weeks ago at Christ Church Cockfosters. We were going through a series on the Nicene Creed, and my particular line was “On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures”, i.e. Jesus’ resurrection. I didn’t really cover the ‘in accordance with the

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  • John 19: Jesus’ Trial and Crucifixion

    As alert readers will no doubt be aware, I have been studying John recently (you can read my previous blog posts on the subject here and here). I promised in my last post that I would blog about John 19, and I thought this would be as good a time as any – particularly while

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  • Saul to Paul: A few thoughts on Acts 13

    One of the things which struck me about our New Testament course this year was the idea of narrative criticism, i.e. reading the text critically (analytically that is – not ‘critically’ in the popular sense) as narrative. I’d never really thought about the gospels in that way before, and it’s been colouring the way I see

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  • The Raising of Lazarus

    As I mentioned in my post on the woman at the well, I’ve been doing a class on John’s Gospel the past couple of months. It’s probably been my favourite class of this year, which is no small feat! John is such a rich gospel, and it’s been a real privilege to spend some time

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