Article in Stretton Focus, April 2019 … and have a look at what you’ve been sitting on. We all make assumptions. An assumption is something that we just take for granted as being true, without raising any questions about it. There was a time when people thought the world was flat, and the sun moved […]
Article in Stretton Focus, May 2019 The ‘end of days’ is deeply rooted in Christian thinking. That extraordinary late addition to the Bible, the Book of Revelation, offers the vision of a certain John (not the apostle) living on the isle of Patmos. His final apocalypse is full of startling horror images accompanied by the […]
Article in Stretton Focus, June 2019 The Book of Proverbs in the Bible urges us to seek for wisdom and understanding: without which we are likely to make shipwreck of our lives. The search for wisdom is a continuous requirement: and if there are proverbs addressed directly to our own day and age, we should […]
Article in Stretton Focus, August 2019 We have acquired a new character in our household, identified as ‘she’, who only responds when addressed by name. She is extraordinarily gifted, having answers to many questions. We can ask her to count, to calculate, to solve equations, and she is almost invariably right. The capital of any […]
Article in Stretton Focus, September 2019 The leaders of world religions should be sounding a wake-up call to their own followers, instead of just defending their own beliefs, and trying to convert others to it. The higher purpose of any religion should be to point beyond itself, to some all-embracing reality that might be called […]
Article in Stretton Focus, November 2019 My title is the daily, and even hourly, offering of Radio Shropshire Travel. It is essential listening for anyone daring to set off along the A49. These days I still cycle, but never on the A49, and I have stopped driving a car altogether. So now I have the […]
Article in Stretton Focus, December 2019 So who were the three wise men, some call them kings, who Mathew tells us visited the infant Jesus? We must not take the story literally. The story of Jesus’ birth was created in the latter half of the first century to address the need for a ‘biography’ which […]
Article in Stretton Focus, January 2018 Towards the end of last year some statistics were published in the media about religious identity. They read that some 53% of people in a survey identified themselves as non-religious and among young people it was higher at 71%. Apart from the usual suspicion about damn lies and statistics, […]
Article in Stretton Focus, June 2018 My title is an unfinished sentence. It must always be so, because the word GOD stands for a mystery beyond reach of words: beyond reach of our finite minds. Nevertheless it is a word which is widely (if not wisely!) used. Whoever uses it should realise that they are […]
Article in Stretton Focus, October 2018 Religions tend to have their Gods pre-packaged and wrapped up in creeds and doctrines for general consumption. This pre-packaged God appeals to those who are afraid to think for themselves, and so such a religion will always have a following. But for many people today, God is greater than […]
