“What should I give up for Lent?” is a question many of us ask at the beginning of Lent. Fr Jonathan Jong thinks through this question in a reflection on Luke 4.1-13, medieval penitentials, and the Church Fathers’ thoughts about abstinence and almsgiving.
We start off this penitential season, appropriately enough, with a meditation by Fr Stephen Hearn about Jesus’s injunction in Matthew 5 to be perfect.
In June of 2019 the UK Government published Regulation for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, its White Paper on technology and artificial intelligence (AI). Why refer to industrial revolution? There are those who suggest AI’s advent is more significant than the invention of the steam engine, that it is a technological breakthrough as momentous as electrification. Some see in this new industrial revolution the possibility for a technology driven nirvana with robots finally able to…
How should Christian readers respond to this work, readers whose scriptures extend beyond the Hebrew Bible, and whose peculiar approach to these texts, not as literary works but as the canonical witness to divine revelation, begins with an encounter with the risen Christ expounding Scripture on the road to Emmaus?
Fr Michael Farthing died on the 28th of December 2019, having served as a priest for mover than sixty years. This is a sermon preached at this requiem mass at St Mary Magdalen’s Oxford by Fr Peter Groves.
Here’s a story often told: Sometime in the 17th century, Galileo taught that the Earth revolved around the Sun, which is obviously true. Refusing to believe him because it made them feel cosmically insignificant, the Church authorities tried to silence him. They even refused to look through his telescope when he offered it to them to see for themselves. Ultimately, they banned his books and sentenced him to imprisonment.
Obviously, the Earth revolves around the Sun. This is obvious now in part because we—maybe not me or you, but someone—can go to space, and see it happening. The trouble is that is was not at all obvious in 1543. Nicolaus Copernicus died in 1543: he lived just long enough to see the publication of his magnum opus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. It is said that he held a copy of it on his death bed.
Next on our series on Christian symbolism, Mthr Melanie Clark writes on the history and significance of the Church’s use of the colour blue. Mthr Melanie is Curate of Lichfield S Michael with S Mary and Wall S John. She is an early modern historian: her PhD thesis (Selwyn College, Cambridge) was on the English Civil Wars and Restoration period in the seventeenth century.
If it takes an imaginative leap to see the book, understood as an artefact or object, as a sign or symbol in Christian life, then this is perhaps down to sheer familiarity. Books are ubiquitous in Western culture. I sit writing this in one of my favourite places: an enormous bookshop in rural Warwickshire, consisting of multiple barns full of volumes on every imaginable topic. Even in the café I am surrounded by stacks of the things, I am resting my laptop on a few of my most treasured discoveries (books are working objects, after all).
This is a series on Advents and Christmas carols, but today we are looking at a carol that was originally written as a song to be performed as part of the celebrations of the summertime feast of Corpus Christi. In the medieval period in England, dramatic presentations of salvation history—usually spanning all time from Creation to Doomsda—were a major part of the way in which Corpus Christi was celebrated in many towns and cities.
Regular programming will resume on the Epiphany, with more hymns and carols. Till then, here are two images of the nativity.
Watching is so difficult. It can feel incredibly self-conscious, awkward, indulgent, or even just plain boring. Yet watching is what we are called to do in Advent as we await the coming of the Lord in our midst. ‘When these things begin to take place, stand up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near,’ (Luke 21.28) is the gospel injunction, as greeting the apocalypse should be done fearlessly in faith.
The medieval Basque hymn ‘Gabriel’s Message’ tells the story of the Annunciation in the context of Christmas. The worship of heaven and earth conjoin as the chorus repeats the connection between the Blessed Virgin Mary’s unique status as the Mother of God and the desire to honour and praise both her and God.
Two cities. Two kingdoms. Two nations. Christian theology—and political theology in particular—is littered with these binaries. An election is approaching imminently in the United Kingdom, and in the near future in the United States.
Advent suffers from a crisis of identity: is it a period of preparation for Christmas, or a period in which we think about Christ’s second coming ‘to judge the living and the dead’? Originally, it seems to have been neither.
As I am writing this, universities across the United Kingdom are participating in industrial action—including strikes—over a variety of disputes: pension contributions are being cut, pay over the last decade has decreased by about 17% relative to inflation, women and people of colour are paid less than White males (by 9-15%), workloads are increasing, staff are being evaluated in reductive ways, and work contracts are becoming more “casual”, which makes employment more precarious, especially for junior staff, women, and people of colour.
The Church is one of the world’s fiercest, most unrepentant and historically ignorant bastions of white supremacy. British Christianity in particular has played a central part in the violence against black bodies over the centuries by colluding with the powers of evil primarily in the form of the British Empire: in the words of historian James Walvin, the history of the Church has been a history of “God fearing men going about their godless business”
Michael Ramsey is an unusual figure. A convert to Anglicanism from a non-conformist background, he displays an unusual lack of the “zeal of the convert”. Instead, throughout his writing and ministry, he points toward a vision of the Church which offers a glimpse of a Church which might be more united and more truly catholic than any of our earthly expressions of such catholicity.
We often hear that we should pay our taxes because Jesus told us to. Give to God that which is God, and to Caesar that which is Caesar’s. Say your prayers and pay your taxes. Such a theology of taxation and loyalty to government has been used by some states to encourage Christians to quiet compliance.
There are two scenarios regularly experienced by distinctive deacons. First, a priest helps put some chairs away or does a bit of washing up, and with a smile says, “once a deacon, always a deacon”. Second, a deacon will be asked “when are you going on to full ordination?”. Both scenarios distort the nature of the diaconate and demonstrate the rather negative and limited understanding in the Church of England about this ancient order of ministry.
