This week’s The Question in The Guardian’s Comment is free Belief is What do we want from St George? What sense can we make of the figure and myth of St George?. And here are the replies.
Judith Maltby Saints: the world’s oldest buddy system. Saints are there to inspire and teach us. St George’s story stands as a rebuke to those that use him for ill.
Adam Rutherford Doctor Who slays St George. St George is all very well, but doesn’t have much to do with being English in the 21st century. I propose a new patron saint.
Nesrine Malik A saint for the desperate. In the Middle East, St George is regarded as a saint of asylum, a protector of the desperate.
Jonathan Bartley Reclaiming St George. The true story of St George – champion of the ignored – is one we need to rediscover.
Andrew Brown writes in The Guardian about Theology natural and unnatural. Is there any possible defence for “Intelligent Design”? Is there any way for theists to abandon the idea?
Diarmaid MacCulloch writes in The Washington Post about Christian love and sex. How should the church respond to the reality that sex is for procreation and for pleasure?
Theo Hobson writes in The Guardian about A confession of faith. We should be frank about the fact that Christianity commits us to some embarrassingly mythological language.
Giles Fraser writes in the Church Times On the value of what is pointless.
John Shepherd writes in this week’s Credo column in the Times that Trite music blocks our ears to the divine in the liturgy. Our worship enables us to enter another time and another dimension – a realm of experience beyond our ordinary human experience.
John Shepherd nails it- “This is why the Church should have no truck with banality. Yet, sadly, this is not universally the case. Too often, in a quaintly deluded attempt to achieve so-called relevance with a largely unidentified and notional constituency, the words of worship are denuded both of intellectual challenge and poetic imagery, and the music of worship is reduced to the most basic and arid of formulae. This toxic combination has achieved what many thought impossible. The emptying of our churches of those with minds to think, and emotions to inspire. “ Along with the continual bantering from… Read more »
Code fix needed: The URL in the second item is in mailto format…
Judith Maltby Saints: the world’s oldest buddy system. Saints are there to inspire and teach us. St George’s story stands as a rebuke to those that use him for ill.
TA:
Sorry fixed now.
I believe in Intelligent Design — now wait a minute, those stones hurt! I believe God is the Intelligence, and evolution of life forms from simple to complex and a universe billions of years in the making is the Design. People who would force us to teach that the universe is 6,013.5 years old so that their faith in God is affirmed have a petty god for God. People who would have us believe that the Flood was world-wide and crested at 30,000 feet have a conjurer for a god. People who insist on teaching that computer scientists are covering… Read more »
“The Christian tradition is now faced with the reality that pleasure and procreation are two separate purposes of sexuality, and many parts of the Christian Church, especially the Vatican, are baffled and angry.” – Diarmaid MacCulloch – Diarmaid’s insightful article in the Washington Post is all the more perceptive because he, as a Gay Person, and an acknowledged scholar -not a stranger to theological debate – is speaking from his own experience. This is one of the problems of the Roman Catholic Church’s attempts to deny the propriety of outside-marriage sexuality – simply because no-one in leadership has ever, if… Read more »
“…Many great scientists have been driven by Christian faith and the roots of modern science lay in the belief that the scientist was “reading the book of Nature”, which was understood to be a revelation of God’s purposes and character quite as much as the other Book, the Bible was.” – Andrew Brown, Guardian Blog – So much for the old chestnut ‘Science v Religion’. As Andrew Brown so rightly suggest here, God has given us a brain – together with all our senses – with which to identify his signature upon all creation. I know of at least one… Read more »