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There is much talk at the moment about the Church of England and inclusion. Yet the largest social and ethnic group that are under-represented in the Church are white working class, and the failure to engage with working class culture has long been the bane of the C of E. Natalie Williams and Paul Brown … Continue Reading
There’s a scene in the film Love Actually where a little girl announces that she’ll be playing “first lobster” in the school nativity play. “There was more than one lobster present at the birth of Jesus?” asks her surprised mum, which leads the girl to sigh in exasperation at such profound levels of parental ignorance. … Continue Reading
On this site, I have for several years been challenging various popular myths about Christmas—that Jesus was born in a stable, that he was born into a distinctively materially poor family, that the shepherds were despised outcasts, that swaddling had symbolic significance, and that Joseph and Mary were isolated and alone at Jesus’ birth. Is … Continue Reading
Christmas is a time for celebration, for feasting and for relationships. But it is also a time for a mild engagement in iconoclasm, as we peel back the layers of accreted tradition and recover the origins of the Christmas gospel—something which needs to happen every year, it seems. In that spirit (and Spirit) I offer … Continue Reading
This is the time of year when various Christmas tropes come around again—and therefore it is worth repeated articles from previous years. I previously published this one in 2020 and 2021. One of the repeated themes of short Christmas expositions is that, in the nativity story, we see God coming to the ‘poor’, and as … Continue Reading
This Sunday’s lectionary reading for Advent 4 in Year A is Matt 1.18–25. It is a short reading, but laden with significance as Matthew gives his distinctive account of Jesus’ origins. One of the presenting issues in engaging in the two narratives of Jesus’ birth in Luke and Matthew is their very distinctive perspectives, leading … Continue Reading
This Sunday’s lectionary reading for Advent 4 in Year A is Matt 1.18–25. It is a short reading, but laden with significance as Matthew gives his distinctive account of Jesus’ origins. James and Ian discuss the reading, its place at the beginning of the first gospel, and issues around reading it and preaching from it.
One of the challenges in reading the Book of Revelation is that it is very theologically dense in the way it presents its ideas. There are several reasons for this: Its dense metaphorical language (commonly called its ‘symbolism’) carries theological weight. For example, the compressed phrase ‘a lamb, looking as though it had been slain, … Continue Reading
The lectionary gospel reading for Advent 3 in Year A is Matt 11.2–11, and as usual is rather truncated, so you might want to extend the reading by a verse or two before and after to be fair to its setting. The chapter begins with the second of Matthew’s five summary statements that conclude the … Continue Reading
The lectionary gospel reading for Advent 3 in Year A is Matt 11.2–11, and as usual is rather truncated, so you might want to extend the reading by a verse or two before and after to be fair to its setting. John the Baptist appears to either question or express disappointment in the ministry of … Continue Reading
There were a lot of headlines this week in response to the latest ONS census of Religion in England and Wales, a voluntary survey conducted every ten years. The major two findings were: For the first time in a census of England and Wales, less than half of the population (46.2%, 27.5 million people) described … Continue Reading
Ian Paul: theologian, author, speaker, academic consultant. Adjunct Professor, Fuller Theological Seminary; Associate Minister, St Nic's, Nottingham; Managing Editor, Grove Books; member of General Synod. Mac user; chocoholic. Tweets at @psephizo
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