Scholarship • Serving • Ministry – Ian Paul
Mark Bratton writes: In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty scornfully says to his conversation partner Alice, “When I use a word, it means what I choose it to mean – neither more or less” “The question is”, said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is”, …
Mike Starkey writes: For the first decade of the 2000s I was a vicar in suburban southwest London. Part of my inheritance from the previous regime was a church with close links to a cult. It was a very British kind of cult, with an emphasis on high culture, old-fashioned values and the 1662 Prayer …
Last week, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales issued a pastoral document on the question of gender identity in the light of biblical and theological understandings of what it means to be created male and female in the image of God. It is a fascinating, clear, refreshing and helpful statement, and like all Catholic …
Dr Hilary Cass has delivered her final report offering an independent review of gender identity services for children and young people. The report is online, and is long and complex (not surprisingly) at 232 pages for the main body of the report, but there is a helpful summary of the key points on the supporting …
Podcasting has grown into a Big Thing over the last few years, particularly though not exclusively amongst younger people. My children are constantly recommending podcasts to me—though to little avail, since I have enough to listen to on the radio! Daniel French is the vicar of Salcombe, Malborough and South Huish, Devon, and is a regular …
‘Andrew MacFarlane’ writes: This is a short précis of a longer piece that included many references to current literature on the issues contained within Living in Love and Faith (LLF). This précis is not exhaustive but provides some key discussion points. The ‘LGBT+’ grouping The singular grouping of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans-sexual, intersexual, and others …
Paul Adams writes: Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality is a robust and compelling cultural apologetics text. The scope is large dealing with a range of highly controversial subjects such as abortion and infanticide (chapter 2), euthanasia and embryonic stem cell research, animal rights, genetic engineering, transhumanism (chapter 3), sexuality and …
As preparation for hosting an international conference on LGBT+ rights, the Government committed to introduce new legislation banning ‘conversion therapy’. Despite significant lobbying pressure from some LGBT+ groups, others objected, on three main grounds: that the basic terminology of ‘conversion therapy’ was unclear; that the initial proposals effectively criminalised anyone with a ‘gender critical’ view …
Andrew Bunt, who is Assistant Pastor at King’s Church, Hastings and Bexhill, has written a fascinating and helpful Grove Booklet on welcoming and supporting transgender people in the Grove Pastoral series, under the title People not Pronouns: Reflections on Transgender Experience. I asked him about the background to writing the booklet, and the interesting approach that he …
I previously posted this review of Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally three years ago, not long after it was first published. I am republishing it again now, because three days ago it appeared that Amazon had delisted it on all its sites around the world. At first I wondered whether there had been a problem …
Dr Julie Maxwell writes: You may have seen the recent media coverage of the Judicial review brought by Keira Bell and Susan Evans against the Tavistock and perhaps you wonder what on earth this is all about. This was a landmark judgement that will have world wide repercussions as well as implications for churches and …
