26th October 2025 “Worldwide people in more countries are living better lives and expressing more hope for the future than they had in years.” This was the first line of some analysis from the polling company Gallup as explained on BBC’s ‘More or Less: Behind…
I finally got around to the podcast I mentioned two weeks back entitled ‘Is it OK to turn your back on suffering?’. It wasn’t exactly what I expected but it was on topic enough 😉 and I was challenged to consider things I usually don’t think…
I didn’t see it coming and I didn’t even think about it but when I read a book review I realised that a new type of novel was coming out – the pandemic novel. I recalled the popular myth that the board game Monopoly…
In 2004, Tilly Smith, a 10 year old school girl on a holiday with her family in Thailand, having just learnt 3 weeks earlier about tsunamis in her Geography lesson, recognised the situation she was seeing – the sea draining away far beyond low…
In thinking about the Reformation – as one does at this time – I think it can be easy to have a sense of triumphalism that Lutherans are right in their teachings and of course by implication … and it is easy, if we…
One of the first lectures I attended at university was in History. The course was an overview – from the Reformation to the modern day (then the 1970s). I recall the lecturer beginning with Luther and describing him as ‘the right man in the…
The topic of promises and oaths has been part of my world over the last few months. Invariably it has been to do with organisations such as the Sea Cadets, Guides, or Scouts which have oaths or promises in which God is mentioned and…
