Entries from November 2007

28 November 2007

Christian community — what is it?

I came across a blog post today that struck me as a strange inversion of what I have thought about Christian community.
I took an hour out of my time this afternoon and reread a large section of Thomas Merton’s outstanding spiritual biography, The Seven Storey Mountain. I was looking for a single sentence, and I [...]

27 November 2007

Imperialism and the Archbishop

US imperialism has created the worst of all worlds, says the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury. I don’t disagree. But when he says that the United States wields its power in a way that is worse than Britain in its imperial heyday, I think he has not studied history enough.
Back at the beginning of 2003, [...]

26 November 2007

Nigerian evangelist starts Protestant church in Ukraine

A Nigerian evangelist has started a Protestant church in Ukraine, and is now setting his sights on the USA.

clipped from www.cbc.ca

Nearly every week, new visitors arrive. They want to see the megachurch that was built in the unlikeliest of places by the unlikeliest of men.The Embassy of the Blessed Kingdom of God for All [...]

25 November 2007

A busy day

It was Val’s birthday and Name Day today (St Katherine of Alexandria), and we had a pretty busy day. First we went to the Hours and Readers Service at Mamelodi, and then went to the annual prizegiving at St Athanasius School in Tembisa, with the monks from St Thomas’s Orthodox Church in Sunninghill, with the [...]

24 November 2007

Thank God for America!

With Americans celebrating their Thanksgiving this week, some bloggers, including some non-American ones, have been making lists of things about America for which they thank God.
Elizaphanian, for example, refers to One Salient Oversight, and Stumbling and Mumbling, but none of those lists really spoke to me. Yet I take Elizaphanian’s point: many people outside [...]

22 November 2007

Christians and homosexuality

An evangelical Christian blogger, Stephen Murray, recently wrote about some comments of Desmond Tutu, the former Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, to the effect that the Anglican Church was spending too much time debating about homosexuality, when there were many more important and urgent issues to be concerned about.
There has been quite a lot of [...]

21 November 2007

Stem cells from skin

A new breakthrough in creating stem cells from human skin could solve bioethical problems in stem cell research

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com

Researchers in Wisconsin and Japan said yesterday that they have turned ordinary human skin cells into what are effectively embryonic stem cells without using embryos or women’s eggs — the previously essential ingredients that have [...]

19 November 2007

The devil rides out

Last Friday I was browsing in a bookshop when I came across a copy of Dennis Wheatley’s The devil rides out. I had read it a couple of times when I was at school and enjoyed it, and when I later read Charles Williams’s War in heaven there were some parts that reminded me of [...]

17 November 2007

The church and money - healing

Here’s a spin-off from the Church and money Synchroblog: Monte Asbury writes in What everyone knows about health care: “the health care giants in the USA spend $300 billion on promotion. You’ll see their ads on TV tonight, won’t you? Enjoy them, ’cause they’re part of your health care bill.”
Even if that billion [...]

14 November 2007

The Church and money - synchroblog

In my first-year Theology course at university the first essay we were asked to write in the Ethics class was on Usury, and it forced us to look at the way that Christian ethical standards have changed over the centuries.
Lord, who shall dwell in Thy tabernacle: or who shall rest upon thy holy hill?
He who [...]