A sermon by Rev Rod Benson, 8 September 2019 2 Corinthians 5:7 On the shelves of the library at Moore Theological College, where I work, there are lots of books about intellectual subjects, about awesome and awful ideas, and especially about arguments. But the library also contains lots of biography and history, and lots of …
Some fairy tales may be 6,000 years old
A scene from a classic edition of Jack and the Beanstalk. “Fairy tales are transmitted through language, and the shoots and branches of the Indo-European language tree are well-defined, so the scientists could trace a tale’s history back up the tree—and thus back in time. If both Slavic languages and Celtic languages had a version …
Mindfulness as a symptom
Reducing suffering is a noble aim and it should be encouraged. But to do this effectively, teachers of mindfulness need to acknowledge that personal stress also has societal causes. By failing to address collective suffering, and systemic change that might remove it, they rob mindfulness of its real revolutionary potential, reducing it to something banal …
A first essay on a first essay
On the table beside me lies an essay. Age spots on the smooth ivory surface, the faded red ink of a date stamp, and the tell-tale black marks impressed on paper by the typebars of an old manual typewriter indicate originality. In the upper left corner, staples stitch the leaves, and every second surface bears …
J.R.R. Tolkien on anarchism
Strangely, this quote is my blog’s most popular post: J.R.R. Tolkien on anarchism
