By Rod Benson (published in APBF Digest, June 2015) When he chose “Francis” for his papal name in 2014, in honour of St Francis of Assisi, we might have expected former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio to make a significant contribution to the Catholic Church’s witness on environmental issues. With the Encyclical released on June 18, …
Help when I feel abandoned by God
A sermon by Rev Rod Benson, 29 September 2019 Psalm 10:1, 12 One of my favourite fiction writers is William Golding, best known as the author of Lord of the Flies. One of his other novels, The Inheritors,tells the story of Lok and his family, the last surviving Neanderthals in a world where another …
Overwhelmed by negative feelings
A sermon by Rev. Rod Benson, 22 September 2019. 1 John 1:5-2:2; 2 Corinthians 5:17 In his brilliant book, Faithful Feelings,author Matthew Elliott says, “Everything we do, say, and think is, in some sense, emotional. We describe ourselves and our experiences in terms of how we feel.”[1] In the Bible too, most of the main …
Underwhelmed by lack of feelings
A sermon by Rev Rod Benson, 8 September 2019 2 Corinthians 5:7On 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 books …
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 …
iDigress 