Renew Your Mind

I've just watched Paul Nurse on BBC's Horizon programme, lamenting the fact that the public no longer seem to believe scientists. He looked nostalgically back at the 300 year history of the Royal Society, with it's mantra of examining ideas and theories by collecting and analysing data, and mused that this approach to discovering truth no longer seems to be universally trusted. I could not help but hear echoes of the erosion of trust in religion. Nurse called for the scientific community to become more aware of the way in which our culture operates, and instead of assuming that the public should change to understand scientists, there needed to be a change on the part of the scientists. This seems so similar to those within the Christian community who are asking what it means to be missional. We have known for a long time that the way we used to do things just does not have much credibility to 21st century people. Rather than us becoming defensive, retreating and becoming in...

I've been reading Moltmann and Barth on work, and am left with some questions.... How do you define work, if you are a full-time mum? Or if you work part-time in a laundrette, but really your heart is in designing and making clothes? Or if teaching maths is what you get paid to do, but you call yourself a theologian? Darell Cosden writes Human work is a transformative activity essentially consisting of dynamically interrelated instrumental, relational and ontological dimensions. His book unpacks that dense definition, offering some helpful insights about how a christian ethic of work needs the balance of all three of his dimensions, but I still feel he is presuming a neat, easily identifiable "job" which he calls work. Work for many of us today is less often a single job, career or vocation, than a portfolio of projects- some of which are paid and some voluntary; some of which are long term and some may be only a day or a few hours; some with a regular fixed timetab...

One of my New Year's resolutions for 2011 is to cook at least one vegetarian meal a week for our family. That's what comes from doing a course in Christian Ethics- you can't study this stuff intellectually, and not let it influence your behaviour. The unit on Christian attitudes to eating is coming up, and has re-awakened thoughts I've had before about being a "rich" Christian in a world with so much injustice and need. It seems to me as if we in the developed world must be prepared to make some changes in our lifestyle, and admit responsibility for some of the hunger in the world. Evangelical christians in the past were often the first to raise awareness of social injustice, now we sometimes seem just as complacent as everyone else. So, although not eating meat once a week is not much, it's better than nothing.