ST. PHILIP’S E-NEWSLETTER(ETTE)
3 SEPTEMBER 2010
COMMENT FROM THE EDITOR
Time flies and thus only a snippet, a letter-ette today.
Enjoy the joke, enjoy the thought, enjoy the weekend, and enjoy the service.
PRELIMINARY REMINDER
Worship returns to 9.30am and 11.00am this Sunday.
PRELIMINARY ONE-LINER
After last week’s favourite festival joke (‘I went on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. Never again.’) your editor thought a start with another one liner might be appropriate.
Never respond to an anonymous letter.
or perhaps even the winner from last year’s festival.
“Hedgehogs – why can’t they just share the hedge?”
THOUGHT
Here’s something from Karl Barth, one of the theologians of the 20th century. It seemed appropriate as schools are now well underway and with… click here to read more
ST. PHILIP’S E-NEWSLETTER
13 AUGUST 2010
COMMENTS FROM THE EDITOR
There is the sense of busy preparation in the background as we begin to sidle towards the start of a new session. Plans are being made, ideas are being tossed about and your editor….reaches for another cup of coffee.
Inspiration in a cafetiere.
THOUGHT
The Edinburgh Book Festival is nigh and your editor often peruses the programme with unconcealed delight at all the possibilities. Lots of great ideas, stories, conversations, books and treasures. Amongst the guests this year is the Nobel Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney, whose work is so often a vivid, physical recreation of memory or a pointer beyond the horizon. Here’s a favourite:
The annals say: when… click here to read more
ST. PHILIP’S E-NEWSLETTER
2 JULY 2010
COMMENTS FROM THE EDITOR
A bit later than usual today.
Your editor had to take his BBQ for a walk down the prom. Don’t ask..
DON’T FORGET:
9.30AM Communion
10.30AM Service
THOUGHT
Don Cupitt is a theologian known for his radical views and his attempts to reconcile the modern world view and Christianity. In a book written in 2008, The Meaning of the West: An Apologia for Secular Christianity, he writes the following:
For many years I laboured to reconcile Church-Christianity and the modern world. I now see that the critics were right, and it cannot be done. Church-Christianity is gradually becoming more and more counter-cultural (a euphemism for ‘irrational’)… click here to read more
ST. PHILIP’S E-NEWSLETTER
4 JUNE 2010
COMMENTS FROM THE EDITOR
Your weekly (well, most weeks) newsletter (well, more than news and far less than gossip) zooming (at least arriving) into your intray (metaphorically, of course) for information and fun and enjoyment (or at least one out of three).
THOUGHT
Charles Taylor is a Canadian philosopher whose thinking on the conception of the self in the modern world and on secularity is both insightful and challenging. He is a practising Catholic who is at home in the post-modern world, searching for ways of thinking through the depths of our faith and cultural heritages. Here he has been talking about links across boundaries based ‘not on kinship but on the kind of… click here to read more
ST. PHILIP’S E-NEWSLETTER
14 MAY 2010
COMMENTS FROM THE EDITOR
Your editor wondered if this e-newsletter should be coloured red, yellow or blue this week. What do you get when you mix a bit of yellow with blue? Apart from a coalition cabinet, something a bit green.
A green revolution?
THOUGHT
Your editor read something recently by a woman named Grace Davie, a sociologist who has done extensive work on religion in the contemporary European and North American context. Within her work are such useful concepts as ‘believing without belonging’ (and for our Scandinavian friends, ‘belonging without believing’); vicarious religion, felt by many in Europe; and the shift from a culture of obligation to a culture of consumption. Within a… click here to read more
ST. PHILIP’S E-NEWSLETTER
COMMENTS FROM THE EDITOR
Your editor was up late collating the election results, cheering for the Liberal Conservative Democrats Labouring in Green Scottish Nationalist Socialist Fields, and though it was tempting to rest, it was thought best to send.
After all, it is better to send than receive.
Who voted this editor into office?
THOUGHT
Politics and religion are often uneasy partners. And so it should be: part of our faith is speaking truth to power. One of the most articulate exponents is the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and your editor has always appreciated his comments. Even if questioned or, more likely, only partially understood, they require thought. Because education is an essential part of this… click here to read more