movies
My records show that this is my 800th post, going all the way back to 2nd February 2006—913 weeks ago. Yes, I do think about stopping often enough and I certainly think about deleting dozens of posts, but I keep going because of three loves: (a) I love chatting away to myself, shaping-ideas and smithing-words;…
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Barby picked up this board from a ‘thrift shop’ recently. Do you recognise it? Yes, it is a (very) old version of Snakes and Ladders. A game we played as kids. With the simple roll of the dice, the game moves forward by seeking to land on the ladders (which lift you upwards) and by…
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Barby and I took a quick trip back to India last week. We watched the new Bollywood movie, Laapataa Ladies—which translates as Lost Ladies. It is as authentic and immersive an experience of India, in just two hours, that you could wish to have. Well, make that four hours because we watched it twice, with…
READ MOREOne thing life has shown me is that ‘post-romantic’ works better as a descriptor for music, than it does for marriage. While I have little background, and less ability, in music [NB: I find it hard to clap and sing at the same time], my soul seems to recognise a post-romantic composer when it hears…
READ MORECovid has turned my heart towards the poor once again. Poverty is not just a material issue. It is a choice issue. The wealthy have options, by definition. They can choose to be vaccinated, or not to be — while so many among the poor just keep waiting for a vaccine, a second vaccine and…
READ MOREIt all started as I was reading Alan Kreider’s The Patient Ferment of the Early Church. On page 92, he quotes Gerhard Lohfink making what seemed to me, on a first reading, to be a most extraordinary claim: “(Is 2:2-4; Micah 4.1-4) is the prophetic passage the early Christian writers cited more often than any…
READ MOREWhen it comes to TV dramas, nobody does it better than the Brits. Nobody. This is a law of the Medes and Persians that cannot be altered. And so it came to pass, with a nudge from our daughter and a shared Netflix account to help welcome us home, that Barby and I discovered Shetland. It…
READ MOREWith movies, I like to think my own thoughts… Whether it be the gross takings from the box-office, or those percentages on Rotten Tomatoes – neither one is going to influence me one whit. They are not going to tell me what to think. No way 😀. I’ll like what I like for the reasons I choose, thank-you…
READ MOREIt won’t win an Oscar, but nor is it cringe Christian cinema. The Least of These is the story of the martyrdom of Graham Staines and his two boys, Philip and Timothy, and it is well worth watching. The decision to build the plot around a journalist, played convincingly by Sharman Joshi (of Bollywood’s The Three Idiots fame),…
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the art of unpacking
After a childhood in India, a theological training in the USA and a pastoral ministry in Southland (New Zealand), I spent twenty years in theological education in New Zealand — first at Laidlaw College and then at Carey Baptist College, where I served as principal. In 2009 I began working with Langham Partnership and since 2013 I have been the Programme Director (Langham Preaching). Through it all I've cherished the experience of the 'gracious hand of God upon me' and I've relished the opportunity to 'unpack', or exegete, all that I encounter in my walk through life with Jesus.