A while back I became convinced that my glasses were growing bigger. I'd look at myself in the mirror in the morning, sure that someone had substituted larger frames during the night. What was going on?

I eventually came to understand: it wasn’t that my glasses had changed, but my perception...

Ever get to Leviticus in your Bible reading and let out a – at least internal – groan? It can feel very hard work: all that stuff about sacrifice and all that stuff about what is clean and what isn’t.

I’ve been leading a group through a study of the Pentateuch as part of a...

June is LGBTQ+ Pride month. That’s why you might have noticed rainbow flags flying, pride events starting (they’ll actually spread across the next few months), and even the logos of some famous companies adopting the rainbow colours. This year’s celebrations are particularly...

Last week I filled a major gap in my education and finally watched The Matrix. I know, I know – how had I not seen it before? I just sort of missed it when it first came out, and then saw so many clips and heard so many sermon illustrations that I never really felt the need to pay to watch...

In 2007, the Gallup organisation asked people around the world whether they felt they were leading meaningful lives. It turns out that Liberia was the country where the most people felt a sense of meaning and purpose, while the Netherlands was the place where the lowest percentage of people did.

Thi...

Now the overseer is to be above reproach, faithful to his wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money.

It is amusing, if salutary, to look at the remaining candidates in the Tory...

The apostle Peter writes to the churches describing them as, God’s elect, exiles, scattered (1 Peter 1:1). The people of God have been chosen by God to be scattered throughout the earth in order to carry the promised blessing to all nations. This is a great calling, but at times being an...

Many of us have big questions about sexuality. What does the Bible actually say about same-sex relationships? What does it look like to faithfully follow Jesus as someone who is same-sex attracted/gay? And how can the church best love, support and share the gospel with sexual minorities?...

On Monday evening I put our carefully sorted recycling out for collection, came back in, put on the TV and found myself watching Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s latest campaigning series: War on Plastic.

Hugh’s outrage was the very on-trend concern about the ubiquity of single use...

Frederick Dale Bruner points out that the Magi are led to Bethlehem by creation (the star), and then by Scripture (the prophet Micah), before encountering Christ. "Nature begins," he writes, "Scripture completes." It is a principle that goes beyond the story of Matthew 2, and prompts a thoughtful...

I grew up in a Christian home attending a good, solid, Bible-believing church. We were taught from the Word every Sunday, and in the middle of the week would meet in homes to study it some more and to pray.

The prayer part was interesting. Which is to say it was usually very dull, but interesting...

You’ve got to feel sorry for atheists. They are such a beleaguered minority, and it is such a difficult position to hold with consistency.

A new piece of research, snappily titled, Understanding Unbelief: Atheists and agnostics around the world. Interim findings from 2019 research in Brazil,...

Should people self-identify as "white"? In normal conversation? In the church, or other specifically Christian contexts? On a census form or diversity survey? It might seem that the answer is yes to all of the above, and that even asking the question is the height of politically correct silliness....

The Bible is a story. I’m sure many of us have said this; many of us will even have taught it. It’s a story which runs from Genesis to Revelation, from Creation to the New Creation, and recognising this fact is vital to reading the Bible well. But what if it isn’t? Perhaps the...

Can atheism provide the grounds for believing in universal benevolence and human rights? Well: no, says Christian Smith in his excellent Atheist Overreach: What Atheism Can't Deliver. In a nuanced, fair, scholarly and readable argument, Smith makes no attempt to establish whether naturalist atheism...

If you have two minutes—and let’s face it, if you’re here, you do—spend them with Tertullian, and consider why Christian joys are unimaginably greater than the pleasures of popular entertainment. Read to the end:

Even as things are, if your thought is to spend this period of...

A few months ago I saw someone post a clip from The Office US on Twitter. Rarely has anything ever resonated with me so deeply! In the clip, one character asks another whether they have read a certain book, to which the reply comes, ‘Read it? I own it! But no, I have not read it.’...

The first time I ever heard of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, he was accusing me of spreading bull**** on Twitter. With hindsight, he may well have been right. Prior to that exchange I had never heard of him, but I was quickly fascinated by his mind, his range, his combative style and his provocative and...

The past decade has seen the publication of lots of great books on sexuality, and yet good books on singleness have remained few and far between. (Interestingly almost all those that have been published in recent years have been by women and for women. Single men seem to have been rather...

The Jungle Book is one of those classics that has, until recently, passed me by. I've seen the Disney cartoon version, of course, but the following scene isn't in it - though the wily tricks of Kaa appear elsewhere. This is how the book tells it.

It comes after Mowgli has been captured by the...

A few months ago I heard a genuinely shocking statement at a leadership conference for pastors. The individual was saying that he wanted people in his community to think of his church before any others in the local area, and said quite matter-of-factly, "I'm after market share. And I don't...

I’ve recently seen a lot of references to university students as “millennials.” Conferences, news articles, podcasts, all claiming to want to reach students and referring to them as millennials. As one of the student leaders at my local church, it makes me want to start wearing a...

One of the characteristics of our era is to judge the past by the standards of the present: this has been especially the case in the verdicts – legal and social – handed down to showbiz figures from the 70s & 80s. The inverse of this is an assumption that people in the past held the...

We (well, Andrew) have not been very good at political predictions on Think, but here goes. As the 'probably' has now become 'certainly' and two weeks today the UK will be taking part in European elections, I offer some predictions - no opinion, simply prediction. Andrew is free to offer different...

"[Bezalel] made the basin of bronze and its stand of bronze, from the mirrors of the ministering women who ministered in the entrance of the tent of meeting." - Exodus 38:8

This is one of those tiny verses that has slipped past my attention on every previous reading of the (somewhat tedious)...