It is sometimes said that devotional times are a peculiarly modern and evangelical phenomenon. I doubt that. Certainly the form of the devotional time practised by evangelicals is modern: personal space, a chair, a Bible, a journal, a pen. Most Christians in history haven't had the money or the...

I was recently having a conversation with my children about their dreams. We were all able to relate to recurring dreams of being in deep water, sinking and struggling, so being a scientist, I began to explain to them what is known about the function of dreams. Interestingly, theories abound and...

Let’s recap on what we’ve seen so far in this series. Christians holding positions of influence in society is a good thing. In fact, it’s an essential thing, if the good news of Jesus is going to spread and the church is going to grow. So, how should we respond to this?

The obvious...

I've been listening to Jordan B. Peterson's lectures on Genesis. For someone who professes no 'belief' in Jesus Christ he has some remarkable psychological insights on the biblical narrative. Last Sunday at One Harbor Church I took one of those insights - about the problem of evil - and attempted...

It must be frustrating for Tom Nichols to have released his book The Death of Expertise and then found, through no fault of his own, that Daniel Drezner was releasing The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans and Plutocrats are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas at the same time. The two...

Different people’s voices have different weights. Diane Abott has more influence than my son’s primary school teacher. My MP’s voice is more influential than my dentist’s. However, it is not just politicians who have influence. Culture is not just shaped by law makers, but...

Robin M. Jensen’s The Cross: History, Art, and Controversy (Harvard, 2017) is an exceptionally interesting and insightful review of the way in which the symbol of the cross has been perceived over the past 2000 years.

One of the many fascinating insights Jensen offers (especially to an...

Virtue signalling is everywhere on social media. Most people seem to agree on that, even if they can't always agree on what qualifies, or how defensible it is. But after hearing a number of tirades about it recently, it strikes me that there is more that needs to be said about it. Four things in...

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.”

These words from Revelation 21:1 have always felt double-edged to me. A new heaven and earth sounds good – bring that on Lord! But no more sea? That’s...

An ill-advised post by a prominent theologian has sparked an online debate over the label of ‘heresy’ and how we ought to judge the boundaries of orthodoxy.

I am referring, of course, to Wilson’s shocking admission that he hates Star Wars.

In a startling contribution to the...

It feels as though every day brings a fresh example of the growing intolerance of the ‘diversity’ movement.

The latest example to hit the headlines concerned the National Trust’s ‘Prejudice & Pride’ campaign. The Trust had required volunteers at Felbrigg Hall in...

I’ve been thinking about the whole issue of influence a lot lately and recently strung together some of my thoughts into a series of posts on our arts blog. While I was thinking of this subject specifically with artists in mind, this subject seems to be coming up more and more in wider church...

Sometimes the only way of explaining David Bentley Hart is to turn his arguments into aphorisms, or tweet-length summaries, and hope you've understood him correctly. I've just finished his remarkable The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics—which, I should say, is not...

Suicide is the second leading cause of death among 15-29 year olds worldwide. It accounts for 8% of all deaths. In the UK, suicide is the leading cause of death in young people, accounting for 14% of deaths in 10-19 year olds and 21% of deaths in 20-34 year olds. It is distressing to think of so...

Charlie Gard's parents this week made the agonizing decision to turn off their 11 month old son's life support system and allow him to die. I simply can't imagine what that must be like, and we must admire their courage and their fight for the life of their child.

The case has captured the attention...

In the Black Hills of South Dakota, there is a mountainside with a face carved out of it. Unlike its more famous neighbour, Mount Rushmore, it features not four faces, but one: that of the Lakota leader, Crazy Horse. But the memorial is nowhere near finished. It was started in 1948, and the...

So the week before last it was all, “Gender is meaningless – it mustn’t even be mentioned; it is the distinction that knows no name,” as London Underground instructed staff not to use the phrase ladies and gentlemen. But last week it was all, “Gender is everything...

Of all creatures, only God's image can cry, And laughter is also exclusively his— For he alone senses our world has gone wrong, And sees that what should be is not yet what is, Which leads him to weep, and to joke, and to sigh, And in his best moments, to cry out: how long?

Jen Wilkin's Women of the Word is not just the best book on Bible study for women that I have read; it is the best book on Bible study for anybody that I have read. Jen is a marvellous Bible teacher who wrote one of my favourite books of last year, None Like Him, and in this book she addresses one...

If you are not French, you can see Frenchness more clearly than those who are. The Latinity of Latin is far more obvious to us than it was to the Romans. In the same way, says C. S. Lewis in Miracles,

... only Supernaturalists really see Nature. You must go a little way away from her, and then turn...

Self-styled progressives—or Whigs—bemoan the death of expertise. If ordinary people don't believe the experts, so the argument goes, they will believe anything: that global warming isn't happening, that immigration is bad for the economy, that the mainstream media are in a giant...

My friend and sometimes Think contributor Andrew Haslam drew my attention to this video of Camille Paglia performing a dissection of the Transgender phenomenon. It is not a new clip, but I had missed it previously. It is scorching; and it is insightful. If you haven't watched it already, you should....

Tish Harrison Warren's Liturgy of the Ordinary is wonderful. (To give you an idea: while typing that sentence, a text from Rachel appeared asking me if I could bring my copy home so she could give it away to a friend, and she didn't want to give away her copy.) Essentially, the idea is that we all...

If creating things is the way by which culture is formed then JK Rowling has been a cultural force. In the 20 years since Harry Potter & the Philosopher's Stone was published huge numbers of books have been printed and sold, vast sums of money generated, unknown children become globally...

I remember very clearly John Hosier listing the three theological questions he had been asked most, in forty years of ministry. The first, by a long way, was: Can you lose your salvation? Another mainstay was equally predictable: What happens when you die? The other, however, was of a completely...