At this time of year I normally get an urge to carve a pumpkin. Something about the bright orange, the squishiness, the shapes you can make (mainly TEETH) and the fact you get to place a tea light inside…it’s all so glow-y and tactile and alluring. And of course, highly seasonal. But sadly, as an…
Author: part time priest
C of E minister in Oxford Diocese, UK
on being green and feeling blue
I knew something was up when I started to nervously avoid the weather forecast. This was in the summer of 2018. Before that (confession time) I cared IN THEORY about global warming but suffered from the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ mindset that meant because I didn’t see the problem on my doorstep, I…
on being
Fancy being ‘paid to pray’! That’s what my life as a priest looks like, though, from one angle. I’m still trying to habituate myself to it, after many years of ‘unpaid’ (‘self – supporting’, aka non-stipendiary) ministry which essentially for me meant living off someone else’s salary. I used to think the C of E…
only joni
I’m not one for hoarding but there’s one cassette tape I’ll never throw away. It was compiled by a friend at Uni, from her personal collection of Joni Mitchell LPs and presented to me, beautifully filled in with handwritten lists on those paper inserts tapes had, so I would know which songs had been recorded…
are things getting worse?
I don’t know if it’s the preserve of religious people, but we do like to talk about how things were better in the past, or to flip this, how things are now getting worse. The Church of England narrative about financial decline (or to be more generous – let’s call it streamlining) is in full…
the other Rossetti
Today the Church of England remembers Christina Rossetti, poet and sister of the more famous Dante Gabriel, of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This group wrote and painted through the latter half of the 19th Century producing such classics as Millais’ Ophelia and Holman Hunt’s symbolic heavy The Hireling Shepherd. Christina was not a formal member of…
on bridges
Although I’m not much of a one for heights, and don’t much like boats, airplanes or lifts, I don’t mind bridges, physical or metaphorical. A bridge spans two places that would otherwise be separated. They tend to feature heavily in war films, where to capture the bridge is to have the power to separate the…
part time priest 