Ordinary Christians are constantly being invited to forget their language. Clergy are also tempted to dilute the force of the language we represent in an attempt to be relevant. Yet paradoxically the pluralist character of our society offers us, once again, the space to embody and articulate distinctive Christian discourse without feeling the necessity to […]
Blog
joy
Posted on by James Woodward
Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence? I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds. Open your doors and look abroad. From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before. […]
wrought flower
Posted on by James Woodward
I believe the earth exists, and in each minim mote of its dust the holy glow of thy candle. Thou unknown I know, thou spirit, giver, lover of making, of the wrought letter, wrought flower, iron, deed, dream the ordinary glow of common dust in ancient sunlight. Be, that I may believe. Amen. […]
Clive Hicks-Jenkins
Posted on by James Woodward
Clive Hicks-Jenkins was born in Newport in 1951 and educated in Theatre Studies at the Italia Conti School. He currently lives in mid Wales. His painting has been critically praised in The Independent, Modern Painters, Galleries and Art Review. Shelagh Hourahane, in Planet, has called him ‘an inspiring and masterly painter’, and Robert Macdonald described […]
Beware of professionalization!
Posted on by James Woodward
For some clergy, professionalism is their way of compensating for a sense of being an anachronism as a cleric. So skills in parish administration — skills in this, skills in that — are all part of “I matter because I have these skills,” as opposed to “I have internalized the theology I’ve been taught in […]
The creation of the 1611 Authorized (King James) Bible
Posted on by James Woodward
The King James Bible began life at a conference convened by James I at Hampton Court Palace in 1604. There it was ordered that a new translation of the Bible be produced, as the King strove to forge unity between Scotland and England. It was the culmination of over two centuries of struggle to […]
Faith
Posted on by James Woodward
Faith is belief that God is leading us to become in tune with the universe, however different we see ourselves to be. Faith is trust in the unknown goodness of life without demand for certainty in the science of it. Faith is belief that the God we call “our God” is either the God of […]
Launching a Prayer
Posted on by James Woodward
The stripling posturing before the hero; the mature man posturing before God. Circularity is endless, yet one prayer, slipping the reason, speeds out into the cornerless universe so close to God as to open a crater in his composure. R.S. Thomas, Residues
oddity
Posted on by James Woodward
Love, thou are deep: I cannot cross thee. But, were there Two Instead of One — Rower, and Yacht — some sovereign Summer — Who knows, but we’d reach the Sun? Love, thou are Veiled: A few behold thee, Smile, and alter, and prattle, and die. Bliss were an Oddity, without thee, Nicknamed […]
Theological Study
Posted on by James Woodward
Serious theological work today is or ought to be rather like working in a quarry, and quite specifically the kind of quarry which one finds in India, where men and women, and quite young children too, in the heat of the day hack away at the rock-face with simple implements, exposing themselves to danger, and […]
poppy
Posted on by James Woodward
In the whole garden like screens of green plane of green rising into the morning sun a single poppy more ornate, fuller, larger as if a shower puff, overlapping petals a singular color, melting salmon steak and orange sherbet richer, softer crepe paper ribbon bloom drinking in the light against a sea of green From […]
Theological Quarry (2)
Posted on by James Woodward
The cliff-face in our theological quarry is the Bible and the rich resources and insights into truth which are to be found in the Christian tradition, and the other world faiths and ideologies that have interacted with the Christian tradition If we are faithful in our quarry work in the heat and sweat of the […]
We need to talk about death!
Posted on by James Woodward
All of us swim in the one sea of our lives, trying to stay afloat as best we can, clinging to such life-lines and preservers as we might draw about us: reason and science, faith and religious practice, art and music and imagination. But in the end the wall go down, we all sink, […]
Theorizing?
Posted on by James Woodward
So too with theorizing: the instinct is about staying alive, but the excess is about living. It enriches our everyday life (those happy-hour debriefs about the boss) and enables our most extraordinary achievements (that hoped-for cure for cancer). Without it, we would be bereft of virtually all our hallmark human endeavors: religion, science, and storytelling; […]
Communication?
Posted on by James Woodward
One of the most obvious features of modern life in the West has been a radical questioning of tradition, of everything received from the past. Wisdom distilled from living in previous eras has often seemed irrelevant and out of date, unsuited to modern conditions and problems. Add to all this the floods of information, images, […]
Help me to change?
Posted on by James Woodward
The need to be right about ourselves—past, present, and future—is what drives our yearning for perfect self-knowledge. And it also drives our yearning for something else; perfect self-consistency. As with complete self- knowledge, we know, in theory, that an unchanging self is not part of the bargain of being human. In fact, sometimes we enthusiastically […]
Discovery?
Posted on by James Woodward
Sometimes everything has to be enscribed across the heavens So you can find the one line already written inside you. -David Whyte
All Saints
Posted on by James Woodward
Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord: grant us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living that we may come to those inexpressible joys that you have prepared for those who truly love […]
I Know?
Posted on by James Woodward
“I know” seems to describe a state of affairs which guarantees what is known, guarantees it as a fact. One always forgets the expression, “I thought I knew.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty