Virtual Methodist

No Saturday supplement this week... not because there isn't much out there of interest in the virtual world... if anything there is too much to swiftly sift it... but because there has also been too much on in the "real" world with the beginning of September and trying to find a new rhythm to life in a new setting... But despite my busyness I did manage to carve out a whole day last Saturday to enjoy my birthday present from my wife... a triple bill of Henry VI parts 1, 2 & 3 performed by the Globe Theatre company... So at the same time as 400 people were gathering in the Lyric theatre to mark the passing of the bard from Bellaghy, I and about 400 others were staggering punch drunk into the Grand Opera House for the final furlong of nearly 8 hours of Shakespeare. I don't recollect ever having seen any of these three history plays before so I have nothing to compare them with from my own experience... all I can say is that I enjoyed the whole day. There were ...

In his book " The Contemplative Pastor " (I'm only 20% of my way through this so there's plenty more to come on this strand) Peterson says: “Jesus’ favorite speech form, the parable, was subversive. Parables sound absolutely ordinary: casual stories about soil and seeds, meals and coins and sheep, bandits and victims, farmers and merchants. And they are wholly secular: of his forty or so parables recorded in the Gospels, only one has its setting in church, and only a couple mention the name God. As people heard Jesus tell these stories, they saw at once that they weren’t about God, so there was nothing in them threatening their own sovereignty. They relaxed their defenses. They walked away perplexed, wondering what they meant, the stories lodged in their imagination. And then, like a time bomb, they would explode in their unprotected hearts. An abyss opened up at their very feet. He was talking about God; they had been invaded!... Parables subversively slip past o...

I loved Jackanory as a child - for those who are not from these shores or my generation, it was a piece of cheap TV for children where a "celebrity" read a story every afternoon for about 15 minutes, over a period of a week. Well following on from my reflections on Brueggeman's "Prophetic Imagination" a couple of days ago, I've been prompted to think about the importance and power of story, not just for entertaining children, but to bring about change. Part of that was a result of another book I was reading "The Help" by Kathryn Stockett, which, for those who haven't read the book or seen the film, is about a young white woman in the early 1960s collating the stories of black maids in the epicentre of segregationism, Jackson, Mississippi. I've posted reviews of both the book and film on facebook recently (via Goodreads and Flixster respectively) and in the review of the film I explored, briefly, how the book was not only shortened but a...