...thoughts on life, faith and culture.
It was my birthday a few weeks back and a friend sent a card with some photos on, one of which is me at the helm of a sailing boat. I’d quite forgotten about it and the memory made me smile. If you didn’t know the context, you could even look at that photo and think I knew what I was doing. What you can’t see is the storm we were sailing into – only minutes later I was wrestling the helm as the wind and rain lashed the boat and the sea reminded me of my amateur status. In...
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Every time I sit down to write a blog recently, there’s some new atrocity in the news. Shootings, bombings, stabbings. Somehow terror has grown even more terrifying, sudden, and startling. It’s hard to imagine the kind of evil it takes to drive a truck deliberately through a crowd of celebrating families, open fire on revellers with a semi-automatic, or detonate a bomb that indiscriminately massacres crowds of people. The easiest, most obvious, and seemingly most natural, response is to hate. Hate Daesh and al-qaeda, hate the Mahdi Army and Boko Haram, and hate whoever else is presently unleashing their evil upon the world. And yet, a couple...
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I was talking to a friend the other day and she told me that she had been driving and had her first blow out. I was concerned so naturally asked if everything was okay and what she had done; everything was fine, she’d gotten to the side of the road and phoned her dad. I wonder what she said when she called him? I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure she didn’t speak in old English, and address him in a very formal fashion. It probably went something like: “Dad, I’ve had a blow out. I’m by the road...
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Korea has been in the news a lot this past year. First Psy decided to invade music charts, and minds, everywhere with the song Gangnam Style and now the tensions of the peninsula are being ratcheted up by bellicose rhetoric from the North. When I think of the Republic of Korea, however, I don’t think first of that horse riding style dance, or of the DMZ and the military tensions; when I think of Korea I think of revival. I think of a nation where 1 in 3 people are Christians and where many of the worlds largest churches are found. There...
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About twelve centuries before the birth of Christ a woman called Tapputi-Belatekallim worked in Mesopotamia, modern day Iraq. Tapputi mixed flowers, oil, cyperus, myrrh, and balsam with water to produce perfumes which made such an impact that her name and career were recorded on cuneiform tablets. For almost as long as we have recorded history, people have been making and delighting in scents. Just a quick walk into any department store will show that Tapputi’s craft is alive, well, and big business; according to a UNDP report some $12 billion is spent on perfume every year in the USA and Europe alone. Scent,...
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