I have been very busy, so haven’t been able to investigate what the fuss is all about that streams past my social-media feeds: something about a red take-away coffee cup not having snowflakes, Santa’s sleigh, and elves and all the other things the Bible mentions at Christmas time… Being in the Southern-Hemisphere, where the majority
The Abbot’s Shoes: Seeking a Contemplative Life by Peter Robertson (Kindle $2). This is Peter Robertson’s story, set in New Zealand. He joined the Cistercians in New Zealand at Kopua Monastery, in the early ’70s was when I first started going to the monastery (I am now a Cistercian Associate of Kopua). Vividly descriptive, it
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The video (above) has already been seen by over a thousand people on facebook [I wrote that yesterday – it’s about three and a half thousand now – check yourself]. The parish has a facebook page. Does your church/parish have a quality website and facebook page? If not – why not?! Does your church/parish produce
Inexplicably, the NZ Anglican Church did not put possibly the most famous Anglican collect into its revised services: BLESSED lord, which hast caused all holy Scriptures to bee written for our learnyng; graunte us that we maye in suche wise heare them, read, marke, learne, and inwardly digeste them; that by pacience, and coumfort of
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Children from religious families are less kind and more punitive than those from non-religious households, according to a new study. All over the internet and printed in newspapers (the above quote is from the Guardian) is the conclusion of the study that found that religious belief is a negative influence on children’s altruism: ” Our
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Preaching the opposite of what the Bible teaches On Sunday most preaching on the Widow’s Mite will preach the opposite of what Jesus in the Bible is actually teaching. On Sunday many men (and women) in long robes (and even those who deprecate robes and instead wear expensive suits or hip-pastor jeans with designs and
Available now online is New Zealand’s Lectionary Te Maramataka 2016 PDF (1.54 MB – click link to download). [Note – page numbers of the printed booklet may differ from the online version referred to here.] This is just a splash of comments from a quick first glance. There is much in a publication such as
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I’m reading Hermits; The Insights of Solitude and appreciating what it offers, including a lot of the quotes it presents. In a book focusing mainly on solitude in the Christian tradition, I was taken by the chapter on Ramakrishna in which it reminded me that life, for a Hindu, is divided into four stages: bramacarya
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