Story
Picture it. Your name is Vladimir and you are working in a Soviet chemical factory in the 1930's. Suddenly the workers stop working and they start to sing a hymn. Not to God but to ‘electricity’. They sing as follows:
Electricity can do anything. It can dispel darkness
and gloom. One push of a button and clickety-click
out comes a new man.
It's not too late to book for this coming Saturday's Forming a Christian Mind day conference in Cambridge. The organising team explain what's special about this event, and why you should come.
As academics, we don’t like looking foolish. We are trained to provide evidence for assertions, and refrain from making them if we can’t provide justification for what we think and believe. But as I have been working through 1 Corinthians over the past few months, I have been convicted and encouraged by Paul’s call to ‘foolishness’.
Very pleased that the Scripture Union magazine Encounter with God has published my article 'Transformation of Work'. Here is the article.
God is a worker and He calls us to work in His wonderful but broken world. Some find it surprising that God works but Jesus makes this clear in the gospel of John. "My father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.” (John 5:17). So both God the Father and God the Son are workers.
Epistemic humility is an important intellectual virtue that can help us navigate difficult problems on the faith–science interface, such as evolution and creation.
Last term I had the opportunity to teach undergraduates for the first time, and alongside that I completed the teaching development course offered by the Humanities division here in Oxford. Part of the course involved writing a teaching philosophy, and so I had to consider: what do I think good teaching is? Specifically, what is good teaching in my discipline?
Very pleased that my new parable about Touch Wood has been published in the Baptist Times.
https://www.baptist.org.uk/Articles/535279/Parable_of_touch.aspx
I am a confirmed lover of Christmas. I love fairy lights and frost on the ground, poinsettias and Christmas ornaments, baking and decorating the tree. I love all the frills. Even though none of these things are particularly ‘commercial’, I’ll admit that none of them are necessarily about celebrating Jesus, either! And it seems I’m not alone among Christians: though we get to celebrate Christ’s presence with us every day of the year, it’s hard to deny that there’s something ‘magical’ about this season.
Reflecting on what Advent might mean for my work, I ended up looking at the connection between teaching and research. About half of this Advent wraps up my first semester of teaching (in a job I recently began), and the other half will give a little more time to pursue research tasks until Christmas is fully here.
