Musician Moana Maniapoto found her beliefs challenged when the ashes of Headless Chicken’s founder Grant Fell were sprinkled on stage during an award ceremony by his wife Rachael. But one of Fell’s colleagues said, ‘I felt like he was there.…
Category: Rethinking Christianity
Lindsay van Dijk, a humanist, has been appointed by the Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust to lead a chaplaincy team that includes Christian, Buddhist, and Bahai members. As Lindsay told the Guardian, ‘A lot of people don’t have an organised faith,…
Jacinda Adern, Prime Minister of New Zealand, is having a baby. But you probably already know that unless you’ve been holidaying on Mars. Her partner Clarke is to be the main caregiver dealing with the general insanity a new addition…
My Mum always said we shouldn’t wash our dirty linen in public. Secrets, lies, and doubts about anything, particularly the godstuff, were for the privacy of our own kitchen and closed down before they got too heretical. What mattered was…
no matter how much we protest about rape (haven’t women been experiencing this forever, remember Dinah in Genesis and when we thought our marching might take back the night) no matter how many rape laws are drafted, enacted people imprisoned,…
Just because your life’s fallen down doesn’t mean there’s nothing left I thought as I gazed at the skeleton of Knox Presbyterian Church in Christchurch. Instead of being desolate, this space had a stark kind of beauty. On the whole,…
Professor Sir Mason Durie is a seasoned presenter. One slide with three points and he had the standing room only crowd in his hand at Vaughan Park Anglican Retreat Centre. We were a willing audience having gathered to hear his…
Christchurch’s interim cardboard cathedral is not all cardboard and may well last over 50 years but that’s not the point. It’s the sense of impermanence that has promise. Cathedrals tend to play down impermanence, opting instead for solid and imposing,…
Emilie Selden has an appealing naïvety. She’s educated in the art and philosophy of alchemy but has no clue about more mundane matters like the predatory bloke who’s after her fortune. She intrigued me when I met her on the…
I’ve been thinking about the most wonderful keyhole in the world as debates about public prayer have been on the agenda of city council meetings in Bideford, England, and Whanganui, New Zealand. To look through this keyhole you have to…