Category: Blog

The situation in Ukraine makes us feel so helpless. What can we do? Add this to our weariness and anxiety about the pandemic, climate change and the economy and we are left wondering what the future looks like for us and future generations. These images of warfare haunt

  I wonder where you consider home to be? And if you are a long way away from that place do you ever feel homesick? That strange longing for the places, the people, the language and particularities that formed you ? Home for me is the north-east – so I should a

The Three Ages of Man or Reading a Song is a 1500-1501 is a painting by  Giorgione which is presently displayed in the Galleria Palatina in Florence. It has stimulated some further thoughts especially around a recurring comment that has found expression in recent conve

Prayers for Living 500 Prayers for Public and Private Worship by Rosalind Brown (Sacristy Press 2021) I wonder if you pray how do you go about this activity either for public worship or private devotion? In the middle of a recent conversation, I was invited by another p

Global Images of Christ: Challenging Perceptions at Chester Cathedral The latest exhibition at Chester Cathedral due to end this month (October 2021) is a diverse, innovative and challenging invitation to the ways in which we represent Christ. In this black history month were

Change where your attention is I first encountered this book through a conversation with a colleague at Sarum College about pastoral supervision.I was aware of Nancy Kline and her transformative Book Time to Think. My first encounter with her thinking was through Christopher

This is a short, readable, challenging and deeply transformative book. The author is Rt Revd Dr Alastair Redfern, who chairs the Clewer Initiative, and the Sarum College Trustees, and is a theological educator of significant skill and generativity. Organised into four par

Sir Terry Frost  RA (13 October 1915 – 1 September 2003) - playful, alive, colourful & fun I cannot now remember when I first encountered a piece of art by Frost. I do remember the vibrancy of the colour and the freedom of the form. Here - I sensed - was energy an

Engaging, wise, passionate This is an appealing and fluent book with a story and a purpose. I read it in one siting on a train from Durham to London and as I passed through York (just under half way through the book) I felt a deep sense of gratitude for the 98th Archbishop

Most of us live ordinary lives making the best of time and circumstance. We do our best. We sometimes fail. We deal with whatever the days of work bring. We dream. We hope. We cry. We wonder about roads not taken. We (mostly) do our best. We look forward to holidays and try

irrepressible, honest, real I have recently invested in a Kindle as part of an aspiration to travel a bit more lightly. The conversion will take some time but here is the first marker - this memoir is the first that I have read on the 'neat' and 'light' tablet. A great start

I have had a busy week at Sarum College catching up with students, moderating assignments, a meeting of my body of Trustees as well as the usual range of unpredictable listening, mediating and resolving. Not all questions or difficulties move too quickly into the resolving z

by Brent Peery, London, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2021, 121 pp., £18.99 (PBK), ISBN 9781785926822 This is a well-researched, grounded, and passionate text that makes a persuasive case for Outcome Oriented Chaplaincy (OOC). This process embraces a methodology of care