vinculafido

  St.John the Baptist's and St. Botolph's Croxton Kerrial At the prompting of a friend, I’ve just been reading Clive Marsh and Vaughan Roberts’ 2012 book: ‘Personal Jesus: how popular music shapes our souls.’   The authors explore a mass of connections between ‘popular’ (undefined) music and our faith.   They argue successfully that Christians should pay serious attention to popular culture, and to my mind much less cogently that there’s some kind of equivalence between what people do when listening to ‘ their ’ music, and what one does in worship and attitude to God.   This isn’t the place to air my differences with them. Sufficient to say that being a music fan in 2024 costs little of necessity(!) while faith in Christ demands ‘my soul, my life, my all’ . For many of us, the blood of the martyrs sets horribly high standards. As good Christian children in unreconstructed, colonial days, many of us lived in fear that God’s will was for us to be missionaries, and thu...

  Pause for breath…and to admire the view.   Aaah… The storms have taken out the trash from the trees and hedges. In late January everything looks stripped and bare, ready for a spring and summer to come. To recap… This all began in 2016, when I began to walk to every parish in the Diocese of Peterborough. My house rules were that I’d start where we lived, in Weston Favell, Northampton, and make my way to Peterborough Cathedral by a series of circular walks, each one of which must touch another somewhere on its circumference. I went on my 2000+ km way reciting the mantra ‘Better Together’ to anyone listening. If the Church of England is to survive, it needs to pool its resources, regardless of tradition. We need to love each other more, and understand that what unites us is far greater than what separates.   To that first strapline I later added ‘Better in Colour’ , meaning that we need to be diverse and enterprising in the way we spread the Gospel. Finally, I put in a...

  They have the sheep well-trained in Leicestershire Both Sue and I had our first bout of Covid during December, (we’re ‘Novids!’) so thirty-four days from first positive test, on a dreakh, cheerless day, here I am so to speak testing the waters with a walk (never any wild swimming, or indeed any swimming at all for me)   because only on a few occasions in the last five weeks have I managed my ten thousand steps. For us the Virus passed reasonably gently, like a really bad cold, but some symptoms have hung around. Sue still has a bad cough and has lost her sense of smell, temporarily we hope. I have moments of fatigue. We’ve both experienced brain fog. The variation of Covid symptoms person to person has perhaps heightened awareness that the same is true of other coronaviruses.   One would like to think that people’s social habits have changed as a result of their experience of infection, but not so.   We probably caught it at a posh concert in Uppingham School Cha...