Critic Cal

From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzying rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting down and drown in nineteen centuries of shit. There’ll be quite a lot of shouting. (Gustave Flaubert, in a letter to a friend, 1850). As far as I'm concerned, these 170 year-old words could have been written yesterday. And no doubt I could find even earlier quotes to similar effect (though the analogy would be hard to beat). I can't decide if the timelessness of impending cataclysm is more reassuring than it is horrifying, or vice-versa. ( Matthew 24:6 springs to mind). Is it too much of a cliché to say this isn't how things were meant to be? Is it too naive to suggest it's not how they have to stay? In The Very Good Gospel , Lisa Sharon Harper writes compellingly about the vision of creation's perfect 'goodne

As someone with a healthy recognition of my need for the mercy of God, as well as a less-than-healthy capacity for shame and religious anxiety (people, we really need to help each other learn the difference), Psalm 51 – King David's great prayer of contrition and repentance – has long been close to my heart. Have mercy on me, O God,     according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy     blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,     and cleanse me from my sin! ( Psalm 51 :1-2) But I've had a growing unease with it ever since the following was pointed out to me. "Against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight..." confesses David to God (Ps 51:4). Meanwhile, the short context-providing note at the start of the psalm explains the particular sin which has prompted this humbled outcry: "A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet went to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba." If "