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 "...

Unusually for a Christian book, William P. Young's  The Shack   (Now A Major Motion Picture ) caused quite a stir in the wider publishing world. For those unfamiliar, it is a story about a man in the wake of life-wrecking tragedy, who finds himself the invited guest of the triune God in a shape-shifting cabin in the middle of a forest. All sorts of healing and self-understanding and provocative conversational exchanges ensue, as you might imagine. The book was unexpectedly popular (topping the New York Times Best Seller list for fiction between 2008 and 2010) and predictably controversial. Among the several charges laid against it by 'concerned evangelicals' was the 'idolatrous' depiction of the first and third Persons of the Trinity – as an African-American woman, in the case of God the Father, and as an Asian woman, in the case of God the Holy Spirit. Now, actually, old habits die hard and I am still 'concerned evangelical' enough to be rather uncom...

I want you to understand that, if I seem to have rather a lot to say about the current US administration, it's because, as a white evangelical Christian – albeit one with a different set of cultural baggage and without a vote – I consider myself implicated. It's my theology that has elevated Trump. It's scriptures that I revere as holy that are being used to justify the policies and behaviour of him and his associates. Songs I sing on a Sunday morning are being sung six or so hours later by Christian sisters and brother who voted for him and are openly celebrating his advancement of their cause. Books and articles and YouTube clips that do the rounds in my social networks have their origins in the minds of Christian elites whose allegiance as events unfold have proven frighteningly unswerving. There is no detaching myself. And, to be honest, the apparent detachment of other evangelicals rather disturbs than inspires me. Especially as I have a hunch that this detachment ...

A poem about, among other things, the importance of biblical literacy.             NEVERTHELESS             You warned me to keep quiet.             Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic,             You explained.             My soul depended on it.             Don’t be so hysterical, you said.             There were no actual cages,             And the youngest were already crawling.             Romans 13.             Violence on many sides,             For all have sinned, you emphasised;             And God so loved the world ...             It’s there in black and white.     ...

Today I'm going to talk about you, and how woefully inadequate it is. Other languages have better options. The embarrassingly small handful of 'foreign words' I learned in school included the French tu (informal singular) and vous (formal singular, formal or informal plural), and the Spanish tú (informal singular), usted (formal singular), vosotros (informal plural) and ustedes (formal plural). Olden-times English disambiguated too: thou and thee for (subject, object) singular, and you and ye for (subject, object) plural. The latter could also be used in the formal singular case, just to confuse things (if anything we think of thee and thou as highfalutin now, at least in the south of the UK). But somewhere along the line we decided that we had suffered under the tyranny of common sense grammar rules for long enough and broke away from our European neighbours. The consequence being that second person subtleties are lost in modern English rendering, with int...

            THEN                         Later, there would be doctrine.                         After whispers and mayhem;             After dinner in a locked room and a show of hands;             After “mass hallucinations”, private consultations,             Promises and re-commissions;             After sea and sand and sunrise,             And a parting in the clouds.                         After fire falling, filling, overspilling;             Raging and enraging;             After news and bread and bodies breaking.         ...