Latest News

John Newton (1725 – 1807) wrote many things, that many Christians have found pastorally helpful. He is certainly best remembered for his classic hymn Amazing Grace, and also for his long sermon series that employed the Biblical texts used in the composition of Handel’s Messiah. But his parish letters are also full of godly wisdom…

Imagine if you could start a city from scratch – not just its physical structures and engineering, but its social forms and paradigms . Many have tried and have created all sorts of utopic visions. Plato once tried it too. In his Laws, he articulated the creation of a new city on Crete called Magnesia….

I only liked one page of The Handmaid’s Tale. It certainly is a dystopic affair. The story is morbid. The characters are hard to warm to. The pages turn with sighs. But then upon one page, a shaft of light fell and brightened the story – at least for me. The handmaid, whose only task…

July is a good time in Sydney to work over the strawberry patch in preparation for a new season. A new season, that is, of feeding birds! Their timing is impeccable. If only I could make my strawberries ‘impeckable’, that would be a worthy achievement. Maybe all I’m doing is fulfilling Jesus’ Sermon on the…

I love that powerful line from the Book of Job, where God describes the futility of trying to tame one of his wild creatures called Leviathan. “Can you make a pet of him like a bird or put him on a leash for your girls?” “Any hope of subduing him is false; the mere sight…

Those clever boys from Geeks2U worked their magic on the church computer last week. It took the technician all of ten seconds to diagnose the problem. Someone had inadvertently loaded three antivirus programs onto the poor machine. The programs were trying to kill each other and were paralysing the system. As soon as the technician…

I was watching a man unloading beer kegs at the pub on the corner near the church. The kegs were of the fifty litre kind, which, when full, weigh in around seventy-five kilograms. And he unloaded all twenty by himself!  It was his method that intrigued me. He would carefully roll the keg off the…

I had reason last week to pay tribute to my hard-working lymphocytes, who engaged in numerous deadly skirmishes with some dangerous intruders of the flu kind. Not sure how many of them died in battle, nor how many received citations for extraordinary acts of bravery. It would be interesting to read their war records and…

There is an old view of God that thinks of him as a watchmaker, that runs like this: God made the world, wound it up, and left it to tick away without having to hang around to check on either the time or the occupants. The view is called Deism, and is one of those…

My son sent me a meme the other day. We do communicate in more meaningful ways, but he is kind to pass on things that he thinks will enrich my life. The little brain-emission was titled ‘The Four Stages of Life’, and displayed four pictures in linear progression:  a baby bottle, a bottle of coke,…