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Jeremiah for everyone - The Arrogance of Power
Jeremiah for everyone - The Arrogance of Power
by SPCK - John Goldingay
The Arrogance of Power As we drank our morning tea my wife told me that some foreign banks had announced that they were pulling out of Greece during its economic crisis, and we wondered what this meant for people who had accounts at those banks…
Jeremiah for everyone - The Big One
Jeremiah for everyone - The Big One
by SPCK - John Goldingay
The Big One One time when my elder son and his family visited us in California, there was an earthquake of the kind that you can feel but that doesn’t cause much damage, though it causes some unease if you’re used to the stability of London…
Jeremiah for everyone - The Bold Miscalculation
Jeremiah for everyone - The Bold Miscalculation
by SPCK - John Goldingay
The Bold Miscalculation In church this Sunday morning, the first of our three passages from Scripture was the story of God’s asking Solomon what he wanted, that most testing of questions, a test that Solomon passed magnificently…
Jeremiah for everyone - The Grimmest Scene in the Old Testament
Jeremiah for everyone - The Grimmest Scene in the Old Testament
by SPCK - John Goldingay
The Grimmest Scene in the Old Testament I hate this story about Jerusalem’s fall and its aftermath, and I hate the fact that it comes more than once in the Old Testament (indeed, more than once in Jeremiah alone, for goodness’ sake)…
Jeremiah for everyone - The Misleading Scholars
Jeremiah for everyone - The Misleading Scholars
by SPCK - John Goldingay
The Misleading Scholars Yesterday a student asked me whether a particular book would be taken seriously by the wide majority of Old Testament scholars. The response I forgot to make was that whatever is the consensus of scholars today won’t be the consensus in a decade’s time…
Jeremiah for everyone - The Perilous Position of Prophet and Priest
Jeremiah for everyone - The Perilous Position of Prophet and Priest
by SPCK - John Goldingay
The Perilous Position of Prophet and Priest Today we had a bumper crop of birthdays to celebrate at church; I was tempted to ask people to stand up if they were not having a birthday this week. As a wondrous coincidence, the Gospel reading was the story of a birthday party…
Jeremiah for everyone - The Power of Being Forgiven
Jeremiah for everyone - The Power of Being Forgiven
by SPCK - John Goldingay
The Power of Being Forgiven Last night we listened to one of our favorite singer-songwriters performing an upbeat song with a downbeat account of her life (well, a downbeat account of a life—one mustn’t imagine that every song is autobiographical)…
Jeremiah for everyone - The Promise of a Future
Jeremiah for everyone - The Promise of a Future
by SPCK - John Goldingay
The Promise of a Future It’s been a year since I became priest-in-charge at our church, when we could no longer afford a paid pastor. That fact was a sign that the church is getting smaller, and it wasn’t clear how long we’d be viable at all…
Jeremiah for everyone - The Prophet Who’s Forbidden to Pray (1)
Jeremiah for everyone - The Prophet Who’s Forbidden to Pray (1)
by SPCK - John Goldingay
The Prophet Who’s Forbidden to Pray My first Old Testament mentor once told us about his first visit to the new cathedral in Coventry in the center of England. The old cathedral, like much of the city, was devastated by bombing in the Second World War…
Jeremiah for everyone - The Prophet Who’s Forbidden to Pray (2)
Jeremiah for everyone - The Prophet Who’s Forbidden to Pray (2)
by SPCK - John Goldingay
The Prophet Who’s Forbidden to Pray (2) My wife’s daughter and her husband work on behalf of Darfuri refugees who long ago fled from Sudan to Chad, seeking to make their plight known in the United States. My wife often feels it’s as if they’re bashing their heads against a brick …
Jeremiah for everyone - The Wicked Play on Words in a King's Name
Jeremiah for everyone - The Wicked Play on Words in a King's Name
by SPCK - John Goldingay
The Wicked Play on Words in a King's Name Names often matter. When we married eighteen months ago, I encouraged my wife to keep her name as it was so that in seminary and church circles it signalled that she continued to be a person in her own right and not simply my wife…
Jeremiah for everyone - Things can only get worse
Jeremiah for everyone - Things can only get worse
by SPCK - John Goldingay
Things Can Only Get Worse As a newly ordained minister I was required to take part in “post-ordination training,” irreverently known as “potty training.” It’s no criticism of it that decades later I remember little about it, but I do have one vivid memory…
Jeremiah for everyone - Things Can't Get Worse (Can They?) (1)
Jeremiah for everyone - Things Can't Get Worse (Can They?) (1)
by SPCK - John Goldingay
Things Can't Get Worse (Can They?) (1) News reports as I write (and over the past year or two) manifest a strange kind of naiveté about changes of government. A series of Middle Eastern countries have seen civil conflict and the overthrow of totalitarian regimes…
Jeremiah for everyone - Things Can't Get Worse (Can They?) (2)
Jeremiah for everyone - Things Can't Get Worse (Can They?) (2)
by SPCK - John Goldingay
Things Can't Get Worse (Can They?) (2) There’s a story about a man who falls over the edge of a cliff but manages to grab the branch of a small tree and thus stop himself from falling hundreds of feet to his death. The tree saves him, but only temporarily, because he can’t get ba…
Jeremiah for everyone - Truth to Power