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Waiting for the Wind: How to Get Spiritual
Here is a long-promised post for friends who are not yet Christian but have come to respect its principles and influence. Somehow, Christianity has suddenly become worth talking about again. Celebrities are coming out as believers. Podcasters and bloggers are voicing concerns that Western society has made a mistake by abandoning its religious heritage. Agnostics and atheists are conceding that the Christian belief might confer some existential benefits after all, with its call to love and forgive. Some wistfully wish they could believe but feel that they just can’t. It is possible to go deeper. There are things you can do, and there are promises that God has given you.…
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Introducing The Blood Miles
‘The Blood Miles’ is about how it feels to live in a world that is at war with its true Ruler. It is about pressing on when progress seems slow, when failures abound, and when help seems so far away.
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Whales & Angels
Jen’s mum went to be with her Lord and Saviour a few weeks ago. It was a tough time. We made it through the funeral, and afterward, we took a week to recuperate in Merimbula. Merimbula is a coastal town just over the New South Wales border. It’s a beautiful place, one we’ve returned to many times over the years of our marriage. However, this trip was marked by several firsts: our first time post-COVID, our first trip without the kids (since 1999, at least), and our first attempt at a working holiday—with computers packed alongside our swimming gear. It was also our first visit during whale season. From September…
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An Easter Easter Egg
I like a good Easter egg. Not a chocolate egg—I mean a secret meaning or symbol buried in a film or game or story. I included a whole bunch of them in The Blood Miles and had a lot of fun doing it. The Bible Is Chock Full of Easter Eggs The Bible is chock full of Easter eggs too. Alongside the explicit prophecies and quotes—which are probably too obvious to count—there are moments of foreshadowing, and patterns, and double meanings that seem very Easter-eggy. Think, for example, of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac and his declaration that God would provide the lamb (Gen 22:8). Although the New Testament never spells it out, Christians…
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The Storied World: Impassibility, Incarnation & Virtual Reality
In recent months, I have been thinking and writing about the significance of stories, divine impassibility and the incarnation. Here is a post to draw some of those threads together in the light of our Christmas hope. Some of this is an adaptation of a paper I gave up at EV church earlier this month. Here’s an odd truth to consider. The world we live in is virtual. I don’t mean that it is a mere illusion or a light-show, or that there is another physical reality behind it. I mean that it doesn’t have self-existence. The world is not a series of objects existing alongside God. Rather, God is…
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Spooky Stories and the Lord of Halloween
I like a spooky story. Maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe it’s unhealthy. Maybe I should be more reformed and less medieval—more Zwingli and less Luther, as Carl Trueman would put it. I know there are definite dangers in thinking too much about spooky things—of drifting into a superstitious mindset where intermediate powers control the ups and downs of life. I know that I am not immune to that temptation, and I know the antidote (see more here). I like the idea that there is a hidden world that still reveals itself. I’m also unsure of how many of the stories one hears are genuine. I have had a few strange things…
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Narnia Must Die – Tough Questions for Christian Writers
A few weeks ago, I shared some of my thoughts about the possibilities of Christian fiction: whether it should exist; what it might achieve. I ended on a fairly upbeat note. Stories might refresh our jaded palettes to see what’s true; stories might take us by surprise and sneak past our prejudices and certainties. But there is one important problem that I passed over. The more stories succeed, the greater the danger that we might mistake them for the realities to which they point. We might want to live in made-up worlds rather than turn our eyes to heaven. We might want to keep reading romance rather than live a…
