What to do with your one wild and precious life: Alcuin’s Answer
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do With your one wild and precious life?” asks Mary Oliver in her poem The Summer Day. It’s a haunting question. Psalm 90:10 tells us that “Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty if our strength endures.” In the end it is not the number that counts, but what makes up our “wild and precious life”. Recently I have been thinking about Alcuin of York (735-804) and how, in his own way, he provides an answer to Oliver’s question. Born in a period misleadingly called the “Dark Ages” (it is...
Read MoreReligious Freedom: Freedom for what?
The topic of religious freedom has been getting a fair amount of air time lately – and validly so. The often bitter debate over gay marriage has led to the fear of enforced conformity of opinion, with non-compliance seeing a quick accusation of (and possible prosecution for) hate speech or something similar. Baptists (the denomination I am aligned with) were some of the early champions of religious liberty. Having been persecuted for their religious convictions (sometimes being drowned with the cry, “If they want water, they shall have it”), they were deeply conscious of how much...
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