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The Solstice is Past
Did everyone come through OK?
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12 tips to get people to come to Christmas Services
Earlier this year, I won a competition. Someone had published a new plugin for WordPress that allows you to fairly easily publish google maps with your own points of interest on them. As a way of promoting the plugin, the competition was to offer a year’s license to the top 20 people who came up…
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The next five questions the Archbishop needs to be asked
First of all, we need to give some cheers to Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was asked some great questions about the Usual Topic this week in an interview and he gave some great answers. The interviewer was Michael Gove and the interview appeared in the Spectator. The crucial bit is this: It…
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The #syriavote is not so simple really
Like many people in the UK, I spent much of yesterday dipping into what was happening in parliament as a long debate took place as to whether this country should engage in military action against ISIL in Syria. I once had aspirations to be an MP and that always makes me wonder which division lobby…
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World AIDS Day Forum
Here’s a video of a conversation I had with one of the members of St Mary’s last Sunday. Andy Winter was chatting to me about the way treatment and perception of HIV has changed over the years. We talked about new PrEP medicines, reducing stigma and the extraordinary news that the epidemic could be ended…
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Sermon for Advent 1 – 29 November 2015
Here’s the sermon I preached yesterday You can’t beat a good quiz on the internet. Two minutes completing a set of multiple choice questions and some computer somewhere out there gives a verdict on what kind of person you are. Thus is was that this week I followed a facebook link and found myself…
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Making Scotland’s Sex Trade Safer
The recent death of Cynthia Payne provides a helpful reminder of the two-faced attitude to prostitution that we often hold. Ms Payne managed to cultivate a populist and almost comic Carry on Whoring image. She invited the great and the good to her home in Streatham and offered sandwiches and “services” merely in exchange for…
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This ain’t persecution
Getting a religious ad “banned” by a company that doesn’t show religious advertisements is evidence not of religious persecution but of the idiocy of the Church of England’s press office. We should be thanking God that religious (and political) ads are banned in cinemas.
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Wars and rumours of wars
The message coming from France is reasonably predicatable – France is at war. However, I am unconvinced that states can win a war against ideas. Although Isis is very much a real body of people intent on doing harm through wicked acts, Isis is not so much a group of people as a group of…
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For Baghdad, for Beiruit, for Paris
On the day of the 9/11 attacks, I was in Paris. At just about the time of the 9/11 attacks I was in the Louvre, looking at this icon. I had specifically flown there to see it on a very short overnight stay in the first madness of cheap Ryanair flights when you could just…