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American Lulu – review
This review also appears on the Opera Britannia website Rating: Taking Alban Berg’s Lulu as a starting point, Scottish Opera at the Edinburgh International Festival present American Lulu – a new re-envisioned interpretation of this piece by Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth, who re-orchestrates Berg’s original, attempts to set it within the context of the Civil Rights movement in America and provides a conclusion to compensate…
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Sermon preached on 1 September 2013
Quite often, Jesus talks about things that I don’t know much about. A man may have gone out to sow – but I know precious little about agriculture. A father may have said goodbye to a prodigal son but I know nothing about having a jealous brother. A young man may have been told not…
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Atonement theory and the Naughty Step
One of the parents in the congregation recently was saying how hard it is to answer good questions from children about why Jesus came and had resorted to trying to explain it in terms of the Naughty Step. I thought it might be helpful to lay out some of the main theories of the Atonement…
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Intervention in Syria – does not meet criteria for a just war
I am not a pacifist. If I was, then I would simply argue against intervention in Syria because armed intervention was always wrong. Instead, I think that there are circumstances where it is right (not by any means good) for armed force to be used. Christians have a fairly well developed tradition of thinking about…
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Dido and Aeneas & Bluebeard’s Castle – Oper Frankfurt
This review should appear in due course on Opera Britannia. Dido and Aeneas & Bluebeard’s Castle – Oper Frankfurt, Edinburgh International Festival Festival Theatre – 25 August 2013 Rating: “Please note, ” said the notice on the way into the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, “this performance contains smoke, water-based haze, fog and nudity.” What they didn’t…
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Congratulations
Congratulations to Craig and Calum, two members of St Mary’s congregation whose Nuptial Mass I conducted yesterday afternoon. Very often, the struggle towards equality seems to some people to take on the air of a pitched battle with people shouting their positions over the heads of others. The truth is, it really is an unbottling…
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The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Mexico Sermon
The Short Version The Anglican Communion is in a mess The Archbishop of Canterbury is in Mexico and he has preached a sermon It isn’t really a very helpful sermon and is quite offensive The Long Version This week the Archbishop of Canterbury (I think we can stop calling him the new Archbishop of Canterbury…
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What am I listening to?
Oh, thank you for asking. Well, the days of listening to CDs seem to be long over, don’t they? I’ve not ditched all the CDs like Chris Pinnock has, but wonder how long I’ll go on with a cupboard full of little boxes. Firstly and most splendidly there’s the Gyndebourne summer online opera festival. Oh…