- Generative artificial intelligence will become significantly disruptive of many sectors this year. Education practices will change quickly as a result of this but education will be but one of many areas of life to be affected.
- No progress for those seeking marriage equality in the Church of England. There will be a lot of talk about moving towards some form of official blessings for same-sex couples which would have the effect of thwarting those seeking actual equality, making it more difficult to achieve. Further division amongst pro-gay activists in the Church of England.
- Indyref 2 will not happen on 19 October 2023 as Nicola Sturgeon had hoped, which is a shame for those seeking to separate Scotland from the rest of the UK as the autumn will be the high water mark for the Indepedence movement. It will be downhill into the next General Election after that.
- Trump and Biden will both declare that they intend to run for the US presidency in 2024 and American politics will continue to be all about Donald Trump.
- Covid recovery remains bumpy, particularly through supply-chain problems due to mismanagement of Covid in China.
- No conclusive end to the war in Ukraine this year.
- Governments in Westminster and Holyrood will announce some kind of “new deal” for the National Heath Service.
- UK Government will not succeed in blocking Scottish Gender Recognition Reform.
- Liam McArthur’s bill in the Scottish Parliamant to allow doctors to participate in the killing of terminally ill patients will fail to receive parliamentary approval but will receive more support than similar proposals have before.
- Changes announced to the UK honours system, perhaps at the time of the Coronation, to remove references to empire. OBE becomes Order of British Excellence.
4 responses to “Here is the sermon…”
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I remember that workshop being done as part of an LGBT group meeting. I was slightly skeptical about it in the beginning, but ended up getting a lot out of it and thinking about God in ways that I hadn’t consciously before.
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FWIW, in order to dot some `t’s and cross some `i’s, my sensibly heretical book The Five Gospels colours all the speech black apart from the saying about women grinding corn (which merits a grey, at best). Ie, none of the text goes back to any historical Jesus, with the apocalyptic context added by the gospel authors; the `thief in the night’ is an Christian saying of the early churches (witness other epistles, written before Matthew, where the image appears) and therefore probably planted, in that order, in Matthew.
I guess taking what you most charitably will out of the passage is entirely reasonable, then. 🙂
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(I had to read that, and a bit from Romans at church up here, too… was “interesting” turning a blind eye to it. 🙂
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Thanks for that Kelvin. When I read that Gospel at the 8:30 service, i remembered the severe fundamentalist church I was brought up in as a child, and it made me uncomfortable. Reading your comments, I remember my first few visits to an Episcopal worship service and remembering how joyful and non-scary it was, and being amazed by the fact that I didn’t have to be afraid of God. Thanks for the reminder.
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