• The Forum with Michael Bawtree

    We had a good Forum meeting after the 10.30 am service yesterday. This time I was interviewing Michael Bawtree.

    Michael is an international musicial and conductor based in Glasgow but frequently travelling the world.

    Some of the things we talked about were:

    • Can you tell a musician’s faith by the music they make?
    • What is Spirituality and is it the same as Religion?
    • Why commission new music?
    • What makes a musician?

    We also discovered Michael’s guilty secret – he revealed which composer he just doesn’t quite get.

    You can see it all in the video below.

    (Note that the sound is considerably improved from last week).


     

     

One response to “Eid, Pride and Abraham’s Sacrifice”

  1. Tim Avatar

    As one who grew up(?) in churches leaning toward the view “it’s a tough story for a tough world, how else would God be just?” in varying degrees, I agree the face-value-narrative understanding of the story is repellant.

    One thing stood out for the first time during Sunday’s reading: the plurality in Abraham’s line – “…and we will return to you”. I’ve been idly wondering about that since.
    It doesn’t make the story wholly acceptable as Abraham still ploughs on ever closer.
    But if one’s goal is to find a “by faith, Abraham” in there, better to say it’s the prior confidence that things will somehow work out well (which I thought was how Hebrews was trying to define it), than to locate the commendable quality in violence (which, by rabbiting on about resurrection, Hebrews does).

    In the absence of other clear & wholly mitigating contexts in which to place the story, certainly it’s simplest, easiest and probably best to file it under “that’s how they saw God back then” and move swiftly on.

    Oofft.

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