What is in Kelvin's Head?

  • The Christian Year and Social Media

    I do love the way that the Christian Year is becoming more important to Christians because of social media.

    When I check my facebook and twitter feeds in a morning I can be pretty sure that there will be something there which relates to what season or more likely what day we have got to in the cycle of faith.

    Today for example, I checked my facebook feed and found a lovely description of St Margaret of Scotland posted by Kirstin Freeman.

    Today is St Margaret’s Feast Day and I can remember a time when most people simply wouldn’t participate in such a festival. Now, if you follow a few Christian bloggers and social media mavens you get little reminders of the heros of faith – comment and pictures and all kinds of good things just arriving before your eyes.

    Passive learning is a big feature of the new knowledge economy. I find it odd that lots of people in the church still don’t get it and still think that learning is about people coming to hear them spout. It can be far more dynamic and far more interesting, even if spouting is still part of what the church has to offer.

20 responses to “Which bits of the Bible do you miss out?”

  1. Bro David Avatar
    Bro David

    I think that I’m with you Father K, there is a time and place for everything and a service where the problems of a problematic passage can’t be addressed easily is not the place to read it, lectionary be hanged.

    Reply
  2. Vogelbeere Avatar
    Vogelbeere

    My favourite bits of the Bible are the Song of Songs (which, in the medieval period, was interpreted by both Jews and Christians as an allegory of the soul’s relationship with God); the book of Ruth; the book of Esther; the story of David and Jonathan; Amos & Micah. Most of the New Testament leaves me completely cold, and some of it is actually offensive, especially the account of the silver-smiths of Ephesus, and the way that Paul appropriates pagan poetry in the marketplace of Athens.

    I think the solution to your problem is not to read the “difficult” bits without some sort of homily about a better way to understand them, and how to read the Bible in general as a collection of texts situated in a particular historical situation.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Previous Posts

  • Riling the Nuns

    Oh no, I’ve managed to rile the nun-lobby in my previous post. You never know who you are going to upset when you start blogging. It was my comment about three nuns sitting around singing kum-by-yah that did it. And I was quoting someone else too. For the record, a good deal of my training…

  • Back to work

    Back to work yesterday. Today was spent answering or dealing with all but 12 of the 150 e-mails that were waiting for me. (None of those 150 were spam, either). I had a lovely holiday, thank you for asking. It is one’s duty to be able to say that you have enjoyed a lovely holiday…

  • Holy George

    Today is St George’s Day and as I live in St George’s Cross, I feel as though I should make some effort to mark the fact. There is a statue of him just around the corner from me. His iconography is as usual here – beardless, riding on a horse and slaying a dragon. There…