I’ve been trying to remember when I started taking note of global warming. My only clear recollection is sitting in Cineworld’s Glasgow Renfrew Street cinema watching a special showing of An Inconvenient Truth in 2006. Watching that was so emotionally powerful, I can still recall that I had an end of an aisle seat next to the stairs. One of the thoughts I was left with afterwards was, surely Jesus would speak out for environmental protection even while his church predominantly seemed to be silent?

The conference I told you about in my previous influential book post about Reading the Bible with the Damned, ended up being key for a second reason: A book recommendation.

On the first night of the conference, before we’d had a single meeting, we all sat down for dinner. I was one of the last to enter, as was Bob Ekblad, the keynote speaker. We therefore ended up sitting next to each other. And as you do…

I have a confession to make. When I heard the title of this book, Reading the Bible with the Damned, I despaired. I was heading to a conference in 2007 where the author, Bob Ekblad, was the keynote speaker, and his book was required reading. What was I being asked to read?

At the tale end of 2018, I spent three productive months planning, researching, and writing 18,000 words (close to half) of the first draft of my next book. Little did I know that before January 2019 ended, I would be not be writing any more of it for 27 months.

Velvet Elvis was the first Christian book I read after leaving Bible College in June 2006. I felt I needed a long break from theology and even reading in general, but there was also the small mitigating factor of my daughter arriving two weeks early and mere hours after I handed in my final essay.

When a sorry—and the dignity an apology would restore to us—is not forthcoming, we have a tendency to try to claim it for ourselves by punishing the person who hurt us.

This revenge takes many forms: we withhold affection, attention, or presence; we resort to physical violence, property damage, or workplace sabotage; or we make destructive comments, start vicious gossip, or tell stories of long-held grudges.

The word sorry, spoken sincerely by someone who has wronged you, has an almost magical quality to it. The bitterness and anger and animosity we feel towards the person has a tendency to begin thawing immediately at a hastened rate.

All because of this single word.

I grew up in the church, yet for the majority of my childhood my faith remained a moral code to follow or a set of beliefs to give intellectual acceptance to. I didn't begin praying until I was eighteen and about to head off to university.

I’ve decided over the first half of this year to write about five of the books I have found influential on my Christian journey. Like many of you may have done, I’ve read hundreds of Christian books, so as I make my choices I’ve been contemplating what, for me, moves a book from very good to influential.

Sometimes we can be sharing something about our lives and our throat tightens. Or tears well up in our eyes. Or a fierce anger bubbles inside of us.

And before this happens to us, we can be completely unaware it was even an issue.

We would be wise not to underestimate shame’s ability to tell a rollicking good tale. It weaves words like broken, wrecked, flawed, contaminated, dirty, alone, or unlovable so majestically into our narratives that we often do not recognise its subtle influence.

We tell stories about our lives all the time. We obviously do not share every single one of them publicly, keeping many of them to ourselves, but we use story to make autobiographical sense of our own lives.

Sometimes we ask the question where do I start? with the boldness or conviction to face an unpleasant task and get it over with as quickly as possible. Occasionally, we say it with despair, wondering where the time or energy or help will come from to unravel all the disloyalty, betrayal, and abuse we’ve suffered in our life.

I think we find it hard to forgive due to how the pain of being mistreated does not seem to fade over time. We see the person who wronged us or we hear their name or we walk by where they live and we are reminded of what happened with painful vividness.

The New Testament teaches that God is exactly like Jesus. Yet we can struggle to believe this whenever we open the Old Testament and read about a violent God who is quite unlike his Son.

If God is love, can we then legitimately swap God for love in that famous passage from Corinthians 13? God is patient, God is kind. He does not envy, he does not boast, he is not proud. He does not dishonour others, he is not self-seeking...

I am always curious to read articles telling us why Millennials are leaving the church. I want to see if the authors will go beyond looking at how the church operates and name violent theology as a reason why Millennials are abandoning institutional Christianity. It is rare to find someone so bold.

Lion and the Lamb is the 10th most sung praise song in the US and 11th in the UK according to CCLI. For half the chorus, God is praised as "the Lion of Judah" and the other half as "the Lamb that was slain." But is this good theology?