We’re back this week after a little break and we catch up on how things are going with our themes. There’s a great email about ways to respond to fear. And I talk a little bit more about my year of ‘Less is More’. I’ve been thinking about this as I’ve started to put more systems in place in order to simplify things. And there are a couple of elements which I talk about in this week’s episode.
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Fairly frequently – about once or twice a month – someone asks me, by email, or in conversation, how to go about getting a book published. So I thought that I would write down what little advice I have to offer in this context. The problem is that my path is not usual. When I started, long ago, the publishing world was very different. And I was fortunate enough to meet some people who gave me my first breaks.
With Joe away in Mexico we have an interview with Bekah Legg. She talks about the work of Restored with the victims of domestic abuse, and shares a little of her own story of loss and grief. The statistics are sobering: in the UK, 1 in 4 women will be subjected to domestic abuse. And, shockingly, that stat is exactly the same within the church. And we need to reflects within the church, on how our theology actually reinforces this behaviour.
Guess which road I live near?
This is a wonderful blog article. I referenced the central idea taken from Ursula Le Guin on last week’s episode of Midfaith Crisis – that the opposite of uncertainty is death; that it is only uncertainty which brings life: “The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.” Ursula Le Guin The Left Hand of Darkness I hate uncertainty. I don’t like being out of my comfort zone.
This is our annual themes episode, in which we set out themes for the year. Not an original idea, I think I got it from a podcast I used to wisent to, but for the past few years we had set themes which we will seek to explore. (We used to do this around January, but then changed to March, because as everyone knows, the real new years day is 25 March.
In this week’s episode we talk about how culture shapes art, and especially, how the culture of the time affects the Bible. This is always a tangled thread, not least because many people like to assume that God dictated the Bible. And, since God is outside all time and therefore culture, the Bible must be free of that. Of course, God didn’t dictate it. At least not in that sense. Paul says that scripture is God-breathed, not God-spoken.
In this episode we discuss some follow up from last episode’s interview with Danielle Strickland which addressed issues of patriarchy within church and society. A lot of our discussion this week was on the difficulty of addressing the deep, ingrained stuff, the stuff we grew up with and which has shaped us. We are all products of, what one correspondent calls our ‘silly teenage dramas’. It’s life-long work dismantling this kind of stuff.
“When one is writing a poem, one may not be thinking about one’s moral duties. One just has something inside that one wants to get out, and the only way to get it out and at the same time find out what it is one wants to get out, is to find the words for it. If you are a poet you will come to know when you have found the words, and when you haven’t.” T.S. Eliot
Source: Collected Prose Vol 4, quoted in TLS January 24 2025 p.5