Showing everything tagged as Revd Dr Sam Wells

The Grenfell Tower disaster clustered together what’s terrifyingly and horrifyingly amiss about our society and showed us so many kinds of wrong. But it also showed us the meaning of Christmas.

There are two kinds of things: those that abide forever; and those that last for a limited period. The things that abide forever we call essence; the things that last for a limited period we call existence.

‘I know you’re in a hurry.’ I wonder if you’ve ever said that, asking for a person’s attention, when it’s clear they’re rushing to something else. And you could simply say, ‘Don’t worry, we can talk about it later, I’ll send you an email, it’s not urgent,’ and permanently or temporarily fade into the background of their life.

If you’re a geologist, you have an extensive vocabulary for circumscribing what the rest of us generally call ‘a very long time.’ For geologists there’s an age, and bigger than that there’s an epoch, and beyond that there’s a period; but that’s not all.

A new daily podcast of words and music for Advent.

There’s two common assumptions about Christianity. One is that’s it’s a theory about how things are – how things began and how the world goes round. The other is that it’s basically a moral code.

When Geoffrey Brown and colleagues established the enterprise at St Martin’s in 1987, they did it in a spirit of ‘Never waste a good crisis.’