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On Candlemas Simeon holds the infant Christ in his arms and, by the power of the Spirit, sees that God has been faithful to the promise given to him —that he would not die before he saw the Lord’s Christ (cf. Luke 2:22-40).
Having seen the Child, Simeon declares those famous lines “Master, now you can let your bondservant depart in peace according to your word, for my eyes have seen your Salvation….” you know the rest.
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Early into his recent book Rumors (Polity, 2025), Mladen Dolar makes a fairly big mistake which sets the whole project (an exciting proposal —to explore the concept of ‘rumor’ philosophically) on a rather shaky footing. Here’s what he says: …
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Is an annual parish meeting “spiritual?”
Short answer:
Yes.
Long answer:
It is easy to think of life as an artificial partition between the things that are ‘material’ and the things that are ‘spiritual’…
T…he problem is that confidence, precisely because of what it is, “can never be instantaneous” (p.76). “It must be built, earned, over time” (ibid). Confidence, as the capacity to endure and withstand, only exists over the course of time. “It has a tempo.”
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“Fear not, for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be for all the people” (Lk. 2:10)
A key feature of the duties of angels in the Gospels is to tell God’s people to not be afraid. The angel says it to Zachariah (Lk. 1:13), to Mary (Lk. 2:30), to Joseph (Matt. 1:20), to the Shepherds (as above, Lk. 2:10), and to the women at the tomb on Easter (Matt. 28:5).
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Every Advent witnesses the gruesome reanimation of the voice that whispers “you know, Christmas is just a pagan holiday…” with that sort of conversational ellipsis that does not so much invite further reflection but halts and forecloses it. The claims are several and equally spurious: Jesus wasn’t born on the 25th, it’s really just an ancient [INSERT CIVILIZATION] practice, it’s just the winter solstice of the northern hemisphere, it’s gone too commercial, it’s become an idol in its own right, Christianity is not about the manger it’s about the Cross, etc.
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Giorgio Agamben notes the way in which “Those who govern us today try to organize the survival of humanity, that is, they try to transform the living into survivors.”
For Agamben “mere survival” is already a kind of surrender to the unreal. Survival, in other words, cannot be its own goal. Surviving can only ever be a means. I survive in order to do something greater than extend my biological instance into the future…
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image courtesy of wikimedia commons
We’ve just concluded our ‘The Way of the Cross’ course with Dr. David Field (in collaboration with the Theopolis Institute). It was an incredibly fruitful five weeks and, I believe, will produce even greater fruitfulness for our parish as the months and years turn round.
Of the many things we covered in the course I find myself reflecting this weekend on David’s teaching on “breathing” …
Read moreWe are now in the season of Advent —a season where we both (1) remember the waiting that happened before Jesus’ Incarnation (his first Advent) even as we (2) wait for his promised Second Coming. Both of these features shape how the Church has historically approached the days leading-up to the celebration of Christ’s birth on Dec. 25.
This year we enter into Advent amidst many great shakings that have rocked the Anglican world. A short list runs as follows…
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…A deeply missional impulse calls us to inhabit eternity. We want to avoid forever gazing at a historical golden age of gospel advancement (“oh man, to be a Christian in Hawaii back then”). We also want to avoid an idolatrous futuristic outlook (“once this happens [insert blank] then we’ll truly be [insert blank] and missionally effective”). We want, thirdly, to avoid a social-clubbishness that comes from focusing only on the immediate contexts in which we live (“these are the golden days” or “we’ve arrived”)…
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