Monthly Archives

Mary and Joseph

Mon, 24/12/2018 - 10:30 -- James Oakley
Mary

Children's Bibles are great. They retell key stories from the Bible in a way that children can readily follow. Each one has its own editorial policy, aiming for a particular reading age and style, with consistent illustrations.

But they're a minefield. When you try to summarise to remove extraneous details, it's easy accidentally to remove the most important thing. Like Jesus forgiving the sins of the paralysed man in Matthew 9:1-8.

When you have extra details that need a little explanation, it's easy to do so in a way that removes the most important tensions of the narrative. Like this example ...:

Blog Category: 
Matthew
Luke

Cousins

Mon, 17/12/2018 - 12:55 -- James Oakley
Cousin Explainer
Image Credit: Dean Kehoe

The past couple of weeks, this image has been circulating on Facebook, entitled the Cousin Explainer.

Given the huge number of likes (256, at time of writing this) and shares (3,400, at time of writing this), it seems I wasn't the only one who needed this mapping out clearly.

As a mathematician, it always bothered me that I could not explain, or even better 'define', what an mth cousin n-times removed is. Well, now I can. And I share it here so that you can too.

Blog Category: 
Other

The death of death

Mon, 03/12/2018 - 11:23 -- James Oakley
Fee on Corinthians

It's been a joy, and at times a challenge, to preach right through the letter of 1 Corinthians. It's healthy to take a long epistle like this, and to tackle it in a single sermon series, so we don't lose the train of Paul's thought by interrupting the series midway through. The challenge, then, is to decide how fast to go. Too fast, and you get such long blocks that the details get lost and the series is bland. Too slow, and the series simply takes too long, and we actually do lose Paul's train of thought because it's so long since we began.

Blog Category: 
Corinthians
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