P.S.
PS is an email and web-based blog format issued regularly by Contemporary Christianity. The format provides an online space for writers toexplore issues relating to church, culture and life in Northern Ireland, seeking to understand the times through insights from Scripture, theology, reason and the observations that flow from lived experience.
PS will never claim to have all the answers, but we hope to prompt questions that leave our readers a little closer to the answer at the end of the piece than they were at the beginning.
Our writers range from well-known names in academia and full-time ministry, to professionals with particular subject matter expertise, to lay people with passion for a subject and a gift for writing.
You can get involved in conversations by posting comments in the threads below the blogs, and if you’re interested in writing for us, you can get in touch by emailing info@contemporarychristianity.net.
“We Didn’t Know”
In a recent interview with a national newspaper the Israeli writer and journalist Gideon Levy said that the reason he tries to tell the truth about how bad things are for those living in Palestine is to prevent a situation in which people in Israel could say “we...
We are what we do…..or are we?
An understandable response to a loving God is to seek to do things which we think will demonstrate our gratitude for being included in His family. To be able to tick off achievements and successes on a list makes us feel good and comforts us that we are indeed...
How Much More Is Enough?
‘How much more is enough?’ was one of the many perceptive questions asked by Marva Dawn during the weekend she spent with CCCI in November 2006. The Bible gives us God’s perspective on life, the universe and everything. It begins and ends with big pictures about...
Slow Down, Speed Kills!
Ignoring the warning sign that speed kills, further down the motorway the carnage of a high speed crash was a shocking reminder to those caught up in the tragedy and to passing motorists. One Minute Bedtime Stories might appeal at first glance but when thought about...
The Ancestors
There is a chilling novel entitled Disgrace, written by J.M. Coetzee (Coetzee JM, Disgrace, Penguin Books, 1999), which is set in post-apartheid South Africa. The book centres on David Lurie, a white one time professor of literature whose life has, for a variety of...
Criminal Justice in Crisis?
I write this on the centenary of the House of Commons speech by Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary, in which he famously said “ ...The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the...
A Christian Response to Homelessness
“Homelessness” simply put is to have no home and from this perspective is an economic term. Behind the term in Northern Ireland are some 18,000 people presenting themselves to the Northern Housing Executive as homeless. Only half of them are resettled. While this...
‘It’s the economy, so it is.’
For many years Bill Clinton's dictum ‘it’s the economy stupid’ was superseded in local politics by ‘it’s the constitution stupid’. The constitutional question in large part determined which party a voter chose. Thankfully that issue seems to have been settled, at...
You don’t have to be an Einstein to believe in moral absolutes
I think I have just discovered an alternative theory of relativity! Unlike its famous predecessor, which has baffled those of us for whom Physics is a foreign country to which we will never travel, this theory is so simple to be self evident. It runs like this. All...
The Beast In Our Midst
In 2004 I was one of the representatives of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland at the 24th General Council of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches in Accra, Ghana. The Council felt a new confession of faith was necessary in the context of what was described as...
Non accidental deaths of children: observations on damaged perspectives.
In discussions of emotive issues the first casualty is often perspective. There are few more emotive issues than the death of children at the hands of their parents or carers. If headlines in the media were to be regarded as proxies for truth then we might think that...
Honesty
Last year there was a news report about a taxi driver in La Plata Argentina who had spent 3 days searching for an elderly couple who had left $25,000 in his taxi. When his eventually successful search and return of the money came to the attention of the Argentinian...