Living in debt or out of debt

Given that the Apostle Paul reminded Timothy that the love of money is the root of all evil, he would not be impressed by our public worship of borrowing and debt today.  The statistics are scary: people in the UK owed £1.452 trillion at the end of September 2015....

Plumbing the well of unhappiness

In western societies we have pushed back the tide of physical causes of harm to the extent that most achieve the milestone of 80 years of age before dying, with a majority enjoying good health up until their final years. However, the conditions that have been kind to...

Migrants and Mercy

This article was first published on the Place for Truth website of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals and is reproduced with permission. Europe is in the grip of the most serious displaced persons crisis since the Second World War. Pope Francis, on his recent...

Prisons … again

Stuart Horner is a lifer serving a minimum sentence of 27 years for murdering his uncle. He recently spent about 60 hours protesting on the roof of HM Prison, Manchester, in a T-shirt bearing the message: “It’s not 1990, tell the government we’ve all had enough, sort...

An Open Letter to Northern Ireland’s Political Leaders

(This open letter first appeared in Steve Stockman’s blog and is reproduced by permission) Dear Political Leaders As you go into intensive talks this week to save the political institutions and our unraveling peace process I want to assure you of my prayers. I...

Reflecting on reflecting on the 1916 Easter Rising

At a recent talk on the 1916 Easter Rising by Philip Orr in one of Contemporary Christianity’s ‘In conversation with…’ series I learned much about its historical context. We had a sweep over the previous three centuries or so and the century since! What tends to be...