Every Friday I’m posting links to things I’ve read this week that I think you might find interesting too –

• Andy Goodliff reviews a new book which interviews Brian Brock, an old Aberdeen Professor of mine and is editted by Kenneth Oakes (who I am pretty sure was a PhD candidate while I was there tha contributed to Websters Barth classes), Andy wonders if Brian Brock in the next Hauerwas;

both are bald white men from Texas

I enjoyed Brock’s Ethics 101, although I remember complaining to him about the £25 price tag of one of his books and lamenting the reading of Augustine’s city of God rather than talking about the death penalty..I’m fairly sure the whole thing felt like ‘pearls before swine’ for him!

• Matt Gemmell has written a 5000 word short book on writing in Markdown, I have enjoyed the last few months converting to writing in Markdown, and everything on this site has been written in it so far. Unfortunately you don’t quite get why it is so helpful until you start using it. This is worth your £2.50 I’d imagine.

• Scott McKnight writes (while reviewing another book) about why we can’t seem to unite two sides of the term salvation;

the spiritual notion of salvation (forgiveness, relation with God, eternal life with God) to the social notion of salvation (justice, healing, systemic evil vanquished). Very few hold them together: Jesus did and so too did the Evangelist Luke..

And how we should consider the exodus from Egypt the primary picture of salvation and a story that gives us both the spiritual and social dimension without forcing us to pick camps.

• I believe that the majority of people on earth today live in fear, and it is one of the primary things that God is longing to set us free from. Unfortunately simply believing in Jesus is not enough to truly set us free from the side-affect of self-reliance. Jim Martin once again unpacks how we can reflect on whether the actions or other, or of ourselves flow from fear, read more here.

• Should we pray for the sick or just hal them? I’ve heard this a few times and haven’t taken it that seriously, Andrew Wilson unpacks why He believes it may not be particularly biblical folk wisdom as it claims to be..

So if someone tells you that you shouldn’t pray for the sick, but should speak to the sickness instead, you should probably ignore them. And then pray for them.

Kim Fabricus is always a polarizing force on Faith and Theology but pens this sermon on the woman with bleeding and the healing of Jairus’ daughter which I found captivating, here’s a few captions to see you through the weekend.

Which is why reason alone, though reason we must, will never turn people from their racism, xenophobia, homophobia. It takes experience – knowing, befriending, eating and drinking, laughing and crying with black people, foreign people, gay and lesbian people. It takes contact – touch – the touch of Jesus. It takes love, a love which is the “suspension of disgust” (Richard Beck).

End of story? Almost. But observe one final detail. Both the older woman and the little girl have been called “daughters”. They also have a number in common. (Numbers are very significant in the Bible.) Mark has told us that the woman had been ill for twelve years; now he tells us that the girl is twelve years-old. Twelve – ring a bell? Twelve as in the twelve tribes of Israel? The twelve disciples, symbolically representing Israel, are male. Here the representatives are female, and particularly insignificant females at that, a sick outlier and a mere child. In both stories in our master class of a narrative, Mark is pointing to the new social order and, indeed the new kind of human being that Jesus has in mind when he speaks of the “kingdom of God”: an egalitarian community in which insider and outsider sit at table side-by-side, the one relieved of pride, the other of despair, each discovering their own good in the common good, each encountering Christ in the other.

• We are on short kids camp with kids from our local township, check out a short time lapse from games on the field!

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