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Prayer and politics
Praying is no substitute for politics. When we abandon living in the world, when we no longer love the earth, when we ignore the neighbour on the road, prayer is left empty, make-believe piety. We no longer walk with Jesus, Word made flesh, whatever our orthodox profession. Politics, even when it has not collapsed into…
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Does Jesus call us to political discipleship?
With a group from our church I listened to Edward Norman giving the Reith Lectures, and was increasingly disturbed. It was a time when many of us had been stirred by books like John V. Taylor’s Enough is enough, by Martin Luther King, and whispers of Liberation Theology, and we were children of the post-1945…
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There Were Shepherds Staying In The Fields By Night
Through the night, shepherds watched over their sheep. In Psalm 23, the Lord is the shepherd, and human beings are “the sheep of his pasture” (Psalm 100.3). Human beings need shepherds, whatever names they go under: politicians, managers, influencers. Be moved with active compassion, as Jesus was when he saw people as sheep without a shepherd (Matt 9.36). Ezekiel saw…
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Monday morning
Monday morning, I sit down to write this piece, only a few hours left before it is due. And very little idea – or perhaps too many ideas, probably most won’t do. A clue-question I will follow: What is my world this morning? ‘My world’ is the great created living world as it comes to…
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Transforming society – or merely making it
a theological discussion with the Bible in one hand and a very particular newspaper in the other Society for the Study of Theology 1995 What is this paper about? I have been asked to write a paper about theology and the transformation of society or transformation in society. I can only make this a manageable…
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The Politics of Forgiveness
Published in The Third Way, c.1979 There is, at present, a great and growing interest amongst Christians in this country in political matters. They feel responsible and concerned. This is a good development – a waking up to reality. But all that we do is not well: the man struggling out of deep sleep goes…
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Illegal Boat People
Originally posted on the Network Leeds blog here. Government makes a decree, like Knut on the beach, which says ‘These are illegal immigrants’. But they are human beings seeking life. Is any creature and child of God, ‘illegal’? If God lets down from heaven a great sample of all his creatures and says, Rise and eat, shall we say with…
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Politics and forgiveness
POLITICS AND FORGIVENESS is an unlikely combination. One senior Baptist world leader said to me, “There isn’t much forgiveness in politics”. That gives us no excuse for rejecting it as our task and responsibility as Christian human beings. After all, the combination of God and Humanity is unlikely, and seems implausible in the world as…
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With my missing hands
Note: This essay is a revision of a chapter originally published in 2008 in Remembering to Forgive: A Tribute to Una O’Higgins O’Malley ed Enda McDonagh, pp141-148. Una O’Higgins O’Malley was a remarkable Irish woman, who worked for peace and reconciliation in Ireland. She founded the Glencree Reconciliation Centre, where I met her in 1978…
While it is yet day
Haddon Willmer