Eucharist Audio and Other Stuff...

Hello to everyone who may read my blog. It has been a few weeks since I've posted so I thought I'd just get on and give a quick update on what has been happening.

1) I still plan to finish off my Eucharist series sometime within the next month. But for those who are interested, I recently preached a much abbreviated message on the topic which you can listen to here. It covers in brief some of my main points. Also, for those interested, I finally got the mark for the essay which I handed in for masters work...I did well. Yeah!

2) I am busy at the moment with the continuation of my masters. I was away last week at Regents Theological College in Nantwich, England doing a module on Pauline Pneumatology (that is, a study of Paul's understanding of the Spirit). This coming week I am back doing a module titled Communicating the Gospel in Contemporary society. After those two weeks I will be diving into my next essay which will be for the latter of the two modules. I am allowed to pick my own essay title so I think I will do something related to post-modernity but hopefully also quite based in a scripture text. I'll let you know after this week what I've chosen.

3) Further to these masters modules, I have had to do some prior reading for both of them to get me ready. For the Gospel in Contemporary Society I read, among other things, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and a response entitled The Dawkins Delusion by Alister McGrath. In a nut shell, Dawkins' book was not so much an insult to my faith, but more an insult to my intelligence. There are even many atheists who have ridiculed it for its dogmatism, emotionalism, and lack of critical depth. I'm glad I read it though.

4) Also, this past week I took advantage of the Regents library and spent a portion of my evenings working through a book called Introducing Radical Orthodoxy by James K A Smith. I won't go into it too much now (probably in a future post), but it basically describes a small, but growing movement of thought which seeks to respond to the trends of culture which are often labeled post-modern. RO contends that most of what usually goes under this heading is not so much post-modern as it is hyper-modern...taking the fundamental beliefs of modernity to their logical ends. It was a very good read and I hope to do much more reading in this area.

5) Finally, one reason I have slowed down a bit on my blog is that myself and two other friends (both of whom tend to think and write very similar to me) are brainstorming about combining our blogging efforts. Instead of our three separate blogs, we would merge them into one and continue to write and discuss topics associated with theology, culture, Christian practice and the like. But never fear, not only will you still be able to keep up with my musings through this new blog, I will probably continue with this blog, but probably gear it a bit more toward more personal, lighthearted and devotional reflections.

Well, that's about it for now.