Temple Cloud

A lot of my posts on here have been rants.   This isn’t because I am permanently in ranting mood.   It’s just that, when I’m feeling cheerful, I mostly write stories instead, whereas, when something has wound me up, I feel the need to work it out in this blog. But right now, I just want to tell you about spring, and about feeling happy. A week and a half ago, I left Somerset in winter, and I came back ten days later to find it in spring.   Admittedly, when I say winter, I don’t mean in the thick snow we’d had at the beginning of February. No, by halfway through this month, I could see that the snowdrops of January had been joined by crocuses and even celandines. The woods were green and mossy and beautiful to walk in. But even so, when I came down to Southampton, I had to re-set my mental calendar to get used to the fact that Southampton, being both a city and on the south coast, was in full, daffodil-filled, blossoming-cherry-tree spring mode. ...

When I first encountered Shane Claiborne and Tony Campolo’s book Red Letter Christianity , I seized it in the hope that it might answer my questions.  Over the previous few years, I had been finding it impossible to reconcile being a Christian (i.e. someone who believes Jesus is our saviour) with focusing on the ‘red letters’ (i.e. what the Bible records of the teachings of Jesus himself, which are printed in red letters in some editions of the Bible). Campolo and Claiborne had adopted the term ‘Red Letter Christianity’ to describe those who take the teachings of Jesus seriously and try to live up to them (for example, in loving their enemies, freeing the oppressed, sharing all their possessions, etc).  They explained that they had done this because the term ‘Evangelical Christian’ had come, particularly in America, to imply Far Right, pro-gun-ownership, anti-environment, etc, none of which they were. To me, ‘evangelical’ had the much simpler meaning of ‘someone...