This has been a hard and busy year (and I’m fully aware that it hasn’t been half as hard and busy for me as it has been for others), but looking back it’s good to reflect on the highlights as well. As part of that I thought that I’d again choose my seven favourite posts from the past year.
The post from this year that’s been read the most is my reflections on the Shared Conversations, but I’ve chosen some other ones that I’m particularly pleased with. As last year, they are in chronological order to avoid the problems of ranking!
1. Vapour of vapours A combination of an excellent study week on Ecclesiastes and reading The Butterfly’s Burden by Mahmood Darwish led to my reflections on the translation of the word hebel in Ecclesiastes (and also led me to explore how to translate Ecclesiastes 3:11 again)
2. Holy Saturday Whilst on the study week the visiting preacher spoke about Holy Saturday, which inspired me to explore it as well.
3. God our Mother? A response to the ongoing debate on how to talk about God. Which leads me on to:
4. How to speak about God? This was a reflection on an inspiring time spent at St George’s College Windsor. It was a privilege to attend this course.
5. Inspiring Psalm 104 Looking at how understanding Egyptian literature (in this case The Great Hymn to the Aten) influenced how the psalmist wrote Psalm 104.
6. Re-telling stories A fascinating study showed how native Australians were able to keep their memories of actual events alive in their stories for thousands of years. These are my reflections on that, and on how they relate to the accounts that were written down in the Bible
7. Jeremiah and climate change The prophet Jeremiah condemned the complacency and denial of people who didn’t want to confront the problems that they faced. These were my reflections on how this relates to climate change…
Thanks for reading and a Happy New Year!
olem - From the past to eternity 