Ecclesiastes

What is the message of the book of Ecclesiastes? How should we understand it? It’s perhaps one of those books that we don’t spend much time reading or thinking about. However, it’s one of my favourites, so this is my sermon about it!

Vapour of vapours

How do you translate the start of Ecclesiastes? “Meaningless”, “Vanity” are two of the more well-known versions. But there are problems with these!

Ecclesiastes as experiment

What does Ecclesiastes look like from a scientist’s point of view? People have long struggled with how best to understand Ecclesiastes and the approach of R J Berry provides a refreshing change to some of the theologian’s arguments over whether it is ‘pessimistic’ or ‘optimistic’. On another note, Ecclesiastes has also provided the inspiration for…

Wondering about wonder

I spoke at Greenbelt 2011 on the subject of wonder: Wonder is more than an emotion, more than a thought. It is experienced by scientists, artists, theologians. It drives people to create new things, to make new discoveries. What does the experience of wonder tell us about what it means to be human? What role…

Response to the New Atheists

This sermon is a response to the New Atheists preached as part of a sermon series on apologetics earlier this year. Specifically, it was designed to help people (many with no particular science backgrounds) understand the issues and give them some sense of how to answer the main questions. This is a slightly edited version…

Galileo

Ecclesiastes and science

Blackwell are publishing a really helpful series of Biblical commentaries with a twist; they show how people have interpreted the books as a whole and individual passages and verses throughout the ages. Hopefully this is one way of at least lessening C S Lewis’ caustic comment in The Screwtape Letters (number 27): “To regard the…