Arabic is a wholly language. Language in which the angel Gabriel spoke to Mohammed. The holy language of the Koran is one whose themselves and consonants in and of themselves have some materiality and thus impact on the lives of those around. This idea of language carrying on certain magical properties reminded me of the …
Author archives: pasdelasbas
St Paul as a prophet
Christianity has this unfortunate obsession with the figure of Jesus Christ. In turn has been a constant struggle within Christianity to return to the original figure of Christ as a way of combating a form of legalese religiosity which installs itself. Every movement like this faces the issue that the actual content of the Gospels, …
Walsingham – You Only Live Once…
It wasn’t difficult to find our way to Walsingham but when we arrived it wasn’t clear what we should do. I had persuaded my partner and our three children to come with me to visit Walsingham. My partner was interested in going but the three children had asked me “what is it?”. It’s the site …
Hamlet 2 & Tsotsi
I watched two films last night, both by mistake rather than planning, practically the only way I see films these days. Hamlet 2 I started watching this and in an early scene when Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan) was emoting I turned to my friend and said “God I hate actors” which was appropriately misplaced as …
apostasy
The conceit of the development of Renaissance humanism was that, like Hercules, “man” could perfect “himself” and become a God. The apostasy of Salman Rushdie was to take the word of God and relativise it, offering a human interpretation to something inspired and directed by God. In the Western intellectual tradition, the Western philosophical tradition …
God is Beauty (not a compliment I fear)
I was thinking about a friend going away for a week to The New Wine Convention with the Church of England group of which he is a member. I was thinking how could he possibly believe in God enough to go away like this? I realise this was a mistaken question. For me, now, finally, …
Leader notes
Yesterday, the 3rd August, I was listening to report on radio 4 of the endorsement of Hassan Rouhani by the Supreme Leader. I can’t find the audio file to link to it but there was in the background this extra-ordianary soviet style choral singing going on that seemed so unlike what I would have expected. …
Ramadan and Christmas
It is Ramadan once again. It is the measure of the year, a movable cycle that is both feast and beast. I met a Welsh convert the Ramadan other day and I asked him how long he had been a Muslim? He replied that this was his fourth Ramadan. I compared it to Christmas in …
A Good Muslim
A close friend of mine brought one of his closest friends to visit me the other evening. This latter man brought with him his daughter who was 28 years old. The occasion was a shared meal and he had driven up from 100 miles away to have dinner with my friend during Ramadan. Conversation continued …
Clay Pipes
Here is a selection of clay pipes which I had the pleasure of seeing at a friends house near Barnsley. They are a very small part of an immense collection, not particularly of clay pipes but of minerals, bottles, disease from the industrial past. They have been brought together by a man who coming from …