I’ve been meaning to read The Children of Men by PD James for ages having seen the film when it came out. I finally picked it up the other day and noticed it was set in 2021, so now was the perfect time to dive in. James describes the story as a Christian fable and… Continue reading Children of Men: Finding Hope at the End of the World
A great example of the Jupiter archetype can be found in the BBC sitcom Rev which ran for three series. The story follows Adam Smallbone, an Anglican priest who is promoted from a sleepy rural parish in Suffolk to an inner-city church in London. It’s an intelligent and subtle comedy that’s beautifully written and has… Continue reading Ontological Despair and the Rebirth of Faith in Rev
The title of this post sounds like a bad thriller, but anyway…last time I promised to tell the story of how the tax credit office almost killed my novel, The Shining Ones, but first, some context: A few years ago I was made redundant in the Tory public sector cuts and, what with one thing… Continue reading The Tax Credit Office and the Sword of Damocles
In which Pooh teaches us how to listen to our intuition and not the rabbiting of our egos: On a foggy day, Pooh, Piglet and Rabbit were trying to find their way home, only it wasn’t going to plan… “The fact is,” said Rabbit, “we’ve missed our way somehow.” They were having a rest in… Continue reading Pooh Follows the Honey of Intuition
Following my epic article on the Dark Night of the Soul, I wanted to go into a little more detail on the symptoms of the Dark Night and strategies for surviving it. I was going to include this information at the end of the previous article but it was already too long. To summarise: the… Continue reading How to Survive a Dark Night of the Soul
“Physicist Stephen Hawking has remarked that mysticism is for those who can’t do the math. In response to Hawking’s remark, George Cairns retorted, ‘Mystics are people who don’t need to do the math. They have direct experience!’” So begins The Mystic Heart by Wayne Teasdale. This lucid and open-minded book seeks to discover the universal… Continue reading The Mystic Heart: Book Review
“You often hear about believers who have a crisis of faith, but what of the sceptics among us who have a crisis of doubt? For years we sceptics have decisively refuted the metaphysical claims of the great religions and scoffed at the pretentions of newfangled spiritual fashions. But then our doubt is suddenly shaken by… Continue reading Sceptical Mysticism
This image is a sliver of a well-known wood engraving by an unknown artist. I’ve used it as a banner for my website in the past, so thought I would look into its history and find out more about who created it. The image is often attributed to Camille Flammarion because it first appeared in his… Continue reading The Flammarion Engraving: Escaping the Crystal Sphere
