plain commandments

[Excerpt from a sermon by Thomas Guthrie - colleague of Thomas Chalmers in Edinburgh in the mid-19th century.]
“Allow no difficulties about this or that doctrine to hinder you from giving instant attention, and earnest obedience, to these plain commandments, Pray without ceasing – Labour for the bread that never perisheth – Give all diligence to [...]

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two for the price of one

Things to read for light relief after ploughing through my last two monster posts:

a new blog, written by a brother of mine, full of entertainingly grumpy rants – the redeeming defect

reaction to the guidance published by the Director of Public Prosecutions on when to prosecute in cases of assisted suicide
something John MacArthur said on different [...]

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equality and the church

One of the proposals in the government’s Equality Bill seeks to remove the right of churches to employ only staff whose lifestyle is consistent with the church’s teachings, specifically in relation to the church’s teaching on sexual behaviour.
My MP got a letter from me on the subject, pointing out that this proposal is extremely damaging [...]

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when is a word not a word

Words, roughly speaking, in the psycholinguistic sense of ‘items in the mental lexicon’, consist of a phonological form coupled with semantic content. They mean something, and they have a sound structure, and these two properties can theoretically be analysed and discussed independently of each other. To give a phonological description of a particular word, for [...]

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problems continue

Actually, life without internet isn’t all that bad, assuming your workload is such that the email side of things can be taken care of within office hours. (Such, indeed, has been my luxurious situation for the past couple of weeks – a novelty!) In the meantime I’ve been getting lots of things done, where the [...]

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still sporadic

I’m back, but my internet’s gone. I’m breaking all the rules by doing bloggy stuff during the day (when I should be earning a crust). Maybe I’ll use the evenings of enforced internet absence to do some proper reading. Meanwhile, go and read this here article and have a ponder.

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and again

I know, I’ve just got back, and I’m away again tomorrow. This time to the far North. Some wonderful thoughts may occur to me on the tremendously long train journeys involved, but more likely, they won’t. In the meantime, you could do worse than the latest two posts on the Wanderer (here and here).
I’ve also [...]

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away a few days

Not that the activity has been particularly fast and furious here for a while, but I’ll be away and deprived of internet access until the middle of next week, so brace yourselves for even less. Should be packing as we speak …

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mutually helpful

The time has come (the Walrus said) to talk of many things – of shoes and ships and sealing wax, and cabbages, and kings.
Waiving the first several, consider the point that Andrew Melville made to King James in 1590: “There are two jurisdictions exercised in this realm: the one spiritual, the other civil; the one [...]

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