The term “polycrisis” gets used a lot these days to name a peculiar consequence of globalisation: the collision of expanding systems in shock—energy, climate, geo-politics, finance, etc., with AI accelerating the chaos—in a confined planetary space.

The world has reached some sort of tipping point, which may or may not prove to be catastrophic but which arguably signals the irreversible transition from an age during which humanity has flourished within the natural order to an age of human domination over the natural order. This new age is often called the Anthropocene, though ironically the dominance of the anthropos is already being threatened by an AI insurgency. Serves us right!

The church also has to navigate this difficult transition—these birth pains of a new and very uncertain age.

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In response to the last post asking whether David raped Bathsheba a couple of online commentaries defending the rape interpretation were flagged up on Facebook: David’s Rape of Bathsheba and Murder of Uriah (2 Samuel 11-12) by the Theology of Work Project, and ( | 3 comments)
Reading parts of a recent bad-tempered Twitter row about David and Bathsheba, I began to wonder whether Bathsheba is to be regarded in any sense as responsible for the turn of events. I was told that “she was really asking for it” interpretations are wildly inappropriate fantasies and that I should… ( | 17 comments)
I have two preliminary points to make from a biblical perspective. ( | 1 comment)
Matthew Hartke posted a couple of pages from Robert Carroll’s book When Prophecy Failed: Cognitive Dissonance in the Prophetic Traditions of the Old Testament on Twitter last week. It got me fretting. The argument of the book is that there is evidence in the Old Testament of how Israel… ( | 4 comments)
What did Christ smell like? Paul says that the apostles—he has in mind at least himself, Timothy, and Titus—are the “fragrant aroma of Christ to God among those being saved and among those perishing” (2 Cor. 2:15). Careless readers of scripture that we are, we happily assume that the goal of… ()
With the Platinum Jubilee celebrations in full swing here in the UK, it’s easy to forget that it’s Pentecost Sunday this weekend. To compensate for the oversight and to make sure that the narrative-historical perspective doesn’t get neglected, here is a series of seven posts that I did ten years… ()
Allan Bevere makes the important point that Jesus was not crucified because he went around telling people to love one another. “It doesn’t take a profound thinker to know that the primary motivation for this dehistorizing and detheologizing of Jesus is to domesticate his life and work into… ( | 9 comments)