Spirituality
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Skip over this post if you don’t want any profound analysis. Thank you.
1 Chocolate Jesus
Some of the catholics are grumpy because someone has made a chocolate Jesus. I was thinking about this this morning and then Kester wrote it better than I was planning to:
I’ve obviously not seen the piece properly, but my sense is that it looks like a wonderfully cheeky critique of the saccharine nature of modern Easter-tide. I wonder if those in the Catholic League would normally purchase chocolate eggs for their children around this time? Are we not all guilty of sweetening the impact of Christ’s death?
2 The three quarter labyrinth
The labyrinth is a sort of a maze thing you walk around in a prayerful manner. It is all very well, but it can be a bit dull and prescriptive for those of us who like to wander off and do things our own way. Perhaps Real Live Preacher’s three quarter labyrinth is the answer:
…you might find a shortcut and get to the center quickly, or you might never arrive at all and spend an entire afternoon endlessly circling. Who knows what would happen.
In my experience, that’s a pretty good description of praying. You pray. You don’t know why, exactly. You’re hoping some things, I guess. You don’t know if praying will be a journey with any end at all. I know people who have prayed for things their entire lives. Or who knows, you might get a miracle right away. I don’t know about this stuff. It makes me nervous making claims about prayer one way or another.
3 Liturgy isn’t everything
Some interesting words from Joel, the director of the Evangelical Alliance. This is taken from an Ekklesia news item entitled “Africans and Caribbeans ‘alienated’ by Westminster Abbey slavery service, say evangelicals“.
“The Church of England needs to learn how to be the Church for England,” he said. “There should have been some space to depart from the script and speak the unscripted language of the heart.
“The protest was a master-stroke of opportunism, but, as we experienced a beautifully choreographed act of worship, it was an important reminder that pain cannot be choreographed,” he said.
Right, these uplifting thoughts were part of a plan to get me into the right mood for work.
Note to self: Get on with it.
Posted by Dave at 1:49 pm on March 30, 2007 and filed under Art, Church, Ecumenical matters, Religion, Spirituality.
7 Comments
A larger version of this cartoon is here along with information about how to use it in your own church publications and elsewhere.
A version of this cartoon appears in the book. I was never very happy with the book version. It had three columns unlike the two in this version. The right hand column (not shown here) was some underlined writing to do with leaving rotas or somesuch which was OK but I wasn’t really satisfied with it. The truth is that I’d had the idea for the four pictures a long time before but finished drawing them the night before the book deadline.
In reality the four pictures are a summary of my ‘faith journey’ (appalling phrase) which perhaps don’t need a punchline. Though in hindsight perhaps the ‘emerging churchers’ or ‘alternative worshippers’ should have got a look-in as well.
I suppose what I wanted to say is that I have found something of value in all these different approaches to Christian faith. Some more so than others, and some of the things I once held to be important I no longer see as important. We all change and realise that we were wrong about certain things. I suspect I been more wrong than most people about more things than most people, if that makes a shred of sense.
Some people don’t like the labels (evangelical, liberal etc) of course, but we have to give things names otherwise no-one knows what we are talking about. Perhaps these days I tend to wear my labels sewn onto the inside of my clothes rather than emblazoned on the outside.
[Feel free to post this cartoon on your blog. Just sew this handy code into the waistline:]
<img src="http://www.weblogcartoons.com/cb/i-have.gif" alt="cartoon from www.weblogcartoons.com" />
<p>Cartoon by <a href="http://www.cartoonchurch.com/blog/">Dave Walker</a>. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at <a href="http://www.weblogcartoons.com/">We Blog Cartoons</a>.</p>
Posted by Dave at 4:51 pm on March 4, 2007 and filed under Ecumenical matters, In-depth analysis, New CartoonChurch cartoons, Religion, Spirituality.
7 Comments
I have no grand Lent plan, but I intend to turn a few more things off a bit more often.
Here are some Lent resources. There are of course millions of others.
Feel free to reuse this cartoon on your blog. This is the code which will make it happen:
<img src="http://www.weblogcartoons.com/cb/concentration.gif" alt="cartoon from www.weblogcartoons.com" />
<p>Cartoon by <a href="http://www.cartoonchurch.com/blog/">Dave Walker</a>. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at <a href="http://www.weblogcartoons.com/">We Blog Cartoons</a>.</p>
Posted by Dave at 9:52 am on February 21, 2007 and filed under Religion, Spirituality.
5 Comments
[Click on the image for the full sized version]
Just a reminder that my Lent cartoon from the ‘Dave Walker Guide to the Church’ series is available for republication by CartoonChurch licence holders.
Please note the special conditions for this cartoon: Please don’t republish it on another blog or website and please use the special text to credit it. Thank you!
Posted by Dave at 9:08 am on February 13, 2007 and filed under Cartoons, Church, Religion, Spirituality.
2 Comments
Hey, look at this:
(Diagram showing co-occurrences of names in the New Testament)
This is from a site called ‘Many eyes‘, which enables you to look at data in interesting ways. Your computer might need a special widgetty-thingummy, I don’t know. Here are some interesting ones I found done by Crossway, who are Bible-related people. I don’t really understand them, but they look lovely and look like they should be interesting. You can zoom and click and all sorts of things.
Examples:
Many Eyes : Co-Occurrences of Names in the New Testament
Many Eyes : Who Gets Mentioned Together in the New Testament
I’m sure they will be a blessing to some of you theological geeks and people like me who like the Bible and nice pictures.
This page explains it all a bit more. I found the link here.
Posted by Dave at 8:11 pm on January 27, 2007 and filed under Profound, Spirituality.
4 Comments
Rejesus, the good website about Jesus, is to move from bulletin boards to a blog for its discussiony bits.
This is the link to the new rejesus (with no capitals) blog. The discussion board, which has now been made a bit difficult to find from the main bits of the site, will close on February 1st. The thread explaining the thinking behind the change is over here. I was speaking to someone today who has had some involvement in this, and they more or less said the same thing as Bruce in the above thread:
Although this community is vibrant and very worth while it has never quite fitted what the intention of rejesus is. We have attempted over the years to make changes to the house rules, or to try and make the intention of the site more explicit directly in threads but it has always been an unsuccessful struggle. This community finds its natural home pitching a message to folk some steps further down the journey than the site is here for.
I find the differences between blogs and bulletin boards interesting. On some sites a bulletin board seems to work really well, but on others it can and up being largely ignored or, as here, going in an unhelpful direction. Ship of Fools has a very vibrant bulletin board community, whereas on the Wibsite our boards have been quieter than our blogs, the latter having having proved unexpectedly popular. If there is a way to predict which of the two means of interaction will work better I for one haven’t found it. Oddly enough quite a few well known blogs are now introducing bulletin boards / forums (call them what you will) for the first time.
All the best to the rejesus team as they try this approach. It is a great site and I hope the blog works for them too.
Posted by Dave at 10:32 pm on January 21, 2007 and filed under Blogging, Religion, Spirituality.
5 Comments
A lot of Christians talk continually about ‘God’s plan for our lives’.
I have the following problems with this idea:
- It does not really seem to be a concept that the Bible endorses that much. Sure, you can dig up the odd verse here are there which says that God has a plan for someone’s life, but they mostly seem to me to be talking in very general terms. That God has a plan for each specific person’s life does not seem to me to be an emphasis in the Bible.
- It is all nice and lovely to talk about God’s plan when it involves good things happening, but what when it involves bad things happening? This seems to me to make God into an unkind being who plans bad things for people.
- Where do you draw the line between the events that are part of the plan and the ones that are not? How about insignificant details, such as the space you will park your car in today?
- What happens if you ‘wander off the pathway’ and do something that isn’t part of the plan? Is there a plan B and a plan C and so on? If there are an infinite number of alternative plans then the concept of there being a plan A in the first place becomes nonsensical as being imperfect none of us will ever follow it.
I’m fully aware that questions about predestination, free will etc have been unsolved by theologians for hundreds of years, so the likelihood of sorting it all out in a Cartoon Blog comments thread is not that great. But let’s try anyway – if you have any thoughts please post them below.
Posted by Dave at 9:07 am on January 8, 2007 and filed under Cartoons, Profound, Spirituality.
41 Comments
I noticed this challenge on the blog of Peter Ould:
Three quick questions Susan:
i) Is Jesus 100% divine and 100% human, now and for all eternity unchanged in that hypostatic union, in a way that no other human being could ever ever be?
ii) Is Jesus the only way to the Father, in that it is necessary to have personal faith in HIS saving power in order to dwell with the Father in eternity?
iii) Was Jesus’ defeat of sin and sin’s power demonstrated by an unequivocal physical resurrection from the grave of the exact same body that was crucified days earlier?
If you can’t answer “yes” to those three questions then you demonstrate why schism will happen. I challenge you to permit this comment onto your blog and then to answer all three questions.
[Look at Peter's post for the full context]
Leaving aside the fact that I dislike it a bit when people put pressure on other people to sign something or take some kind of a test to prove whether they are a proper question, I thought I’d take Peter’s ‘orthodoxy’ test to find out whether I am a heretic or not.
Question i)
Is Jesus 100% divine and 100% human, now and for all eternity unchanged in that hypostatic union, in a way that no other human being could ever ever be?
Yes. I agree. Though I had to look up ‘hypostatic union’ as it is a few years since I underwent theological whathaveyous.
Question ii)
Is Jesus the only way to the Father, in that it is necessary to have personal faith in HIS saving power in order to dwell with the Father in eternity?
Is Jesus the only way to the Father? Yes. How does this work. I do not know. The ‘necessary to have personal faith in HIS (Jesus’) saving power’ bit I struggle with. What of those people who die before they are old enough to understand anything about ‘having personal faith’? What about those who can’t understand anything about ‘having personal faith’ because they have a learning difficulty? What of those God fearing people who never in their lifetimes meet a Christian or hear anything of Christianity? I could think of many more examples. The truth is that if I am to be honest I have no final answer as to how God will decide who will ‘dwell with the Father in eternity’. See also the former discussion ‘hell etc‘.
Question iii)
Was Jesus’ defeat of sin and sin’s power demonstrated by an unequivocal physical resurrection from the grave of the exact same body that was crucified days earlier?
I believe that Jesus was physically resurrected. As to the nature of his body after he was resurrected – I don’t know. It seems to me that he was in some way different – the way he ‘disappeared from their sight’ (Luke 24 verse 31) and seemed to be able to walk through locked doors (John 20 verse 19). But then again perhaps he could do those things before his death and resurrection. It is evident from the Bible accounts that he was not just a ghost (Luke 24 v 39) , but I don’t know whether his body took exactly the same form. I don’t think I can be certain.
So Peter, heretic or not?
Posted by Dave at 5:50 pm on December 17, 2006 and filed under Religion, Spirituality.
22 Comments
Today it is my turn to host the Posada chain blog / blog chain, originally started here by Andii Bowsher. I originally posted about it here if you remember. OK, here is what we are going to do. There will be the official Mary and Joseph picture, followed by a meditation done via some drawings, then a prayer, then navigational instructions for following the blog chain onwards from here.
Mary and Joseph
Meditation:
Prayer
[We do not pray very often on this blog, but don't let it alarm you - nothing to be frightened of.]
Dear Lord,
Please help us to clear out our second bedrooms, be they literal or metaphorical.
Amen
How to follow the Posada blog chain
Tomorrow’s Posada location is John Cooper’s blog. Yesterdays was Weekend Fisher in case you are following the blog chain backwards.
The full list of blog chain locations:
Posted by Dave at 11:55 am on December 15, 2006 and filed under Blogging, Spirituality.
9 Comments
I’m a bit frantic with Christmas cartoon deadlines, so plase forgive the lack of new cartoon material over the last few days.
I have once again this year observed a number of bloggers determined to observe Advent properly in the face of overwhelming opposition. Take Father Jake as an example:
In every congregation in which I’ve served, I’ve found resistance to my insistance that carols, pagaents, greenings and other Christmas customs not begin until December 24…
…Even though our culture has surrounded us with the sounds and signs of Christmas, it is important that the Church not cave in to this attempt to commercialize this season.
Around here the trees, lights, inflatable snowmen etc are now in full swing. I’m in agreement with Fr. Jake’s sentiments, but I wonder whether attempting to fight this aspect of our culture is like trying to hold back the tide using a piece of cardboard. Especially the thing about not singing Christmas carols until the 24th of December. I the whole Carol service phenomenon as quite a good way to connect with people in the real world, although I can understand why clergy who have to go to ten or fifteen of the things would have less enthusiasm.
Meanwhile Real Live Preacher has his own set of Advent struggles. See Advent Comedy of Errors. Very very funny (Found via Maggi)
Update: I’ve added the cartoon above to We Blog Cartoons, meaning it can be freely re-used on personal blogs if you add a link.
Posted by Dave at 9:19 am on December 5, 2006 and filed under Church, Current events, Spirituality.
6 Comments
John Davies has a new blog which will document the two month walk he is planning for his sabbatical in 2007. He will be walking along the approximate route of the M62, the motorway linking Hull with Leeds, Halifax, Manchester, and Liverpool.
But why walk the M62? Many people given the chance for three or four months away go somewhere exotic, you know like the Far East. But I’ve become increasingly convinced (helped by philosophers of travel like Alain de Botton) that the exotic is not a physical place but a state of mind. It’s not where you go so much as your mental attitude which determines your perception of a place.
A week or two ago I listened to a CD John sent me of his Greenbelt talk ‘Reading the Everyday’. I’ve not always been good at being content in uninteresting surroundings, but I’ve found John’s approach, that of finding value in the mundane and the ordinary, quite inspiring. You can get the talk as a CD or MP3 from the Greenbelt shop.
John’s regular blog is here.
Posted by Dave at 9:56 am on December 4, 2006 and filed under Art, Blogging, Mundane, Profound, Spirituality.
1 Comment
I have decided not to add to my Advent calendar blog this year because I have too many other projects that are demanding my creative energy and the extra stress will not help me. I have been working on ideas for the advent blog this year, but it is not to be. Perhaps I will draw a few of the cartoons I had worked on and post them here instead and do the full series another year. All of the cartoons from last year are still available of course if you want to look at them on a daily or some other basis.
In the meantime there are now millions of Advent calendars of various sorts online:
- The official Church of England one, Advent Stories looks quite promising. I like the fact that it stops you peeking ahead.
- Andii has started his Blog Posada – the first entry is here. I will be hosting the Posada on the 15th of December.
- World Vision have a downloadable Advent Calendar to accompany their ‘Take 2′ project focussing on AIDS. There is a blog where a couple from Scotland will be posting about their their visit to Africa to discover hope amidst the AIDS pandemic.
- Neal contacted me about his collaboarative Advent blog writren by people from Glasgow and beyond – you can find that here.
If you have come across any innovative, creative or unusual Advent calendars then feel free to post them in the comments.
Posted by Dave at 1:42 pm on December 3, 2006 and filed under Cartooning, Spirituality.
5 Comments
Dave Walker's blog. Dave is a freelance cartoonist who draws a weekly 'Guide to the Church' for the Church Times. (
