Best o' blog

Some of my posts seem to get a lot of traffic...

... Whether that really makes them "best", I'll leave you to judge. The most visits have been to a post mulling over the idea that ordained people undergo an ontological change, this post tries to make sense of that idea in more contemporary terms and in a way that might work for at least some evangelicals.

Oddly, in some ways, a post on clerical collars gets a (to me) surprising amount of traffic. See if you can work out why. I think it might be because people come to the post expecting a different kind of post rather than about the semiotics and the possibilities for change.

Have people stopped singing in church? Well, some think so and in this post I raise questions about some explanations offered and offer some of my own based in social anthropology and cultural studies with a dash of musical skepticism. That along with a touch of theology has me offering some suggestions for development beyond the worship band in its normal current instantiations.

Another popular destination is a post on the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic which comments on the so-called translations of the prayer from the supposed original Aramaic. I bring my linguistic background to bear alongside my biblical interpretive training to scale back the claims made. There are links on to further writing.

One of my pet peeves is that there are some people whose hobby horse is using language to look down on other people. Why this matters and matters to me can be found here -one of my more robustly expressed posts! A longer post which begins to show how that kind of linguistic put-down fails even on it's own terms, is here. Why it matters to me is set out in this post. I think it's right to supposedly split so-called infinitives (sic!). And my advice for putting down the weapons in the grammar wars ...

I'm quite keen to encourage readers to have a look at a series of posts about framing our thinking about atonement with the human experience of forgiving and being forgiven rather than starting with theories of justice or honour. The series, Rethinking Atonement forgiveness-centred starts here and has links from each post to the others in the series.

I'm pretty interested in the spiritual effects and dimensions of human corporate-entities (such as corporations, organisations and churches). You'll get some insight into this by checking out the posts that appear with the tag corporisations. But I think these might give you the best chance of getting a foothold on the topic: maybe the place to start is here: the rest to dip into are one about whether our personalising corporised entities is merely a figure of speech; one about corporations not being people but nevertheless perhaps there's something we need to retrieve from that kind of language ...;  one on mental complexity and social life in institutions and one about the 'creational trajectory' we humans are on.