Recent content by MikePaterson

Whose Christianity? - Mystic's question - presupposes uniformity within each denomination. That's not been my experience of Presbyterianism, Catholicism, Anglicanism or the UCC. Even at the levels of Christology and Theology there are wide ranges of understanding and expressions of personal...

I have a PhD from Glasgow University. My supervisor was Ted Cowan, a prominent Scottish historian who taught me that context is all; documents are not necessarily more reliable than oral history and more easily misrepresent actual events. Motives are core to written sources. In the case of...

Wow! Your academic expertise compels me to defer to your outrage. (y)

The Gospels we usually see are an edited selection of more than 50 such documents: they are the formulations of oral communities recorded after 60 and more years of banter by people fearing for their own survival and the survival of their faith. The gendered "god" is a product of linguistic...

Christianity appears to me to include admonitions against greed as an essential original tenet. Historically it was compromised because early Christian communities benefitted from wealthy patrons. I see capitalism generating poverty, environmental disaster, oppression and ignorance. I see...

Faith and Capitalism BOTH make claims on the human spirit; Capitalism assumes we are rational consumers; Christianity would have us be faith-filled sharers. Christianity, one might expect from the Gospels, sees wealth and possessions as spiritual hazards; Capitalism sees them as the height of...

All sorts, Jae. Ministry (my wife's a UCC minister) comes in many forms. Liturgy is an art, pastoral care can be extraordinarily demanding, office and administrative demands are pressing; prayer, reading and personal preparation are essential disciplines. Service preparation takes attunement to...

This whole thread seems to be literalist and antagonistic. "God" itself is a loaded word, a noun rather than a verb, that is exclusionary. "God", if you insist on using the word and insist on gendering the concept, can only mean the inclusion of ALL genders and all gender choices. If you...

I can't find his Plug & Pray site at the moment. I got there yesterday, Try http://richardbott.com/about-me/ for more information, or find him on Facebook:

It is resources for worship services: It's called PLUG & PRAY: Plug & Pray evolved when some lay worship leaders in The United Church of Canada expressed a desire to have resources that they could grab off the shelf and use right away. As a liturgical writer in The United Church of Canada...

EVERYTHING, in the end, resolves into mystery. Certainty is (arguably perhaps) one of our most dangerous delusions.

It's NON FICTION, Jae…

'You Can't Be Serious — essays in wonder'… you won't find it yet. I'm told it's coming out in August-September (Rock's Mills Press). I wrote it. No: it's NOT self-published. It has influenced me deeply because it made me engage more widely and more deeply than I ever would without the...