James's Weblog

Psalm 34 is an acrostic. In Hebrew, the first word of each verse starts with successive letters of the alphabet. So, if this were English, verse 1 would start with A, verse 2 would start with B, and so on.

At Trinity Church, we’ve been preaching through Book 1 of the Psalms (that is, Psalms 1-41) from Easter until the end of August. We won’t have had time to preach on all of them; we’ve had 18 weeks, so there will have been time to preach on just under half of them. Nevertheless, we thought it would serve the church better to preach selected psalms from the first book, rather than a selection dotted across the whole psalter.

I've never noticed this before, and it’s a bit of fun.

Whose tomb was Jesus buried in? Joseph of Arimathea, you’d reply, and you’d be correct.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 1 that the message of the cross sounds foolish and weak to someone without faith in Jesus. This can sound remote and theoretical, but is beautifully illustrated by Pi Patel’s account in the book The Life of Pi.

Just a quick post in case this helps someone.

My PC (Fedora 42) has just updated to KDE Plasma 6.4.

Immediately, every time I locked the session (Super key + L), an error appeared on the screen

The screen locker is broken and unlocking it is not possible anymore. In order to unlock it, switch to a virtual terminal (e.g. Ctrl+Alt+F1), log in to your account and execute the command:

On Tuesday 17th June, MPs voted on amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill that change abortion law in England and Wales. This post explains what those amendments are, summarises their impact, and then offers 4 reflections on how we can make sense of what’s unfolding.

Parliament sat last Friday (16th May) to debate further the “Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill”.

The short version media report was that the “final vote” will be on 13th June.

As those who know me will know, I love my coffee. In fact, I love speciality coffee, which is more than just a way of saying “really good coffee”. It’s a term in the industry for coffee that is farm traceable, graded by calibrated standards of taste and quality to be of a certain standard, and then brewed with care and precision. You might like to read about the “third wave” coffee movement. Coffee drinking has progressed from mass-produced instant coffee, to fresh coffee that is mass produced and then packaged long before it's brewed, to the kind of coffee I'm talking about.

As the funeral of the late Pope Francis is held in the Vatican today, the liturgy has notable points of difference from the Anglican liturgies. Those differences expose some deep differences between Roman and Anglican theology, and the surprise is that the biggest problem is not actually transubstantiation.

I've been studying Deuteronomy chapters 5-7, preparing some notes for our small group leaders. As I've been doing that, I find myself approaching Easter freshly. Here are a couple of questions for us with chapters 5-6 particularly in mind.