My friend PB took me off to see Show of Hands perform at the Half Moon in Putney last night, which was a thoroughly excellent evening’s entertainment. I hadn’t heard anything by them before, but this is going to be an anthem for me; at least for a while:

And we learn to be ashamed before we walk
Of the way we look and the way we talk;
Without our stories or our songs
How will we know where we’ve come from?
I’ve lost St George in the Union Jack
It’s my flag too and I want it back

Seed, bud, flower, fruit
Never gonna grow without their roots
Branch, stem, shoots – we need roots

Haul away boys let them go
Out in the wind and the rain and snow
We’ve lost more than we’ll ever know
Round the rocky shores of England…

PS the support band were Megson – see here for a taste – thought they were pretty good too, even if we only heard their last two songs!

Good on you Preston!

John Morehead left a comment, and sent me an e-mail linking to his two blogs (here and here) – and I think there is much for us to discuss. Have a read of his Burning Man essay (linked on the first blog sidebar), which pursues many themes close to my heart. I particularly love these two quotations that he uses at the end (and those who were at my Learning Church rant on Saturday morning – to be posted very soon, I promise – will recognise why I appreciate them so much):

“Apologetics is not at present a core requirement in theological education, so that it is perfectly possible to move into a position of church leadership without any knowledge of the theory or practice of apologetics, or awareness of its strategic importance…I want to make it clear that this is unacceptable. It is utterly irresponsible for a church which faces hard questions about its beliefs, values, aspirations and traditions to fail to equip its public representatives to deal with these questions, in terms that our culture can understand”

and

“The sad truth is that the church cannot be the metainstitution our world needs to instruct us in festivity, to open us to fantasy, to call us to tomorrow, or to enlarge our petty definitions of reality. It cannot for only one reason: the church is not the church. That is, what we now call ‘churches’ have departed so markedly from their vocations as agents and advocates of Christian faith that only a residue of that historic calling remains. Dim echoes of it are still heard in its preaching and pale shadows of it appear in its liturgy but the substance has been thinned and the spirit diluted.”

And now for something from Fergus Kerr:

“That considering the execution of an innocent man is a more promising starting point for sustaining Christian theology than proving that God exists might be one unsurprising conclusion.”