Just a short post-script to my last blog. I was talking through my thoughts on the way that liberal Christians (like me) teach the faith to children and the 'unchurched' with my vicar. We agreed that much of liberal Christianity assumes quite a deep involvement with matters of faith. We also reflected that our culture is losing what connection it once had to matters of Christianity. The way in which RE is taught in most schools is part of this, as are the more general assumptions made by the media. This reminded me of a novel I have read recently - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon. The main character in this book, Christopher, suffers from asbergers syndrome. At one point he explains that he doesn't like metaphors, because these are simply 'lies'. Similies are alright because they state clearly that something is 'like' something else, and do not pretend (lie) that they are something else. It's a subtle point of gr
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Last night I was helping to teach a confirmation class. We were discussing the miracles, and having the usual liberal dilemmas about what they mean for us today. We talked about little things being miracles and about how God works through people to bring his miracles to folk nowadays. The young people in the group who are fairly well 'churched' seemed to take hold of this quite well. Perhaps they knew the game that was being played and answered accordingly. But two of the group are rather less regular attenders at church and found it more difficult. It seemed to me that they thought we (the leaders) had got something confused because the story from the Bible we were talking about was clearly a miracle, but all the stuff about people helping each other clearly wasn't.
Thinking about this since then, I wonder whether this variety of liberal Christianity (which I don't want to rubbish, since it has nourished me well for many years) actually requires quite a high l