Thought for the Week

The Lord Crewe Arms is a pub in the village of Blanchland, in Northumberland. I have friends there, so I visit the pub from time to time. There was an abbey at Blanchland; one of the bars of the pub is in a crypt from one of the monastery buildings. Every time I go in…

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I have just come back from a short break to Aberdaron, on the Llyn Peninsula in Wales. It was the parish of R.S. Thomas, a priest but also a poet whose work I love. The door of the church on the sea front was open and the only sound was of the waves. In front…

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Video assisted refereeing, or VAR, is a topic the provokes strong opinions amongst followers of football. It uses video and computers in an effort to eliminate refereeing errors. Many people in this country started to call for it after a World Cup game in 201o against Germany when England were denied a goal because the…

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High in the roof of Highley Church is a wooden carving of a face of a bearded man, his mouth open. He is the nearest we have in any of our local churches to a representation of the “Green Man”, a symbol that was very popular in Medieval times and who has recently undergone something…

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I am sometimes greeted with surprise when people find that I am a vicar and also a scientist. Around 20 years ago, some prominent scientists did try to take on religion but their arguments soon faded, not least because they often attacked ideas of God that few people of faith hold. When I attend scientific…

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And so another football season draws to it close, this Sunday (24th) with the last round of games of the Premiership. Some matters have been decided, but not all; glory or dejection still await the supporters of Spurs and West Ham, Bournemouth and Brighton. I am basking in Manchester Utd finishing 3rd and qualifying for the Champion’s League…

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Today (Friday) is St Matthias’s Day. Who?…. He is one of the many one-hit wonders of the Bible; elected by the remaining disciples to take the place of Judas who betrayed Jesus, never mentioned again. For obvious reasons, the Church does not have a St Judas’s Day, but Judas features as much in this day…

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It is unlikely that you will have missed that Sir David Attenborough is now 100; the BBC have been celebrating this for the last month. He has combined his passion of natural history and his skills as a TV presenter to shape the way nature documentaries are shown on the television. He has very largely…

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By the time you read this, I will be coming to the end of a week’s holiday on the Shetland Isles. For over 30 years I have had an annual trip to a Scottish island with a group of friends. When we started, we would think nothing of stopping off en-route to climb a Munro;…

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It may not have escaped peoples’ notice that there has been recently been an exchange of views between two prominent Americans; the US President, Donald Trump and the Pope, Leo XIV. It began with the Pope pointedly saying the Christ rejected the prayers of war mongers; the President responded by accusing Leo of being weak…

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