So, this is the best thing I’ve ever seen. Or the worst. I’m not sure which. Read more about Japanese Culture in Photos: Stress relief

This afternoon I was giving a talk at a local event; speaking before me was Mr. Sō Mōri of the South Kyoto Legal Center. He was explaining the LDP’s proposed changes to the Japanese Constitution and their effects. I’ve only seen a little bit in English on this and I hadn’t seen the extent of the changes until today. (Should Christians, missionaries, foreigners be engaging in Japanese politics? Read more about "Detrimental to the public order"

You wouldn’t cite Richard Dawkins as an authoritative interpreter of Evangelical doctrine. I don’t really need to spell out the reasons why not, but in no particular order: Read more about Less anti-semitic hermeneutics, please

…realise that Romans are different to you, but don’t try and pretend that you are one. Read more about When in Rome...

I’ve got lots of stuff that I want to blog about at the moment but neither the time or the energy so here’s a photo of a black plastic bag:

Read more about Japanese Culture in Photos: Black plastic bags

In mid February I noticed a flood of tweets with the hashtag #bellletstalk inviting an honest conversation about mental health. My first thought, knowing that Rob Bell had a new book coming out, was excitement and relief that he had taken the brave step of writing something substantial on mental health issues and depression in the ministry. Read more about Let's talk

Yesterday, on the door of a local restaurant, I saw a sign very much like the bottom one of these two: (I didn’t get a picture of the one I saw, but the wording was more or less the same.)

How would you translate it? You may not know Japanese, so I’ll give you the choice of two options: Read more about Literal translations

Because I’ve just wasted a couple of hours on this and I don’t want you to:

If you have a xulrunner application, and you set it up with the directory structure described here, and it doesn’t start, and then you try running it from the command line and it says either:

LSOpenURLsWithRole() failed with error -10810 for the file...

or Read more about Running XULrunner apps on OS X

Today I was preaching on the mission of God and salvation history, and decided at the last minute to throw in a good example of (a) how God always seeks to restore relationship with those estranged from him, and (b) the principle that, because God does this, we should too. It’s one of my key themes, and a great verse which highlights it is 2 Samuel 14:14. David has become estranged from his son, and Joab sent a woman in to change his mind and gain forgiveness. The climax of the woman’s argument, in every English translation I have checked, goes like this: Read more about Today in Bible translation horrors

So this morning in church we looked at 1 Corinthians 16, and, in what I think is probably a first when teaching on stewardship, everyone there decided to increase their giving. How did I do it? Read more about With regard to the collection for the saints