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This picture hasn't got anything to do with anything. I took it when we were camped recently in Surat Bay. This last weekend I was in Auckland for the last of the hermeneutical hui that the Anglican Church has been holding over the past 4 years to address issues of Biblical interpretation as they apply to matters of sexuality. I hadn't been to any of the others, so didn't know quite what to expect. We met in Auckland's Holy Trinity cathedral, a quite lovely building that is, oddly, designed so that the best view in the place is the one from behind the altar. In other words, it doesn't draw the eye in toward the altar so much as lead it out, through the stained glass to the city beyond,  which is an interesting theo-architectural statement, and perhaps for the hui, a profound one. The past hui had addressed themselves to the usual Biblical texts used by those seeking divine authority for their views on sexuality. The arguments over those passages have all bee...

I missed the last session of Tuesday's program. An old friend had an issue to discuss and, seeing as I was in the neighborhood, I spent late Tuesday afternoon sitting in a bar drinking Speights and talking about life, the universe and everything instead of in the Kinder library discussing Augustine, life, the universe and everything. I would have got away with my wagging except that when I arrived back in school on Wednesday morning I discovered I had been appointed, in my absence, to a panel and my place was there, third to the left and we start in 5 minutes. It was OK. The panel was comprised of people representative of various ministries, lay and ordained, who all spoke eloquently and powerfully about issues of power in the church. People spoke from contexts in which the power of the church to speak the Gospel was severely restricted, in the places where they lived, by governmental and social pressure. Some were students preparing for a future of full time service to the ch...

The flight from Dunedin left early so I was up at 5 and driving to the airport in the dark and wet. Wellington was cloudy and Auckland, when I arrived slightly misty and, by Dunedin standards, warm, but that doesn't seem to stop the wimpy locals banging on about how chilly it is. I picked up my bargain basement rental car- an aging Nissan Sunny with the performance and handling of a slug negotiating a plate of porridge- and navigated my way across the city with surprisingly little bother. With an hour to kill before the powhiriri I found a cafe near the Orakei basin and bought a large and good and inexpensive latte. I sat and looked out at the streets around which, 35 years ago, I had jogged with a pair of adidas on my feet and a pained but determined expression on my face. This was a neighbourhood near which I had lived during that period in my life when I had first been truly happy, and now it was at once familiar to me and as foreign as Honolulu or Beirut. Through long reme...