It was reading the reports of the Oxford Diocesan enquiry into the events in the parishes of Stowe and Maids Moreton that made me pick up my digital pen this morning. You can read the report at https://www.oxford.anglican.org/safeguarding/learning-reviews/events-in-stowe-maids-moreton/. It tells of the activities of a very dangerous young man, Ben Field, who insinuated himself into …
Author: Jeremy Pemberton
Church of England priest, musician, academic, father and grandfather. Married to my husband, retired.
Funerals in a time of plague
I have been taking people’s funerals since I was twenty-five. I have seen hundreds and hundreds of funerals of all kinds, in all kinds of places, surrounded by a huge variety of rituals and customs that made the grieving manageable for the mourners. But I have never seen a time like this. Everything in us …
Sexuality and Intimacy: are we thinking straight?
Yesterday I went to a lecture-workshop led by Professor Traugott Roser , Professor of Practical Theology at the University of Munster. It was entitled, "Sexuality and Intimacy in a time of severe illness and death". The lecture at the beginning told us about research conducted with a cohort of terminally ill patients and their spouses …
Continue reading Sexuality and Intimacy: are we thinking straight?
Making a Case for Pastoral Guidance
Why the House of Bishops' new guidance needs a lot more work if it is going to be listened to.
On Not Sharing the Peace
When I was a boy, there was no such thing as sharing the peace. The 1662 Prayer Book Communion service is a liturgy that resolutely maintains the sense of the individual amidst the corporate. Charles Willams's poem, At the "Ye that do truly" expresses the sense of separation of one Christian from another in this …
In Praise of Method and Application
A propos the priesthood, Giles Fraser writes in praise of Incompetence in his latest Unherd blog. He talks movingly and rightly of the dangers of any priest ever pretending that they are “successful”. And of how the grace and love of God uses the unlikely, the odd, the incompetent to advance the cause of God’s …
From The Quire 