Category: Reflections
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The Ghost in Every Machine
There is an essay I have wanted to write for years. The trouble is that the topic keeps expanding. It begins with the old philosophical idea of the “Ghost in the Machine”, Gilbert Ryle’s phrase for the imagined little self living inside the mind, pulling the levers and making decisions. The tiny homunculus sitting in…
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Autumn Reflections
The middle of October is here, but we’ve enjoyed a few weeks of fine, dry weather. However it has now become very evident that the days are growing much shorter and cooler, especially when I have to head off to work at 6.30 in the morning. Outside of work, it feels like a time to…
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Little Boat in a Storm
On Resilience, Anxiety, and Not Running Aground At the time of writing, my ordinary working life is passing through a period of instability. The details are less important than the general experience. A career setback, a period between jobs, uncertainty about the future, or the collapse of a carefully constructed plan all produce a similar…
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Reflections on the Great I AM
Being, Isness and Suchness: Towards a Relational Ontology Introduction Western philosophy has traditionally begun with the question: Why is there something rather than nothing? Yet this question assumes that “nothing” is a genuine possibility. It may not be. If non-being is incoherent, then Being is unavoidable. The question becomes not why Being exists, but how…
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A Sunday School Song
A curious thing happened recently. A Sunday School chorus escaped containment. After lying dormant somewhere in the deeper recesses of my mind for several decades, it suddenly resurfaced and began repeating itself without invitation: Jesus died for all the children,All the children of the world… Readers of a certain evangelical vintage may recognise it. Of…
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So… Are You Suffering From Pastor’s Kid Syndrome?
A completely unscientific self-assessment based on popular mythology, church folklore and several decades of accumulated ecclesiastical baggage. Tick all that apply. The Church Years Symptoms experienced whilst still living inside the ecosystem. □ You knew all the words to every worship song whether you liked them or not. Comment: Repeated exposure is a powerful educational…
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After Evangelical Narnia
I grew up in a conservative Plymouth Brethren environment. More than that, I had one of the most hard-core evangelical childhood experiences: I was the preacher’s son and the pastor’s kid. When I finally emerged from evangelicalism it felt as though I’d been locked in a cultural cupboard under the stairs. But thinking about it,…
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The End of My Religious FOMO
Preface The reflections below arose from a realization that several religious claims I had always treated separately may actually be connected by a single underlying assumption. The claim that believers have a personal relationship with God, the claim that scripture is a kind of divine message, and the claim that the universe itself is grounded…
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Future Past
My daughter received her GCSE results today. She did remarkably well. Better than her old man ever did, in fact. Watching her consider her next steps, and all the possibilities that seem to stretch out before a sixteen-year-old, I found myself thinking back to my own youth. Like many people of that age, I was…
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Reflection on AI Use in Writing, Part 2: exaggerated language vs the old geezer in the pub
In my last post, I admitted that AI has occasionally helped me climb onto an imaginary soapbox and voice my ideas in a manner suggesting I’d discovered the answer to life’s great mysteries. The good news is that this pomposity isn’t entirely my fault, but partly a result of how the core engine of an…
