Writing in The Guardian, Julian Baggini, one of the speakers at our June Conference ​- ‘Religion and Atheism - Beyond the Divide?’ Saturday 8 June 2019 -

You needn’t take the Gospels as gospel: sharing in a collective celebration can be more important than what is being shared - A look east could help those who value Christianity but who cannot take the Gospels as gospel. It offers a means of wholeheartedly embracing a Christian Christmas without having to believe in preposterous fairytales. That could mean seeing it as a way to acknowledge your belonging to a culture and tradition that has been celebrating the festival for centuries without necessarily going along with absolutely everything that entails

Find out more about our day conference ‘Religion and Atheism - Beyond the Divide?’ Saturday 8 June 2019 here _

Religion_and_Atheism_Conference

Joan Chittister, radical Benedictine, attended the COP 24 Environmental conference Dec. 8 in Katowice, Poland. She came away with mixed emotions as intergovernmental agreements fell short of what is required. Joan was heartened though by the presentations which took a different tone. Theses were, she said, presentations from religious leaders, spiritual teachers, more philosophic types who know that nothing much can happen to the world around us until something happens within us that is beyond money and power, that seeks global harmony and world peace.

Heaven help us! The sky is falling. It’s another example of political correctness gone mad, and religious freedoms being violated. According to the Dr Duke Show,

a weekly podcast ‘bringing you news and insightful commentary about the state of education in America and the world today’, the Chasco Middle School in Florida is the latest front in America’s ‘culture wars’.

Read full article from Robin Bunce in the attached news file.

The newspaper report is here: Tampa_Bay_Times_report

SCM is recruiting for a new Chief Executive Officer to take the charity forward in the next stage of its development. Full details available:SCM_vacancies

Join with us in praying for students on Student Sunday, 17 February 2019. The toolkit is now available to download from Student_Sunday

Help us celebrate 130 years of SCM’s life changing work with students by signing up to our 130 Challenge and commiting to raise £130.130_Challenge

In an interview with the newspaper St Galler Tagblatt on 5 December the Abbot of Einsiedeln, Urban Federer, 50, has called for a more differentiated view of homosexuality than that put forward by Pope Francis.

The abbot said that, as a teacher, he was aware of the great pressure young people were under to define themselves sexually nowadays but this overtaxed many of them.

As the tenth-century Benedictine Abbey of Einsiedeln is a territorial abbey, the abbot is the equivalent of a bishop and only responsible directly to the Pope.

Earlier this year the progressive element of Swiss German-speaking Catholics, angry at the nomination of a conservative as papal nuncio to Bern, issued an open letter to the nuncio. The canon and co-dean of Bern, Fr. Christian Schaller, said he hoped that Archbishop Thomas Gullickson would show enough “sensitivity in order to perceive the realities of the Church in Switzerland”

Welcome to the Agora Marketplace. The Greeks called it the “agora” (Ἀγορά), a gathering place where merchants kept their shops and sold their wares. Agora are coming close to having 2000 partners and want a way to feature the “wares” of their partners.

Heidi Schlumpf , writing in the NCR, describes an address by Richard Rohr to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Thomas Merton.

Unbelievable: Why neither the ancient creeds nor the Reformation can produce a living faith today

John Shelby Spong

Spong writes in the introduction that this was written in the twilight years of his life, indeed he estimates that some of his best books have been written in these years.

Whilst one might not want to study the fulsome arguments in those books, reading and discussing “Unbelievable” can be sufficient to underpin the notion that the dysfunctionality / dissonance of 1st and 16th

century-based Christianity really is unbelievable now.