Blog

'Practicing The Way Of Jesus - life together in the Kingdom of Love' is one of those hugely challenging books I want to put down - and can't! The writer Mark Scandrette outlines in a compelling way what for him is the central expression of the Christian faith. It's not about words but about action. Let me just quote the first two sentences of the book: "A number of years ago I invited a group of friends into an audacious experiment in which each of us would sell or give away half of our possessions and donate the profits to global poverty relief.

The film 'Of Gods And Men' is the most compelling and thought provoking I have seen for a long time. It tells the story of eight French Christian monks who live harmoniously with the wider Muslim community in a monastery perched in the mountains of North Africa in the 1990s. When a crew of foreign workers is massacred by an Islamic fundamentalist group, fear sweeps though the region. The army offers them protection, but the monks refuse. Should they leave?

This is going to be an occasional blog (written by me, Malcolm!) focusing on different books, films, CDs, and anything else creative which I have found stimulating. The offerings may not always be specifically Christian, but they will have proved thought provoking and, I believe, worth a look (or listen).

The King of Instruments in a Small Town

Pipe organs date from the 3rd century BC and were found in Ancient Greece, and whereas it is air that makes the sound today, it was water in the beginning (called the hydraulis) that created the air pressure to make the pipes sound, but by the 6th or 7th century, the air pressure was created by bellows.