He was the last prophet faithful to God in a kingdom with a weak and indecisive king influenced by the cunning queen Jezebel. The Pagan religion introduced by the queen had spread widely; the people of Israel had left the faith of their fathers. Elijah the prophet offered a kind of competition between himself and the pagan priests. The sacrifice…

I had some brilliant ideas for this weekend’s sermon. But when yesterday at six in the morning my alarm clock automatically turned on the radio I was petrified by the news from Norway. Since the attack on New York in 2001 somehow we’ve got used to news about bombings. In some ways all those bomb attacks were dehumanised because of…

Some time ago the ‘voicemail hacking’ scandal started as the rather seemingly bizarre allegations from various celebrities. Revelations about so-called super-injunction – a legal way of covering up private matters of well-off people – didn’t help to take the scandal seriously, but rather as the peculiar moaning of some famous individuals. Everything changed with the news about hacking the phone…

When I was a late teenager (not dead, just about eighteen) I discovered a fascinating book written by J. R. R. Tolkien ‘The Lord of the Rings’, perfectly translated into Polish. Since then I’ve read it several times – but for all those years I’ve had an ambition to read it as it had been written – in English. I…

Last Tuesday my friends, a married couple, with their children came to visit me. Despite the weather I’ve been trying to show them some interesting places in this part of Scotland and they’ve been very happy to see the hidden college in Scalan; they were impressed by the Ladder Hills (although the hills were mostly covered by mist); they’ve enjoyed…