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[The Bible] resituate modernity's prejudices within a wider context from which they were originally wrenched, showing them to be reductive heresies of a more complex biblical reality. So whereas modernity privileges an unchanging a-historicity, in the incarnation God enters history at a particular moment to gather a people to be with him not in a Greck eternity of unchanging timelessness, but in a biblical eternity of never-ending and ever-renewed intimacy and relational richness. Whereas modernity subordinates the particular to the universal, the Bible perfectly marries the universal "image of the invisible God" together with a particular first-century Palestinian Jewish man. Whereas modernity seeks the abstract over the material and finds itself painfully akimbo between the twin idols of materialism and immaterialism, in the same gesture the incarnate Christ validates material reality and prevents his followers from ever worshipping it. Finally, whereas modernity secks ...

It used to be summer when Christmas came round.  Underneath tall southern skies over sun scorched ground. With the backyard cricket, the barbies, the beach, and munching on mangoes to watch the Queen’s Speech. The slathering of sunscreen, the glorious glare And toasting the glow in the warm evening air. It used to be summer when I was young. A golden age in a land far flung. But there came a point, I crossed a divide, went up in the world and summer had died. December is dark now, the nights close in. So we huddle together as kith and as kin. It’s winter now when Christmas rolls round, We celebrate still though with different surrounds. We mull the wine and strike the matches, Light the fires, batten the hatches, Gather around the warming beam Of family love or a TV screen. So safe inside, no place to go, we toast marshmallows and let it snow. Our summer’s gone, if you’ve been around, you’ve felt the fall: life’s run aground. We’ve gone up in the world, seen summer die. So what’s o...