Posts Tagged: religion

  • Top left—@faithentwisle at Worcester Cathedral; bottom left @timentwisle at Tewkesbury Abbey; right is Worcester Cathedral.

    An English pilgrim

    The cathedral at Worcester My wife and I are in England to catch up with some family and are staying in Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire. We went to the nearby city of Worcester for a half day trip. A nice lunch and a visit to the cathedral were the agenda. I always feel like a pilgrim […]

  • My great- great-great-great-great grandfather, the Reverend Joseph EntwisleMy great- great-great-great-great grandfather, the Reverend Joseph Entwisle who was a yokefellow to John Wesley

    The true yokefellow

    Over the Christmas period I was re-reading my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’s biography—the Memoir of the Rev. Joseph Entwisle, Fifty-four Years a Wesleyan Minister. In this reading of the book I came across the wonderful word, yokefellow. When I researched the word, I found it resonated strongly with the book in a way not quite intended. The first […]

  • A tropical paradise (the Maldives)

    Paradise renamed

    And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; … And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. (Genesis […]

  • Mummies and sarcophagi in a museum in Denmark

    Mummies at the museum

    On our trip to London (in 2015) I took my children to visit the British Museum, one of my favourite places. My daughter who was studying ancient history at school wanted to visit the Egyptian rooms. So we headed to Rooms 62 and 63 dedicated to Egyptian death and afterlife to look at the mummies. […]

  • The Pais Metro sign saying Metropolitan—coloured by Madrigal

    Metropolitan words from the city

    My eleven year old son asked me (a few years ago) what metropolitan meant when we took the train into Sydney on the weekend. I knew that polis is the old Greek word for the people of a city or the city. However, I was unsure what metro was, so after I got home, I […]

  • Feasting at christmas

    Feasting and fasting

    Christian and other religions have commemorative days we know as festivals. A festival is a celebration or commemoration where participants rejoice and seek to find an elated state. Festivals are often celebrated by abundant eating and drinking. Therefore, festival days and feast days are the same thing. And, not surprisingly, the words feast and festival […]

  • Widdershins Childe Roland runs around the church

    The magic of widdershins

    In the ancient folklore of pagan Britain, to go widdershins (widershins or withershins) was, in a magical sense, to walk around an object against the sun. In the northern hemisphere to walk the opposite way to the movement of the sun, was to walk around an object counter-clockwise.

  • Avatar—Munneswaram Sharabha overpowering Narasimha Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) 

    From gods to bots

    Avatar, is an ancient Sanskrit word that describes the form a deity takes when descending to earth. The concept of the avatar has been picked up in the information age by Internet users to describe their online representations. The recently released film, Avatar, combines the concepts.

  • Pope Benedict's homilies

    Homily tedious or uplifting?

    The pilgrims have packed up and the pope has gone home. The World Youth Day 2008 celebrations have finished and Sydney returns to normal. I followed it all through the media, shared the noise from the late night partying of German Pilgrims billeted next door and visited the city while some of the events were […]