Here goes...

In January 1530 a priest named Thomas Hitton was making his way to Dover to catch a ship to Antwerp. Walking through fields near Gravesend, a posse of men looking for a thief who had stolen some clothes from a hedge, stopped him & searched him. They found none of the stolen clothes on him, but they did find letters written to certain ‘evangelicals’ on the continent. Aware of a recent change of policy on ‘heretics’, he was handed over to the officers of Archbishop of Canterbury for interrogation. Hitton had recently visited William Tyndale and others in the Low Countries, and had returned to arrange distribution of forbidden books, including Tyndale’s new translation of the Pentateuch and the Psalter. Hitton was quickly interrogated, condemned, and burned alive at Maidstone on February 23rd 1530. Hitton was the first martyr of the English English Reformation, first of many to lose their lives on both sides of the debate over the future of the English church and nation, over the co...

My new book " The Prodigal Spirit: The Trinity, the Church and the Future of the World " has recently come out. I thought I'd offer a few snippets of the book on the blog. This is a section from chapter 1, looking at one of the main themes of the book, a contemplation of Charlie Mackesy's sculpture of the Prodigal Son, which imagine the image not just as a picture of the Prodigal Son being embraced by his Father, but also as a window into the Trinity.     If we let our imagination run with this way of looking at the sculpture, it depicts God the Father embracing God the Son. In particular it suggests the Father’s embrace of the Son who is on the borderline between life and death. In this sense, the sculpture is a kind of Pietà , though not with Mary his mother cradling the dead Jesus in her arms, but the Father embracing the Son after his sacrifice on the cross. Bringing back the picture to its setting in the Prodigal Son story, the words of the Father: “for this so...