‘Living With the Truth’ is Jim Murdoch’s first published novel. There are several more to follow shortly.I think it is a ‘Good, old-fashioned, read’.That is quite different to an ‘Old-fashioned good read’, which it also just happens to be.You’re with me so far, right?The story is effectively a two-hander. Firstly we meet Jonathan Payne. He’s a second-hand bookshop owner who leads an understated, solitary existence. One ordinary day, he is visited by ‘Truth’, no less.Truth quickly becomes his companion, his sidekick and his erstwhile mentor. The narrative follows Jonathan’s exploits with his new associate as he gradually discovers what a frustrating, embarrassing yet ultimately revealing companion the truth can be.Truth accompanies Jonathan to his work, to the... Similar posts

Why does God let bad things happen?A perfectly natural question that is asked by all children at some stage or another when they begin to learn about religion. If God has the power to stop bad things from happening (AIDS, the cyclone in Myanmar, the earthquake in China) why doesn't he? This is a natural curiosity that we should all have, and when thought about in detail, can be quite corrosive to the concept of "faith". Religion, for the most part, makes attempts to quell this challenge with a set of answers, often provided to the child by an uncomfortable teacher or perplexed parent, who isn't too sure if their answer is provable or 100% true, but I'm sure feels it's in the child's best interest not to let their natural curiosity run wild with the subject. It could be considered that... Similar posts

Thoughts on Evil 2 These thoughts in today’s post are a direct continuation of those of yesterday. As a 21 year old student, doing a thesis on The Mystery 0f Evil as opposed to the title The Problem of Evil, an important distinction which I explained in the previous instalment, I was faced, along with my fellow students, with the tragedy of the suicide of one of our classmates called Pauline. We as students went through a searing existential trauma. Why wouldn’t we? After all we were only human weren’t we? And added to that we were studying questions of ultimate meaning according to our philosophy, theology and scripture professors. Then to get this stark denial of life and its so-called meaningfulness right in the midst of our “intellectual studies” brought even the... Similar posts

No Easy Answers to Difficult QuestionsIf you are a person interested in easy answers, then these pages are not for you.  I remember when I was a young teacher, very green about the gills and all of 22 years of age, a fellow teacher challenging me with the question “what is it all about?”  It was only years later, when Ger Smith had died at the young age of some 30 years, that I learned that he had suffered from a congenital heart disease from birth and that his allotted span on this earth was limited.  Hence the question, and that question did stop me in my gallop as it were.  Such questions are big questions and there are no easy answers.I have always been captivated by the big questions not merely as an intellectual pursuit but also as an... Similar posts