Now Also on Ko-Fi!

As regular readers will no doubt be aware, I invite those who wish to support this blog to subscribe to my Patreon. I’m gratified by the support that some of you have given – it lets me know that people value what I’m writing, as of course do comments, shares and so on. You can be sure that I also look at my page views and see when a post is popular, which usually means that people have shared it more widely, which is great.

Financial support is not more important to me than that sort of moral support, but is, obviously, different. It means I can spend more time on the blog, and it can mean that my financial situation is a little less precarious, all my sources of income being variable and not entirely within my control. So when you support me and my blog financially, you make a practical difference to my life, as well as encouraging me to write more.

Happy Christmas!

So, it is Christmas Day (in most of the world), and in case you've just browsed here for some light reading that fits the season, I've collected up links to my posts, both deliberate writing and written ministry, that relate to this festive season.

In A Quaker Christmas, I look at the Quaker testimony concerning times and seasons, how liberal Quakers do approach the holiday (in my experience), and a look at how we could retool the testimony to fit in with modern life and practice, and how the Religious Society of Friends is now constituted and situated.

In A Christmas Prayer, I share written ministry concerning this time of year. This one actually originally came to me during a Meeting for Worship, when I attended the mid-week afternoon MfW at my local Meeting.

In Modern Christmas and Equality, I look at some of the issues that came up in that ministry, and generally how the way Christmas is now done (at least in the English-speaking parts of the global economic north) interacts with ideas of equality.

In Everyone Can Draw Meaning From Christmas, I put the universalist, new-light-from-wherever-it-may-come, every-religion-has-something-to-teach treatment on Christmas itself, a look at what meaning the story of Christmas can have, spiritually, for those of any faith.

I also wish all of you a fond "Happy Christmas", or good wishes whatever celebration you may be partaking in at this time of year (it's a bit late to wish people a good Yule or Chanukah, but you get the idea). Thank you to all who've commented, here or elsewhere, and given that vital support to anyone writing - the knowledge that people are reading, and thinking & discussing. An especial thanks to those who've shown their appreciation, support and confidence by backing my Patreon. Expect to hear more from me before the New Year!

Your Ideas Wanted for New Post Series

As those who have signed up to my Patreon will be aware, I've been working for a little while on a longer piece, that will be published as a series of posts, looking at different approaches to the Divine and to Quaker business method. This builds on the ideas I presented at Woodbrooke earlier this year, looking at discernment in the context of a religious society that enjoys a wide diversity of beliefs.

In that presentation, I talked about the idea of conceptions of the Divine, along similar lines to those in my post on the subject of such conceptions (which rather drew on the work I did for the Woodbrooke presentation), talked about how they relate to different conceptions of what is going on in a Quaker business meeting, and laid out the traditional (theistic) view of business. I then followed this up with my own non-theist conception, and I was very gratified to see that people could largely accept that, while they could not be considered equivalent, not “the same thing in different terms”, they were compatible.

Openings Is Now On Patreon

You may have noticed, in recent weeks, a survey on the sidebar of this blog, asking if you might support a Patreon for this blog, along with my recent post about money. Well, I appreciate those who submitted an answer to that very simple question, and I've decided to move ahead with the idea. I do so in a spirit of living adventurously, not knowing what it might bring – but certain that it won't work if I don't do it, so I may as well do it.