Goodbye, Old Stick

Posted on 19/05/2025 by Jon Garvey

The day before yesterday I lost Uncle Ralph’s stick, whilst we were on holiday in Cornwall. A small, but significant, bereavement for me. Either I left it behind after the excitement of seeing a chough on the coast-path near Porthleven, or less plausibly someone nicked it from the open back of the car outside where we were staying. Either way, it’s drawn a sharp line under an eighty five year old story, and Uncle Ralph, aka Ralph Hopper, deserves to have his unsung death in World War 2 told, I think. As there is no longer an artifact to hang the tale on, I guess the web will have to do.

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Southport protests – silenced truth and spouted lies

Posted on 10/05/2025 by Jon Garvey

The new report from the police, or specifically His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services, has created a stir on the Internet, though not so far in the mainstream media, by concluding that there is not (and never was) any evidence of the involvement of Far-Right groups in the protests after the Southport massacre, and that most of the disorder involved angry locals, and not mindless thugs traveling in on buses and trains.

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Posted in Politics and sociology | Leave a comment

More on Christian music and church music

Posted on 07/05/2025 by Jon Garvey

Thanks to those wonderful YouTube chaps, I’ve just discovered the fascinating and surprisingly contemporary-sounding music of Pérotin, the thirteenth century composer of Notre Dame, Paris, who was the first to write choral music for four parts, eight centuries ago. I’m tempted to say I’ve developed Pérotinitis, as it’s such good stuff.

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Is “moderate Charismatic” an oxymoron?

Posted on 05/05/2025 by Jon Garvey

The reason for posing this question is that whilst the excesses of the “Hypercharismatic” megachurches are plain to see, and have been so for many years, they still seem remarkably attractive to the undoubtedly sane and generally sound Charismatics in most British Evangelical churches.

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Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | 1 Comment

The use and abuse of music

Posted on 26/04/2025 by Jon Garvey

It has been truly said that modern revivals (of the Toronto Blessing sort, rather than the actual quiet revivals apparently going on in the UK or Iran) are not gospel revivals but music revivals. By that is meant that if you removed the loud and prolonged rock music from the proceedings, nothing would happen in the way of people falling on the floor, weeping, laughing hysterically and all the other features that convince people the Holy Spirit has turned up in force. I can well believe it.

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Hump author shakes the world of biology

Posted on 24/04/2025 by Jon Garvey

Not me, you understand! My friend Sy Garte, one of the original writers here, who has moved on to various platforms of his own, is the lead author of a significant new paper. I confess upfront that I became aware it of through the ID Discovery Institute’s Evolution News and Views rather than Sy himself. His co-authors are Perry Marshall, whose 2015 Evolution 2.0 sought to bridge the gap between conventional evolutionary theory and Intelligent Design, and Stuart Kaufmann, one of the leading systems biologists and an advocate of “natural” self-organisation. A philosophically diverse trio!

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Posted in Creation, Science, Theology, Theology of nature | Leave a comment

Societal revival

Posted on 22/04/2025 by Jon Garvey

My last blog picked up on the widespread talk of Christian revival in this country, and discussed how true revival is far broader than the usually-held idea, recalling the Great Awakening, of big meetings accompanied by spectacular spiritual and/or psychological phenomena. As was actually true in the eighteenth century too, the key thing was a general realisation that the current religion was failing, and a God-given hunger directed at biblical salvation in Jesus. The rest was contingent detail.

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Posted in History, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Theology | Leave a comment

Revival v. Revivalism

Posted on 18/04/2025 by Jon Garvey

In the past I’ve expressed scepticism about the whole concept of Christian “revival,” suggesting that this non-biblical word became fixed in the Evangelical mindset in a particular form through the atypical spiritual, sociological and psychological example of the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century. I wrote about this in Prophecy Today in 2003, in two articles which I later re-posted on The Hump, here and here.

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Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology | 1 Comment

Putting on the agony, putting on the Lifestyle Christianity

Posted on 13/04/2025 by Jon Garvey

Another week, and yet another miracle working apostle is exposed as a fraud and abuser. In this case, a bevy of YouTube clips tell me, it’s some dread-locked ex-addict called Todd White, who founded an outfit called Lifestyle Christianity but has now been exposed by his own people as living the lifestyle of Satan instead.

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Humanity – of one blood and polyphyletic?

Posted on 11/04/2025 by Jon Garvey

I’ve been revisiting the large Crossway Tome on Theistic Evolution of 2017, largely to see whether any of it affects me differently as my views on origins have developed since then. And partly to honour the memory of my good friend, the late Peter Loose, to whom the book is dedicated. The part that, when I first read it, seemed least convincing was the theological overview by Wayne Grudem (who did his PhD at Tyndale House, as a matter of recent interest).

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Posted in Adam, Creation, Science, Theology, Theology of nature | Leave a comment