BUGB e-news sweep has this link to an article on Biblical literalism, or maybe more accurately Bilbiolatry.  Worth a quick look see.

Various Baptist bloggers refer to the publication of a collection of essays honouring Brian Haymes (here, here, and here) it sounds a fascinating collection.  And of course I can add in my usual annoying way "I've preached in the church where the photo was taken."  I look forward to reading this at some future date - when my brain cells are working properly!

One of the things that has taken me by surprise since my surgery is how utterly rubbish my concentration has been.  Trying to read anything longer than a page or so or to take in a TV porogramme over 30 minutes long is a disaster, so I have a big pile of books and DVDs waiting for me to recover the wherewithall to appreciate their loan.

I was also lent two jigsaws and the one I'm working on seems to be doing the work of rebuilding my ability to focus and concentrate (phew!  I didn't want to be dozy and distracted for the rest of my life).  I find I can sit, backache notwithstanding, for a couple of hours at a time and work at a section of the picture.  Maybe a 1000 piece puzzle is a bit adventurous for the first one in 40 years, but I'm getting there!

After about 12 hours I've got this far...

I just discovered, via PAYG, that today is the Feast of the Chair of St Peter.  Wondering just what on earth this was, I resorted to that fount of all all dodgy information, Wikepedia, which assures me that there are relics venerated as chairs (cathedra) upon which the Apostle Peter sat.  It also tells me that by synecdoche (no I didn't know what it meant either) it becomes essentially a celebration of the papal office.  Not a feast a good dissenting Bappy is going to mark!  But it did put me in mind of another possibility, born of my expereince as a member of a House Group in the late 1990s. 

Our hosts had two settees.  The one on which I sat became known as the 'silly settee' because we would make flippant remarks (I recall us all saying 'yeah, right' when an elderly King David needed a beautiful young virgin simply to keep him warm at night; 1 Kings 1:1-2 (v 4 assures us of his chastity, so clearly ancient readers thought likewise!)), we would see the funny side of either the passage or the questions in the leader's 'Big Book of Questions' (it was called something like 'Search Ye the Scriptures' and consisted of loads of questions on every book of the Bible - and no answers!), and sometimes we would push the envelope on topics like predestination or religiously sanctioned genocide.  The 'Silly Settee' was an important part of my growth in disicpleship and a place I recall fondly for those who shared it and the fun we had in the studies.

So I hereby declare today the 'Celebration of the Sofa of Silliness' a liturgical commemoration of the role of group discussion in the ongoing formation of disicples of Christ.