Coffee Theology

It's that magical time of year again - that one night when my small neighbours knock on my door asking for sweeties.  This year, I'm properly prepared: I have two pumpkins (I wanted five, but decided to be thrifty), a big tub of sweets and a tube of 100 glow sticks.  The sweets are my concession to popular demand; the glow sticks are an attempt to represent light in darkness (a symbolism which will doubtless be lost on the kids).  I'm seeing the pumpkin as my main opportunity to communicate something of my Christian faith to my neighbours. One year, while I was at theological college, Halloween fell on a Sunday.  The new housing estate church I was assigned to met in a church hall on Sunday afternoons and many of the congregation were unaccompanied children.  I googled 'Christian pumpkin carvings' and guess what - there are a lot of ideas out there, America being a country which is big on Halloween and big on Christianity too.  I decided to carve a simple fish and c

I got hooked on the five-part BBC drama Doctor Foster within minutes.  It's beautifully shot and acted; Suranne Jones is mesmerising as GP Gemma Foster, who discovers that her husband of 14 years has been cheating on her.  With a 23-year-old.  For two years.  It's a very simple story which in many ways is banal, but the quality of the acting, and especially the central character, sets it apart. On Wednesday the final episode aired and I found myself indulging all my least sophisticated knee-jerk emotional reactions, shouting very rude things at all the various characters who have hurt Gemma: her husband, Simon, who has cheated, lied, and shows no remorse when he is found out; Simon's girlfriend, Kate, whose disgust for Gemma makes her easy to hate; Gemma's so-called friends who had known about the affair for months and even socialised with the adulterous pair, saying nothing to Gemma.   It is only in the final episode that Gemma lets on that she knows about Simon's