New Puritan Blog

Richard Snoddy (pictured here with Tim at a recent conference; left), who is working on a doctorate down at Oxford, researching the theology of puritan James Ussher, began a new blog this past week, called diatheke.

Richard is a self-confessed Conventicle reader, but don't hold that against him. From the looks of things, his posts will be a good deal more substantive than ours. Here are titles to the first few:

A Blog is Born ...

Thoughts from Ussher on the Cross

When the church looks like the world ...

'Sexing' up the Puritans

The 'Papist Way'

Here's a provocative excerpt from the last one:

That’s one of the things I have appreciated about living in Oxford for the last 10 years or so - a sense of connectedness with the past, however complicated and messy that past was at times. In the space of a few minutes you can pass the forbidding walls of Balliol College where John Wyclif preached against the power of the papacy, the cross marking the spot where Latimer, Ridley, and later Cranmer were burned for their belief in the once-for-all-time sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice, and the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin where John Henry Newman tried to seduce the Church of England back into error (the extent to which he succeeded we can talk about another time). On a lighter note there is the Inklings’ favourite pub, The Eagle and Child. C.S. Lewis spent a lot of time there and is said to have kept a pair of slippers behind the bar. I will have to blog some Oxford things for the benefit of those readers not fortunate enough to live in this fine city.

Anyway, I saw the sign and thought I’d take a photo. I suspect that had John Bunyan been with me, he would have enjoyed pointing out the fact that it was overgrown with thorns…

Nice work, Richard! Best wishes to you.