The reflecting theologian

The stuff that I want to say in this post is partly sparked by this post: https://pastorpeterko.wordpress.com/2012/11/10/why-i-wont-date-you-an-imaginary-letter-to-a-non-christian/. I thought, as I reflect upon some relationship lessons that I have been through over the past two years, it may be good to list it out somehow. As some of you may notice, some of these points are probably reflected somewhere else in this blog. 1. You simply have to discriminate One of the pet peeves when people of different faiths get together is that you shouldn't be exclusive in your dating and narrow your choices so much to only those in your faith. I must say that this is really a convenient excuse for people to get together, as the argument self-destruct upon closer scrutiny. Unless you are effectively a bisexual who have no preference, you already excluded half the world's population the moment you set out to look for a relationship/life partner. A man will naturally look for another woman...

As students in Singapore, we are familiar with this thing called the "10-year series" which is really a series of past-year examination papers from the GCE O and A'level. The assumption is that the questions do not vary too much and hence it is possible to practice from these past papers and gain a familiarity of the kind of questions that will come out in our final papers. In a society that focuses much on grades (where a bad result in PSLE condemns you to a hell that even the Devil shutters), the mastery of the 10-years series means a difference between a fail (which is B) and a pass (which is A+++, in order to get distinction, one must obtain 200% of the score as a sign of one's godlikeness in the GCE). I am of course exaggerating here. But this is to spring off to another issue that I am concerned about. For many years in my walk in the church, I have heard the same 10-year series label being applied to Christian answers to difficult situations. This refers to s...

While I was walking to office this morning, I was reminded of a story that was written by G.K Chesterton, which I mentioned in this blog some time back. This is the story in full, as told in his book "Orthodoxy": “I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas. I always find, however, that I am either too busy or too lazy to write this fine work, so I may as well give it away for the purposes of philosophical illustration. There will probably be a general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool. I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool. But if you imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you...

This post was inspired by another article from here: http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god/problem-church-hopping. The article addresses an issue that is more prevalent in the American context: church hopping. Church hopping could be more prevalent due to the number of churches there and also because people are more mobile and move all over the place for their work and studies. But more importantly, one has to consider the consumeristic culture of the American society. The consumer market in USA is huge, really huge and every year, millions and billions of dollars are spent on consumer goods. This is evident by the success of numerous online purchase websites such as Amazon.com, Wayfair, Walmart etc. It reflects the consumer culture in the country and this consumer culture is in turn being reflected in how people tend to hop around the churches. This made me think about Singapore as well. As a heavily westernised country, I do think that the landscape is not much different, thoug...