Author Archives: JBowe

Orthodox Crossing: Me and My A.I.

Artificial Intelligence is a bit of a topic these days. Questions like, what is that? How does that work? Am I out of a job now? Is this from Satan? I can’t answer any of the above, but I have

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Orthodox Crossing: First Dibs Michael!

Picking things is great. That sense of personal agency amongst the sweet wafting aroma of options. It could be just grazing your eyes down the biscuit aisle of your local vendor or something altogether more romantic like when I used

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Orthodox Crossing: A Case of Moving Home

I moved house a fair amount as a child. Being the youngest of four brothers, I didn’t get the choice of which new bedroom was going to be mine, but I did like tearing about the space and getting a

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Orthodox Crossing: Labours of…

My Dad can build anything, but if you left him to it without direction, he’d build the sweetest shed or greenhouse that you ever saw. No working plans to go by, just God-given instinct and experience. An intimidating ability to

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Orthodox Crossing: Intermission

I do enjoy an intermission. When I used to work for Snape Maltings Concert Hall I could get to be part of loads of them. Every other night during festival times. It was a chance for me to roll a

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Orthodox Crossing: Voices.

We all hear voices, don’t we, and that’s just inevitable given the amount of us that are around and how we all rely on one another to go down the shops or operate a sack barrow. There are other examples

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Orthodox Crossing: Saint Paul’s Theological Autobahn

I like a good paragraph. That sense that a thought or action has been properly rinsed through, even at the expense of being concise. I think that so long as it’s not going over the same ground over and again,

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Orthodox Crossing: Stuff

Stuff is full of thin spaces. When Max Plank and Niels Bohr got their fingers mucky with all the stuff which would become quantum physics, they had to somehow put their findings into words, and at a time when Chat

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Orthodox Crossing: Where’s my Bear?

In a recent episode of badly curated thoughts, I wrote in broad and unfocussed terms about the church and the internet. It is a prickly pear of topic and I did my best to confront it while avoiding it. Well,

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Orthodox Crossing: Turned On, Tuned In, Without a Doubt

Back when I was doing a degree, one of my tutors would give me a few of the scholastic media study journals that did the rounds twenty years ago. I’d flick through them and try to have a good question

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Orthodox Crossing: Inner Doors, Outer Rooms

A sense of place. Everywhere has it, but we are always looking for it and hope to sense it the moment we come upon it. I did when I first started working as a stagehand for Aldeburgh Music at Snape

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Orthodox Crossing: Reliquary and Me

I am not a big one for digging, generally, but then I garden for what I earn so I am digging for a lot of the time. And when I am, I find things; dirt, bits of old pottery, a

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Orthodox Crossing: What Just Happened?

Time, that old constant that always seems to be shifting depending on your relationship to it at that moment. Activities can transcend it, and so can place and space. In another life ago, I worked as a stagehand for a

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Orthodox Crossing: Electric Summer

And so it becomes high summer; the sun reaches out with long fingers and all the gardens that I work on respond in song, growing in volume until they fill border space and the whole ensemble almost breaks under itself

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Orthodox Crossing: An Already Nostalgia

‘I used to do the bins around here,’ I said to my 11 year old daughter as we made a steady approach towards the serpentine village of Pen-y-Bont-Fawr; a passing on our way to St Melangell’s Church. My daughter took

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Orthodox Crossing: David and the Theophanic Briefcase

Sometimes, perhaps often, I forget to thank David for his leading the choir and the infectious sight of him dinging a tuning fork into his head to find that sympathy of tone, which in the time it takes grace to

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Orthodox Crossing: Crowns and Clippings

Symbolic gestures are always going off all over the place, in parallel to ourselves, like the unseen realm itself. My right hand and entire arm was most certainly animated when I ripped the starter cord off of a lawn mower

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Orthodox Crossing: A Christian Wisp…

On Sunday the 23rd of April Presvytera Catherine retired from thirty-seven years of devotion to our church and the wide reach of its parish. To be precise, that is only five years less than I have been alive, so when

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Orthodox Crossing: Young Joseph

During the passing of the ambient sun of Lazarus Saturday, the lovingly be-haired Young Joseph was baptised through our church into the ever-loving mystery of Christ’s salvation. Joseph Llewellyn-Jones had been attending church and catechumen classes from before my family

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