This BBC Radio 4 programme - one of the 'Something Understood' series, is a delightful reflection on the value of written letters. If written letters have fallen out of your life in favour of texts or emails, it is especially worth listening to. "American broadcaster Julie Shapiro began a long correspondence with her great aunt Lill following the death of Lill's husband twenty-five years ago. It lasted until Lill's own death seven years later. These letters, read by Irma Kurtz, form the central part of a programme that examines the rituals, intimacies and sustaining qualities of old-fashioned letter-writing".  Link to the BBC site and programme.

"The meaning of Jesus Christ is God's concern for and presence in this world. The Christian faith is not about some god who is an abstract presence somewhere else, but about the living presence of God here and now, in this world, in exactly this world, as people know it, and see it, and touch it, and smell it, and live and work in it. That is why, incidentally, all the well meant talk of ‘making the gospel relevant’ to the life of the world is obscene: it secretly assumes that God is a stranger among us, who has to be introduced to us and to our anxieties and triumphs and issues and efforts. The meaning of Jesus Christ is that the Word of God is addressed to people, to all people, in the very events and relationships, any and every one of them which constitute our existence in this world. That is the theology of the incarnation." 

William Stringfellow