Meander river greece3/2/2024 ![]() The politics of the Kingdom of God are still shaped by one meandering Galilean preacher who ranged freely across Palestine two thousand years ago. In mathematics a meander can be a pattern of self-avoiding curves which intersect across line or route a number of times, such as a road traversing a river through a number of bridges. In geography, meanders are sinuous curves, bends, loops, turns, or windings in the channel of a river or stream. In later English meander came to mean turning around in a narrow passageway, or finding one’s way through a labyrinth. ![]() To meander is to follow some winding course, be it a path, road or a river. A meandering river will find its path, despite the obstructions encountered. Of wandering and pilgrimage, and altering the most obvious direct route in the face of seemingly significant impediments. The term, ever since, has had associations with flow, fluctuation and formation. Later Greek thought converted the name of this river to a common noun. The ancient Greeks took the term meander from the Meander River (located in present-day Turkey), with its remarkable convolutions. The last 150 years has seen the churches slowly pushed to the peripheries of public debate still visible and with a voice, but of diminishing social, moral and spiritual importance. Churches have been usurped from occupying central space in the public square, gravitating and navigating towards more marginal enclaves. The challenges facing churches and Christian faith are different today, but of no lesser proportion. Parker’s edited volume was in the finest tradition of open pedagogy and intellectual dialogue: a place to begin conversations that would need to continue in the decades to come. It appeared just four months after Charles Darwin‘s On the Origin of Species. Parker’s volume took a reasonable, radical broad-minded approach to the challenges faced by Christianity in the wake of developments in science, advances in scriptural interpretation, and seismic sea-changes in culture, politics and society. It takes its name from an 1860 volume Essays and Reviews edited by John William Parker.
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