In Depth:  John Stevens

John Stevens

Last month a gold pocket watch worn by John Jacob Astor, the richest passenger on the Titanic, was sold for £1.2m at auction.

The watch was not recovered from the wreck but had been found when his body was recovered from the sea. Rather like ‘My Grandfather’s Clock’, it had stopped at 2.20pm when the ship slipped into the freezing waters of the Atlantic.

John Stevens

As we start 2024 the nation is gripped by the BBC series The Traitors, which has returned after proving a massive hit last year.

In this sophisticated version of Wink Murder, 22 contestants battle to survive to win a cash prize. They are divided into ‘traitors’ and ‘faithfuls’, with the traitors aiming to murder the faithfuls one by one, and the faithfuls seeking to identify and banish the traitors.

John Stevens

At the start of September, just as parents were preparing for their children to return to school, more than a hundred schools were closed due to the risks posed by RAAC concrete.

This cheap and lightweight building material was widely used from the 1950s to the 1990s, but becomes prone to crumble and collapse after about 30 years.

John Stevens

In recent weeks there has been a plethora of concern about the dangers of AI. One is the fear that AI will create new religions.

Israeli public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari recently told a conference in Switzerland: ‘In the future we might see the first cults and religions in history whose revered texts were written by a non-human intelligence. Of course, religions throughout history claimed that their holy books were written by unknown human intelligence. This was never true before. This could become true very, very quickly, with far-reaching consequences.’

John Stevens

Few issues have provoked more controversy in contemporary culture than the transgender ideology which asserts that individuals can define their sex for themselves irrespective of their biology.

Progressive society has largely adopted and accommodated this transgender ideology, and treated those who reject it as reactionary or oppressive. Feminists, such as Germaine Greer, who have opposed transgenderism have been cancelled and vilified.

John Stevens

How do you gain redemption and forgiveness in our graceless society?

The world’s answer is that redemption and forgiveness must be earned by works. This has always been the way of religion but is it also the way of our secular culture.

John Stevens

A couple of weeks ago I had a great evening seeing a tribute band at the De Montfort Hall in Leicester. I had been given tickets as a birthday present by a friend. Elio Pace and his band played the ‘Billy Joel Songbook’. It took me back 40 years!

I had previously been suspicious about the idea of a tribute band, fearing it might be something like a poor karaoke performance. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The quality was outstanding, and about as close as possible to attending a genuine Billy Joel concert.

John Stevens

On 19 July I was staying just ten miles away from Conningsby in Lincolnshire when the temperature reached 40.3C, the hottest ever recorded in the UK.

As I write, temperatures are no longer scorching, but is still warm and we face the prospect of a drought. The winter months seem far off, but we know it won’t be long before the nights draw in and we need to turn the heating on. However, many are already living in fear of that day because of impending increases in the energy price cap.

John Stevens

Death is the one of the last taboos in contemporary British society. Medical advances over the past 200 years have all but ended infant mortality and life expectancy is now more than 81 years. As a result, we are less familiar with death, which is confined to medicalised environments. We tend not to talk about it.

Our reasonable expectation that most people will live to a ripe old age means that we are even more shocked when younger people die.

John Stevens

A recent research project by the University of Essex has claimed to have identified the most boring jobs and hobbies in the world.

The five most boring jobs are: Data Analysis, Accounting, Insurance, Cleaning and Banking. The five most boring hobbies are: Sleeping, Religion, Watching Television, Observing Animals and Maths.

John Stevens

In January, George Linnane joined the South and Mid Wales Cave Rescue Team. He volunteered after he had spent 54 hours trapped in a cave in the Brecon Beacons and was rescued by 300 volunteers. He joined the team ‘so I can help the next poor soul who finds themselves in this situation’.

As we approach the A Passion for Life Mission, and our churches begin to return to normal ministry after Covid, this story is a reminder of the essence of evangelism.

John Stevens

As I write, the government has just announced the reintroduction of limited Covid rules requiring the wearing of face-coverings in shops and on public transport in England to protect against the Omicron variant.

We pray that these measures will prove temporary, and that the new variant will not undermine the strategy that has thus far enabled an end of lockdown.

John Stevens

In his recent magisterial and book, The Rise Triumph of the Modern Self, Carl Trueman makes the point that in the absence of an agreed ‘sacred order’ ethics become simply a matter of taste. This explains the difficulties evangelical Christians face understanding and responding to the changed attitudes of contemporary society, for example in respect of human sexuality or assisted suicide.

The supremacy of ‘taste’ in contemporary ethics was made evident to me last month when there was extensive coverage of the annual dolphin hunt in the Faroe Islands. Some 1,400 dolphins were corralled into a bay and then speared to death. My initial reaction was one of distaste. I like dolphins, know that they are sentient and intelligent creatures, and have a deep-rooted opposition to whaling as a result of the Save the Whale campaigns of my childhood. The reports led to strong calls for this annual hunt to be banned.

John Stevens

This summer has seen the start of a new cricket competition, The Hundred. This has been developed to make cricket more accessible.

Each side faces 100 balls, bowled in lots of t e n balls rather than six- ball overs. The shorter games produce greater excitement, are more attractive to families and provide entertaining television. Needless to say, traditionalists are outraged. Simon Heffer has written that it is a ‘bastardisation of a once-great game.’ Many have repeated the obvious cliché that The Hundred is ‘just not cricket’.

John Stevens

When the Equalities Act was passed more than a decade ago, it seemed to limit the freedoms that Christians had long taken for granted.

It became unlawful to discriminate against others on grounds of religion or sexual orientation with the result that, for example, a Christian-owned hotel could no longer refuse a room to a same-sex couple. Similarly, a Christian could not serve as a magistrate and take the view that children were always better adopted by a heterosexual couple. New laws against hate speech meant Christians were more fearful of preaching the gospel in case they offended others; and they faced the possibility of disciplinary action in the workplace if they challenged transgender ideology. These changes reflected the fact that we live in a secular, post-Christian context. Christian views and values are no longer widely shared across society and deemed worthy of privileged status. Instead, government has to balance the interests of competing opinions in a multicultural society.

John Stevens

Recently my family watched the excellent Escape from film Pretoria, set in apartheid South Africa. It made me think, if I had been a white South African in the 1970s would I have supported or opposed apartheid?

I similarly wonder, if I had been a German living in the Weimar Republic in the early 1930s, would I have supported the rise of Hitler to power? Or, if I were George Whitefield or Jonathan Edwards, would I have owned slaves? In my head, I like to think I would have done what was morally right. However, the weakness of my fallen flesh makes me all too aware that I probably would have been just as culturally blind as many who lived at the time.