I'm Nathan Hobby, an Anabaptist Christian in Western Australia. This blog is a space for my theological reflections. My literary side has a different home - nathanhobby.wordpress.com.
In 1987 I was six and obsessed with archaeology. I created a kingdom in the front yard, burying clay mummies wrapped in cloth. I also wanted to find the present again in the future, and so I wrote the date in texta on pieces of paper and buried these. They did not last so well, […]
Lincoln covers the last period of Abraham Lincoln’s life as he attempts to pass an amendment through Congress abolishing slavery before a Civil War peace treaty makes such a prospect impossible. It is a riveting dilemma: peace vs the end of slavery. Daniel Day Lewis’s Lincoln is a complex messiah and, more than anything, a […]
It is a joy to discover someone who shares your quaint pleasures. I love to find ephemera in old books, a regular occurrence in my library. My theological librarian colleague Philip Harvey shares my interest. I sent him the passage in my new novel which touches on it, and I was chuffed that he quoted […]
I started listening to music again, properly, in the last year, and it makes me feel I got a piece of my soul back. I’m not musical, but songs mean a lot to me. Everyone’s musical, some people insist – usually kind musicians. That’s what she said at first; but then she heard me try […]
I had a reading drought in 2012. No clear favourite, no book which even blew me away – and yet I still discovered some interesting and worthy ones. I have been scared I’ve been losing my love of reading, but I cured that re-reading an old favourite, Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved, which I finished […]