Barry Cundill

One of our Hull congregation, Barry Cundill, is an author with a special interest in Charles Dickens, and was telling me on Sunday about his ancestor, a Unitarian minister of the north Kent area who went in a trinitarian direction and was physically manhandled out of his church including the use of the police. He ended up in schoolteaching in Grimsby and Barry lives over the river in East Yorkshire. I will be reading a book about this shortly. I have one myself on a Newcastle Unitarian minister. Barry responded to my service with the "inconvenient truth" [his words] about Jesus when it comes to animal rights stances (I'm struggling with the idea of Jesus as an icon of compassion for animals), and joked that historically in The LIfe of Brian they used Latin. I said they did in the horror film directed by Mel Gibson, but it still remains that Greek (Koine) was the lingua franca and as well as its use to speak to Gentiles, Jews at distances from each other used it as a common language to speak to each other when they came together. It was Barry who thought I have become more comprehensible than I used to be when taking a service.