Two quite significant things have happened to me in the last two weeks. The first was that I finished this painting. Its difficult to be completely happy with any portrait, there is always something more that can be done. But I feel I have turned a corner and, finally, I’ve found a style that makes sense.

The second thing is that I spent a long weekend in Oxford studying Christian Apologetics (which is just a fancy way of saying modern theology) and I came away with a new book by Alister McGrath – ‘Inventing the Universe’. Its rather a grand title and I’m not sure that the book entirely lives up to its promise. But it had some really interesting thoughts about the soul. He says:

Modern neuroscience has no place for the idea of a ‘soul’, understood as some immaterial part of the body. Neither does the Christian Bible. The ‘soul-body’ dualism lives on in popular culture, both secular and Christian. Yet the best view – found in both contemporary neuroscience and Christian Theology – is to think of humanity as a physical unity: a single body, not a ‘body and soul’

I had always suspected that this was the case and I quite like the idea that the soul may have gone missing. It makes a lot more sense of the world we actually live in.