The Complex Christ | Signs of Emergence

Soliton | Dangerous Living

This weekend I'll be joining Jonny, Andrew, Si, Gareth, Saga, Pete and others in the Northern Ireland Soliton Sessions.

The theme is Dangerous Living. Looking forward to it.

More details here.

Technorati: soliton | Northern Ireland

Blog Frustration: Comments and Feeds

I've been using Typepad for a while now, and I think it has really moved on recently. One thing that's been really bugging me though is the lack of work that seems to have been put into comments.

Ok, so there's hardly a huge amount of comments traffic here yet, but the thing that annoys me about Typepad - given that this is meant to be a conversational medium - is that comments aren't readily integrated into these feeds. Nor is there any simple way to do this. Services like Co-comment are great... but not brilliantly serviceable yet. So while people can read posts and do lots of other stuff like add them to Del.icio.us or Digg them, they can't see or make comments unless they go to the site.

What stats I have show that I get a lot of people reading this via my Feedburner feed, which is great. Hello to you all! As Vista approaches and the rest of the world catches up with RSS (see Wired article), I think this is the way most people are going to handle content. The actual site will be visited less and less. So I've been trying to tweak the feed to make it as useful as possible to people. I've added various 'flares' and an option to receive the feed by email.

Anyway, having had a dig around, I found some good hacks on getting comments feeds [ here ] and have thus just published a separate feed for comments from this site [ here ]

How does anyone else get round this? And does anyone else think it's about time Typepad got over the bling thing and did some real work making comments work better?

Technorati: Comments | RSS | Typepad

Abstinent? Want to be Filmed About it? | Channel 4 Doc

A researcher from Channel 4 (in the UK) has contacted me (I know not why!) wondering if I could 'pass on any names of Christians in their 20s and 30s who are eloquent, attractive, hip, modern and can present arguments for abstinence in an appealing and convincing way.'

If only I knew people like that!

Perhaps, dear readers, you all are. Except Jonny. I wouldn't like to speculate on the abstinence, but young he ain't ;-)

Actually, joking aside, it looks like an interesting piece. The film-maker - a guy called Jamie Campbell - was an evangelical Christian abstainer until he was 23. He says his faith has now 'dissipated', but wants to explore the effect pre-marital sexual abstinence may have on long term relationships.

If you're up for it, email Anoop Pandhal on apandhal [at] elevenfilm {dot} com or call her in London on 7479 4218

Technorati: abstinence | Channel 4 | documentary | sex

Eno Interview | 'Evangelical Atheism and Secular Spiritual Places'

Excellent interview with Brian Eno on Front Row today.

Well worth a podcast or download. For one week only.

In reply to a question about his music being 'spiritual' he admits to be being an 'evangelical atheist' but that he is 'jealous of the spiritual experiences the religious have access to.' His recent work seeks to provide 'Secular Spiritual places.'

[Unlucky mate, you were on the Vaux playlist frequently ;-) ]

Technorati: Eno

Barack Obama: Is the US ready for a (Emergent) Black President?

The ever-interesting Prospect Magazine has a very good portrait of Barak Hussein Obama - the democrat whose political capital is ever-rising, and who is widely tipped to give Clinton a run for her money in the democratic nomination race.

What is interesting is how Obama appears to be a figure who would resonate with much of the 'Emergent' generation. Already a friend of Rick Warren (OK, we'll forgive him that ;-) he came to faith in a more round about way, and is not afraid to talk about it. He is also seen as able to 'move the boundaries of the race issue' as he is not the descendent of slaves.

Whether there will be much policy behind the excellent oratory remains to be seen. One critic described him as being 'the guy who walks into a restaurant with you saying there are 16 reasons to have the fish, and 19 to have the meat' - he won't have time to be so reflective if he puts his hat in the ring, let alone when he's President.

One quote amused me. He candidly talks about his childhood, and his dabbling with both coke and dope. When asked if he'd inhaled he pulled the rug out of the whole Clinton debacle and spin-doctoring by answering, 'Of course. That was the point.'

Perhaps the question is not whether the US is ready for a black President, but whether it's ready for such a candid one. With crises growing in Iraq, the threat of climate change and the inertia of the White House to respond, with the deficit spiralling towards the infinite, perhaps the US is still looking for the 'hero', as Gil Scott Heron so lyrically put it in his song 'B-Movie':

"The day of the man in the white hat or the man on the white horse - or the man who always came to save America at the last moment - someone always came to save America at the last moment - especially in “B” movies. And when America found itself having a hard time facing the future, they looked for people like John Wayne. But since John Wayne was no longer available, they settled for Ronald Reagan"

Snow Time! Sort of...

Hardly what Jordon has had to cope with in Canada, but hey, this is London, Elias is almost 3, and it's pretty much the first he's seen!

Technorati: London | Snow

Prophet and Loss | Emerging Islam?

I read a story today of this guy living in the Middle East in this really corrupt community; full of drunkards, cheating businesses, aggression, anti-social behaviour. He'd had a rough childhood himself - orphaned by 6, sent to live with his grandfather, who then died.

He'd ended up with his uncle, followed him into his business, and done pretty well. But he couldn't help feeling the society around him was in some ways rotten... Believing anything and nothing, and violently opposing anyone who thought different. He got so tired of it he'd take time out of his business and go and meditate and pray in a mountain retreat. Like the Desert Fathers had done. And it was there he felt God speak to him: he should just start living with a group of people honestly, justly and hospitably, with a rhythm of prayer. Simple. And radical. Totally in tradition with Abraham, and Jesus... worshipping the One God.

So he did. And the people where he lived hated him for it - persecuted him and this little group of people trying to live this simple, radical life. In the end, they left and moved to another place that welcomed them, and the community grew.

His name? Mohammed. PBUH.

What happened? Where has this simple, just, radical community got lost in the smoke-screen that has become international Islam and western Islamophobia? Am I wrong, or was Mohammed trying to return people to the simple faith of a Christianity gone very wrong? And if so, is there an 'emerging Islam' that we can connect to?

Technorati: Islam | Mohammed

On Form(ats) vs Content | The Medium is not (quite) the Message | Analogue and Digital Faith

I had a snoop around the sale items in a department store the other day. A guy in an ill-fitting suit bee-lined me and was desperate to show me the new hard-drive recorders they had in. Tempting, but the prices are crashing and the capacities are inflating, so we'll hold for a while yet.

One machine intrigued me: a VHS / DVD / Hard-drive player in one. We've clearly got format-change overload here. I'm only surprised it didn't have Blue-Ray and Laserdisc capability too. It played CDs too... if it had only had cassette and vinyl... ;-)

No doubt I'll switch soon. There are those who are always early adopters, but most of us continue to live 'within' a format while new ones become properly established...

Jordon Cooper Review

Big thank you to Jordon for a really great, comprehensive review of the book.

"I think I have read the book probably 20 times and I will soon retire the book as soon as Signs of Emergence comes out in North America for no other reason to give it's battered binding a must needed break. If I had a list of the ten most important books for the emerging church and for the church in general, I think this one would definitely be on it."

The cheque's in the post ;-)

Technorati: Signs of Emergence

MacOSaiX...

...is one of those great free bits of Mac software, and if you have a large iPhoto library (or just access to Google Images) you might want to download it and have a play. Very flexible. Very simple. Pick a target image, choose your source image folder(s) and let it get to work.

Technorati: Jesus | mac | MacOSaiX | Mosaic | photography

The Coffee Pot and The Webcam: Necessity as the Mother of Invention

As a footnote to a great article about the history of our love for gadgets, the story of how the webcam came to be is told in today's Independent:

"In 1991 the webcam is born as the computer-science department of Cambridge University installs a video camera showing the filter coffee machine in the library's Trojan Room, to avoid people the disappointment of making the journey only to find the pot empty. The webcam was finally switched off on 22 August 2001."

Perhaps with the rise of internet it will finally be noted that we have all become these nerds: using the extraordinary as a work-around for the banal ;-)

Art as Pork Belly | The Gift and the End of 'The Original'

Jonny has been posting some great stuff on The Gift. And tonight on Front Row - BBC Radio 4's flagship arts programme - there was a great piece about the inflated price of art.

One expert made it clear that the people buying Pollocks for $140 million, and Warhols for tens of millions have one thing in mind: selling them for even more in a few years.

This is the final tragedy of gift become play-thing of the market. Any spirit within the work is destroyed in the face of the business mind. It has become no more than another commodity - steel, pork bellies - to be sold on for profit.

There are those, thank God, who work to subvert this possibility of their work becoming dollar-focused by putting an end to the idea of 'the original'. And I think it is more here that Hyde's spirit of the gift remains.

Technorati: BBC | Front Row | Pollock | Warhol

'Stay in the City'?

Steven Johnson, who wrote the fabulous book 'Emergence' [USA | UK] which inspired so much of 'Signs...' has a really interesting post on his blog about Leaving Brooklyn.

It seems two friends of his were the victims of crime in the area and have decided enough is enough - they are moving out. Johnson's post is a plea for them to stay, backed up with some great thinking.

Connectedly, in preparation for the release of 'Signs...' in the US, I've been going through the UK version with the fine people at Baker, with them suggesting amendments and clarifications. One of the trickier points has been whether to tone down the deliberately city-focused UK text and generalize it to 'wherever you live.'

In many ways I've been doing my best to resist, partly because I feel that while humanity has urbanized massively - over half of the world live in cities now, whereas only 15% did 100 years ago - the church has failed to respond to what a city is really about. Its theology and ecclesiology have thus remained 'pastoral' - from the countryside - I am convinced that we need to rebalance that.

But for that to happen do Christians need to 'stay in the city'? If the grand sweep of our faith is the movement from a garden to a city then what impact ought that to have on how we live? If a city is simply 'where humanity and divinity gather to co-operate and co-create' then does it matter if this is in London or Chipping Sodbury, as long as we connect with people?

Technorati: Emergence | London | Crime | Steven Johnson | Urbanization

Gift Economics...

With Jonny posting some thoughts on The Gift, a book I've reflected on a great deal, I thought people might like links to a series of posts on gift economics I wrote last year, which links it with Veblen's 'Conspicuous Consumption':

Gift / Market / Plunder 1

Gift / Market / Plunder 2

Gift / Market / Plunder 3

Slow Down Week...

... is next week. Or whenever you feel like it, right?

Technorati: Adbusters | Slow Down

Love Thy Neighbour... Wirelessly and for free | iPhones and Social Networking II

Following the previous post about some of the deeper issues behind social networking, and with the much hyped release of Apple's iPhone, I was struck by this piece on Channel 4 news about free mobile calls on wireless. (It reminded me too about a Wired piece on open-source mobile phones, which is great)

It seems we ever more desperate to connect to one another, but that more and more of our connections are mediated: screens, machines, handsets...

But never eye-to-eye. More i- to i- now.

In a typically insightful comment, my good friend Greg Russinger noted that one of the problems he had with much of the 'alternative worship' he had seen was that it often gave little or no space to face-to-face contact. It was church, but with more screens, machines, handsets...

One of the amazing things about the incarnation is that it was God, unmediated. The technology of connection, the Temples, the priests, the special equipment, was blown away.

Of course, we will always see through dark glass (though, like damn celebrities, I wish it wasn't always through dark glasses) but since the ascension we have continued to rebuild the technology of divine mediation, when we ought to have been out sharing free speech, with no contract or direct debits needed.

So I'm pleased Jobs has released his very cool device. But let's make sure we use them (yeah, right, I'm ever going to own one ;-) to arrange to meet, and take out our headphones, and remove our eyewear, and be social. You know, in the non-Web2.0 way...

Technorati: Mobile | wireless | iPhone

Posts Imported...

Thanks for the tip from TSK - just imported all posts from the old blog. Check the Archives and extra categories.

Before you can love thy neighbour, you've got to meet them first... | Social Networking

Which is where Peuplade comes in. (You can read the BBC's article on it here.)

It's a Parisian social networking site that is helping people to meet their neighbours.  Which is great. Sort of.

Of course it's a positive thing that people are meeting up. But it worries me that it has taken the mediation of a website to do so. The proof of the pudding will, of course, be in the eating: will the site reinvigorate community and neighbourly feeling so effectively that it won't be needed in the future?

I hope so. I am currently reading The Challenges of Ivan Illich - a series of essays by some of Illich's collaborators - and there is a piece there entitled 'Hospitality Cannot be a Challenge' which I think is pertinent...

Google Reader

Nice online RSS feed-management from Google

We Like (Gay) Sheep Have Gone Astray?

In today's Independent there is an interesting piece about gay sheep:

For the past five years, a team of researchers at Orgeon State
University has been investigating the sexuality of sheep. Early on,
they proved what every sheep farmer knows: some 8 per cent of rams are
gay. When it comes to sex, these woolly homosexuals shun ewes and
engage exclusively in ram-on-ram action.

It turns out that the hypothalamus in these sheep's brains is significantly smaller, and these differences exist even in the 3rd trimester of pregnancy. It seems a further 8% or so of sheep are entirely asexual. The reason for the research? The lack of reproduction of this minority is costing farmers dear... And they've worked out a way to make them straight, too.

I wonder how this biological evidence will be treated by the various camps? Hari, himself gay and a forceful critic of the church's attitude, admits he "fears the consequences of moves to abort or "cure" gay people - but I
cannot fear greater knowledge of the biology of human sexuality."

Personally, I think the whole issue is a huge distraction. While serious injustice remains, with famine, wars and global warming, the huge and divisive focus on attitudes to homosexuality as some benchmark for faithful belief is a travesty.

In my own tradition of the Church of England we have in Rowan Williams one of the wisest, clearest, politicially active and deeply spiritual leaders for many years. And yet he has been blunted by this one minor issue. The church has gone astray on this. We have been distracted.

Technorati: Anglicanism |  Church |  Discrimination |  Homosexuality |  Independent |  Religion |  Religion

Loving Thy Neighbour: Out of Great Silence?

I've just returned from seeing Into Great Silence - a documentary by Philip Gröning about the Grande Chartreuse monastery, one of the most aescetic in the world.

I am a huge documentary fan, and this is a truly wonderful film. The mix of HD digital and Super 8 footage, the all-natural light, with no crew allowed, and no commentary and no soundtrack... It really immerses you in the life of the monks, just as Gröning did himself, having been granted permission to film 16 years after his first request.

It is a long film - and one always has to forgive documentary makers for this given that they really only get one shot at it. Another film will not be made here for perhaps another 50 years, so it deserves our long attention.

In Conclusion: Love thy Neighbour

So here's the first proper post of the Signs blog. The book itself comes out in July, but why wait that long - I'm hoping we'll be able to engage in some discussion way before then. (If you really can't, you can order a copy of the UK version or download a sample chapter ;-)

Having written the book and reflected on it for a while, I've been wondering what the essence of it really is. In a world where brutal dictators are hung, with violence piled upon violence, where the birthplace of our faith rips itself apart in acts of frustrated self-harm, and - as the BBC reported the other day - in a country where four fifths of the population don't think that good relationships with neighbours is important... In such a world as this, what possible relevance could a book paralleling the theory of emergent systems with the gospel have?

As 2007 begins, I'll begin with the only conclusion I can come to: love thy neighbour.

Complex, emerging systems such as you might read about in the book - or in more depth in Steven Johnsons Emergence - rely on the local, neighbourly connection. The grand designs of our minds, the viral web of the internet... neither of these rely on high-level connection. They work because at the low level they are interconnected.

In 2007 what can we do to stop the global violence, to prevent climate change, to improve our cities, to build bridges across the divides in and around our beliefs? Only one thing: make low-level connections. Walk, don't take the car. Be kind. Show love to those who disagree with you.

A recent commentator on the radio highlighted the problem of dealing with anti-social behaviour in a world where there is no neighbourly relationships: the only route is to call the police, which ramps up the tension and solves little in the long term. It's very hard to be antisocial when you are in good relationship with your neighbours.

So perhaps we are left with this single resolution as we head into 07: try to love our neighbours more. Why? Well, as the aboriginal leader Lilla Watson said,

"If you have come to help me you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us walk together."

This interdependence is, I believe, at the heart of the gospel, and at the heart of what I've tried to write about.

Peace,

Technorati: Civilization | Emergence | Emerging Church | Love | New Year | Neighbour | Saddam

Launch//Welcome//Notes of Guidance

We have official lift-off.

Thanks for landing at the Signs of Emergence blog, and Happy New Year. If you've arrived from my previous blog over at The Complex Christ, then please adjust any links you have; I won't be checking that too often, and won't be writing there any more. Why change blogs? Well I got tired of the old site, and thought the publication of The Complex Christ as Signs of Emergence in the US was as good a time as any to switch. The book is being released by Emersion - an excellent new line of titles springing out of a collaboration between Emergent and Baker Books.

Blogging is an evolving medium, and here, in my second stab at designing a site, I've tried to clean things up a bit. You won't find masses of further information or reels of links to other blogs or sites on this page. Instead I've created a separate Links Page where I'll be collating that sort of stuff. Doubtless that'll screw rankings on Technorati etc., but, as James Bond says, 'do I look like I give a damn!' It's time to get beyond stats...

On that page you'll also find a digest of the latest pages of interest I've tagged over at Del.icio.us. Rather than posting here about every article of interest, be that theological or sociological or technological, I'll be tagging them at http://del.icio.us/KesterBrewin/signs You'll also find links to series of blog posts I've written, plus articles and a sample chapter of the book to download.

Finally, I've created an Amazon e-Store on the site too - one for the US and Canada, and one for Europe. You'll be able to buy the book direct from there when it comes out in July 2007, but there are also links to other books I mention or think are relevant. Have a browse round.

So welcome back to both the people who read the other blog regularly, and those who have just arrived. I look forward to journeying and conversing together...