The Complex Christ | Signs of Emergence

Goodbye, for now | New Book

I think the time is right to drop the curtain on ‘Signs of Emergence’  / ‘The Complex Christ’ / ‘Der Jesus Faktor’ and move on. The idea of this blog has been to give some space to extend the ideas presented in that book, and, personally, I feel that’s been successful.

But you shouldn’t keep flogging a dead horse. There have to be periodic moments of silence / jubilee / death / hidden-ness if the moments of speech / action / life are to have any meaning.

So I’m going to stop this blog, and spend some time working on a follow-up book.

The idea, as it stands in various sketches in my note books, is for an extended meditation on the idea of ‘the other,’ leaning left on the poetry/theology continuum, and hopefully drawing on the stories of some fantastic people I’ve met.

I’ve been pondering Jesus’ summary of the Law to ‘love God, and love your neighbour as yourself,’ and re-phrasing it as ‘love the other, love The Other.’ The other within the Self, the other within our communities, The Other that is immanent and beyond all… It strikes me as the core of everything we are about as people of faith. Indeed, since the birth of consciousness, it’s at the core of everything we are about as people.

And yet, with the continuing rise in anti-social behaviour, teenage stabbings in London, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, theological schism, global terror threats and clinical depression, it seems that in our fluid, multicultural, melting-pot, border-less, easyJet world, we are further from accepting the other than ever before.

Yet, despite all this. I think there are signs of hope. And we need to be those signs of hope. Personally, communally, locally, corporeally, we need to be communities that have this love for God and other at our core.

No, I haven’t got a publishing deal, or even spoken to anyone about one. I’m not sure how much that matters, to be honest. I’m just going to spend some time thinking and writing. And if you have any thoughts you’d like to throw in on the theme, any good books to read, do get in touch, come for a beer, leave a comment, or whatever.

Doubtless I’ll be around online again at some point… No idea when. But you’ll find out ;-)

Fare well, for now. And thanks. It’s been fun.

Kindle | Physicality

I, for one, won't be buying an Amazon 'Kindle', at least for some time yet. I think the prediction of this being 'iPod for books' is way off for the simple reason that the media are totally different. Music is not physical. Sure, you could thumb through the album artwork, and that was a great bonus with a 12" gatefold. But it was always subsiduary to the actual thing: the music. And music is simply to be listened to. In stereo. No more.

With a book, the text is the object. Fine - the text can be inked digitally, but what I don't think can be replicated is the 'flick value' of a book. I never just read a book - I read a bit, flick around, look at the cover again, turn back... It's a much more physical experience than we often think. And I just don't want to give that up.

With music, the emotional centre is the listening. With a book, the whole object - the spine, the binding, the font, the leading, the stock - all of these things are tied up with the emotional content of the actual text.

I read news online. But a novel? Forget it. Won't kindle no spark for me.

In The Shadow of The Moon

In The Shadow Of The Moon is a magnificent movie. No voice-over. No animation. No mock-ups. Just archive footage, and interviews with the Apollo astronauts. It's stunning as a film, stunning to be reminded of perhaps the single greatest technological feat of mankind, and stunning to be reminded - in a way Gore never quite achieves in AIT - that the earth really is immensely precious. Armstrong's continued absence from any documentary - literary or on film - only serves to add mystery to an already ethereal and epiphanic event. He was the first to step out onto another world; what God whispered to him before leaving for someplace else he will continue to keep to himself.

If, you're in London, you'll have to catch it soon, as it's been on a scandalously limited release. If you miss it, buy the DVD, with the largest screen you can lay your hands on. Or, better still, read Andrew Smith's 'Moondust' - which very likely inspired the film.

Technorati: Al Gore | Andrew Smith | In The Shadow of The Moon | Moondust | Neil Armstrong

Storyquest | Lara Croft is no Wise Guide | Antisocial Behaviour

Storyquest is the national festival of story-telling and the spoken word, and runs for the whole of November. Alongside many keynote events, the organizers - the Prince of Wales' Foundation for Children & the Arts - are simply encouraging families to 'fill their homes with stories, capturing the moment when a story gets inside you and fires the imagination.'

One idea they have is to simply open an old photo album and start talking about the people within it - whether alive or dead. Doing exactly this is something I remember fondly from my own childhood.

With the heavy-handed 'National Literacy Strategy', story-telling has been rather gutted of its emotional heart. Reading is to be 'done' and stories are to be studied. This is a tragedy, not simply for the pure enjoyment of stories, but because - as Christopher Booker argues in The Seven Basic Plots - it is stories that forge our emotional and spiritual development. Remove them and you stunt growth and maturity.

Of course, people will argue that stories still abound in childhood. What is Lara Croft other than a story animated and controlled by the player? True. But the issue is the commonality. A child playing alone at a computer is in control of their own story. Left alone to navigate a world with no narrator or guide. And this, I am convinced, leads to a wounded and insecure heart that finds love and grace and appreciation of the other difficult. In other speak, it contributes to anti-social behaviour.

So turn the screen off, go grab a book, an album, or just your imagination, and tell someone a story. The fire is lit.

Technorati: Antisocial Behaviour | Arcade Game | Christopher Booker | Gaming | Lara Croft | Prince of Wales | Story-telling | Storyquest

Wikiklesia Paperback Available | A Tale of Two Publishers

I'm really pleased to see the Wikiklesia book published in physical form. Go get your copy here and support Not For Sale as you do. I contributed a chapter on the move between text, audio and video, which seems to have gone down well.

Wikiklesia is one of those great publishing projects you are happy to be a part of, with no thought of payment. Good people doing good things... the gifts have cycled well.

Unfortunately this isn't always the case. Many months ago now I was keenly asked to provide a couple of articles for a large and very well known US Christian publication. The deadlines were tight, the turnaround not easy with juggling other things, but hey - they seemed so keen and nice about it! My queries were answered by the editor within hours, they seemed really pleased with what I'd produced... And then it came to payment. I was patient, I can tell you - I don't like hassling people for cash - but suddenly, with the articles published, I couldn't get a squeak out of them.

Finally, after a number of unanswered emails, a cheque for one of the articles arrived, with a copy of the piece for my file, which I was more concerned about to be honest. I've since heard nothing about the other one, which was published months back, but for which I'm still owed.

Should I be bothered? I can take or leave the cash. Some can't, but I'm lucky enough to have income from my teaching. But I just feel that the principle is important. It's basically theft, right? Should writers have to hassle people for what their due, however small it might be? I know for a fact that this publication has treated others in a similar way. Is this the sort of way we'd want a Christian publication to run? I've no desire to write for them again, and if that means I'm shooting my US Christian publishing empire in the foot, well, so be it ;-) I'd rather spend the rest of my days pushing work out for free to projects like Wikiklesia than have the sour taste of having to chase poorly run, industrial-sized Christian publishing houses for cash.

Rant over.

Technorati: Christian | Publishing

Wise Traveller...

Just out is this set of three books of reflections, to which I contributed 8 or 9 pieces.

Nice thoughts for the journey to pop in and out of.

Here's one I submitted for book titled 'Loss'

Fruit

I want to change the fruits of my labours.

When someone says ‘Apple’,
I shouldn't want sleek plastic and titanium,
but England’s Coxes,
heavy hung in dappled orchards.

When someone says ‘Orange’,
I don’t want to know about free minutes and the latest upgrades.
I want to think citrus thoughts;
the appeal of slowly peeling skin.

And when someone says ‘Blackberry’,
I don’t want my head to rush with virtual thoughts
of emails and deadlines and documents and settings
and schedules and coverage and battery life.

I want, instead, my tongue to rush with sweet sensation,
a bowl of fruits shared with friends.
A rug.
Open space and blue sky.

Lech Walesa came to the West and said:
“You have riches and freedom here,
but I feel no sense of faith or direction.
You have so many computers,
why don’t you use them in the search for love?”

Devices all sold to connect me.
When all I had to do was pick some fruit, and share it.

© KB 2007

Walesa's quote is strangely prophetic, I think.
We've all heeded his advice in some way.

Technorati: Blackberry | Fruit | Love | Scripture Union | Walesa

Soliton | Think Not Whether The Serpent Exists, But What The Serpent Said

I can think of no better way to stretch my legs out over the Atlantic for 11 hours than flying with Pete. Like a couple of great insomniacs, we fell to talking some theology, which knocked out the 5 rows around us in no time. I think BA might actually contract us for overnight flights, or produce some sort of video channel to help people get some sleep.

We tried to watch Blades of Glory, but the system broke. There is a God. Perhaps.... which put us back to the God-talk.

Literally.

One of the interesting things Pete was setting out, one of very many, was the idea that actually proving that God exists is a dead-end topic for theologians. It can't be done, so needs to be left undone. Pete quotes Barth, who was asked "So, did the serpent physically speak in the Genesis narrative?", to which he replied "The question is not whether the serpent spoke. The real question is what the serpent said."

In the usual argument over whether God 'intervenes' in our world, people who have doubted this have drawn two conclusions:

1. There is no God, and thus no intervention is possible, or

2. There may be a God, but this God doesn't intervene. He's set the world running, and stepped away.

Dr. Peter J. Rollins Ph.D* (not Caputo as I erroneously mentioned), of whom Pete is a big fan, argues that there is a 3rd option:

3. Intervention has definitely occurred in my life, but there may not be a God.

So the question thus becomes: let's take the fact that I experience some sort of intervention in my life seriously, but not get bogged down in the unanswerable question of whether God physically intervened. Instead, what does this intervention say to me? This helpfully takes us away from having to work out exactly how God might have intervened - an argument we cannot make sensible progress on - and forces us to focus on the actual intervention itself. I know I have experienced love here... what impact does that have on how I'm going to live?

* Ph.D's are, according to the man himself, as Doctors of Philosophy, the 'only true doctors.' Medical doctors, in particular, are singled out by him as charlatans.

Technorati: Caputo | God | Intervene | Weakness

Wikiklesia: Voices from the Virtual World

I am really pleased to have been able to contribute a chapter to a great new book: 'Voices from the Virtual World'. It's been put together under the umbrella of 'Wikiklesia', which is a collaborative publishing project.

"Voices of the Virtual World explores the growing influence of technology on the global Christian church. In this premier volume, we hear from more than forty voices, including technologists and theologians, entrepreneurs and pastors… from a progressive Episcopalian techno-monk to a leading Mennonite professor… 'Voices' is a far reaching exploration of spiritual journey contextualized within a culture of increasingly immersive technology."

"Conceived and established in May 2007, the Wikiklesia Project is an experiment in on-line collaborative publishing. The format is virtual, self-organizing, participatory - from purpose to publication in just a few weeks. All proceeds from the Wikiklesia Project will be contributed to the Not For Sale campaign."

 

My chapter is entitled 'Text/Audio/Video: Probing the Dark Glass'. Our journey from birth to adulthood takes from video (we see first) to audio (we learn to speak) throught to text (we learn to read). Paradoxically, our technological path has started with text (printing) moved on to audio (sound recording / pod-casting) and finally on to video (video calls, HD video streaming). How do these two different paths impact our rendering of faith? Go buy a copy from 23rd July, and find out. Don't worry, there's a host of great people to read other than me ;-)

More info from Wikiklesia.

Technorati: Wikiklesia | Dark Glass | Kester Brewin

Signs Emerges... | Book Launch

So, Signs of Emergence finally hits the shops on 1st July... I'm really excited about the book coming out in the US and Canada, especially as so many of the ideas within it have sprung from great work done over there.

To all you people who've been queuing up for days outside stores to get hold of one... Oh, sorry, that was for the iPhone! Anyway, it's a book I'm really proud of, which a lot of people have been very kind about, and I hope people enjoy it and find some inspiration in it. I'll post some reviews  here as they come through; for now, thanks to everyone at Baker and Emersion for taking it on.

I'll be out in Ventura, CA at the Soliton gathering from 6th - 12th August, and there's going to be a launch party on the evening of the 10th, so if anyone from the LA area is around it'd be great to hook up with people while I'm over!

Technorati: iPhone | Emersion | Signs of Emergence | Soliton

Dave Eggers | Valentino Achak Deng | Sudan

I went to hear Dave Eggers in conversation with Valentino Achak Deng at the ICA this evening. It was wonderful, moving and sad and funny.

Deng was one of the Lost Boys in Sudan. After his town was pillaged by militias, he got separated from his family and joined 4000 or so other young boys on a walk to Ethiopia. Some were ate by lions. Others shot. Others just died of hunger. After 3 years in a refugee camp there, Ethiopian militias turned on the boys and drove them out again. So they walked to Kenya. 10 years later, Deng and some 3000 others were taken to the US. He met Eggers; 'What is the What' is the 'fictional autobiography' of Deng's life. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Much as cynical postmodern life tells me they shouldn't, heroes do still exist. Dave Eggers is one. His 'Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius' is just that. Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern is the best vehicle for new writing around, and The Believer the best writing magazine ever. That's before we get to the inner-city work of 826 Valencia, the Voice of Witness human rights oral history project. Faith has never been mentioned. I don't want it to be. He's simply a person of huge spirit.

One of the questions after the talk was about how much of him is in the book, and how much is Deng, and whether there was a theme running through his work. He commented quickly that he didn't think there was, in particular, and that he had tried to be as 'invisible as possible' in What is the What.

In some ways I'd like to disagree: I think there is a theme. HBOSG is essentially a work of the ego. It is about him-Self,

about getting to know the Self, if you will. His second book 'You Shall Know Our Velocity' tells the story of a suddenly rich American guy going to Africa with the naive intention of giving money to the poor - a project that spirals into disaster, and his own death. And now we have 'What is the What'.

My thoughts? That the trajectory of his writing has been, having examined the Self, putting the Self to death, and disappearing into the service of the other. And that's good enough for hero status for me.

Please buy What is the What. All the money is going back to Deng's town to build a Secondary School and a Library. And please visit his site to find out what you can do to put pressure on governments to act to stop the violence in Sudan and Darfur in particular.

Technorati: Eggers | Sudan

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

Off to Greenbelt | Heretic's Guide to Eternity

I'm off towards Greenbelt tomorrow, via a stop with some friends in Devon, so probably won't be blogging. Before I go, I promised to post a review of Spencer Burke and Barry Taylor's book 'A Heretic's Guide to Eternity'.

First, an apparent paradox in the book, which I think helps unlock its position quite well. Spencer begins with a well written polemic about the state of religion: immovable, unchanging, unresponsive. Religion no longer works for him, but he remains hopeful that "faith can be practiced without the baggage of religion." Yet a chapter or two later, Spencer writes that "in religion, nothing ever stays the same. Our religions are practiced within our cultural horizons, not outside of them."

So which is right? Is religion over, or is it still evolving? Is Spencer leaving religion behind, or practicing it in a new way? The book appears to affirm that it's both/and. And this is the unique place of the heretic: one who stands both within and without, who "pushes past and beyond the conventional wisdom of the dominant group and pulls us across sacred fences that hold us back... Heretics either burn in flames, or light the way for a new generation."

In other words, this is heretic as Trickster. And for that alone, the book deserves to be read. It will challenge and frustrate and stir up and question. And we absolutely need that to happen. In a great section on the prodigal son, Spencer asks us to reflect on ourselves not as the tragic/heroic younger son who gets so marvelously saved, but on the hard, cold, elder son who equally needs saving. Perhaps the younger son's heresy will save them both, for what the story tells us is that grace is something they both needed.

So what's the central heresy here? For Spencer, this grace is an 'opt out' issue, not an 'opt in' one, and this sails him mighty close to Universalism. In fact, he calls it 'Universalism with hell attached' - hell being the place where people who consciously opt out go. Personally, I think there needs to be a lot more careful thinking here. In fact, my reading of the prodigal son story is precisely that grace is an opt-in issue: the elder son hadn't 'opted out' - he'd hung around and done his duty - but neither had he yet opted in, which the younger son did do.

Either way, one of the other key undertones of the book is the centrality of gift - and it is this line of thought about the nature of the 'transaction' of grace that I would have liked to see pursued more rigorously to push beyond the simplicity of opting in or out. But in a sense, that's the beauty of the work: like a good heretic or trickster should, it demands a response from the reader. What is important now is for those theologians who vigorously deny their ivory tower status to come and get their hands dirty with some of this stuff.

Spencer explores a variety of meanings of the word religion, but doesn't mention the latin verb 'religare' - 'to bind'. He is fighting those bindings, and wrestling to be free of them. But we never will be. We are bound and obligated to live inside some plausibility structure: atheistic, Islamic, hedonistic, universalist, Christian. And bound by culture and place within them. The answer is not that these double binds don't exist, but how we negotiate these boundaries and learn from each other about 'the other'. What is perhaps unique about Christ is this: here was a God prepared to be bound, become human and nailed down. And, accepting these limits, forged a freedom for us.

Technorati Tags: Grace, Spencer Burke, Religion, Salvation, TheOoze

The 3rd Economy: Gift, Market and Plunder [1] | Christian Leadership and the Leisure Class

As some of you may know, I've been working on a novel for the past few months, playing with themes, among others, of the links between identity and consumption. One of the books I've picked up to feed the furnace has been Thorstein Veblen's 1899 satire Conspicuous Consumption (an excerpt from his longer work The Theory of the Leisure Class, available as part of the lovely Penguin 'Great Ideas' series), and I'm glad I did, as it's nudged me to re-thinking some of the ideas on gift within The Complex Christ. These are unrefined thoughts, but I wanted to set out a few posts on what I've mulled over.

Firstly, an outline of Veblen's ideas.

His thesis begins with an examination of what he calls the 'leisure class' which 'is found in its best development at the higher stages of the barbarian culture; as, for instance, in feudal Europe or Japan. This leisure class is basically what we might now call the aristocracy, but his labeling is quite deliberate and, I think, rather contemporary. What obviously separates them - and Veblen gets us to think about this in more ancient cultures, rather than just in terms of stately homes etc. - is their employment:

'The upper (leisure) classes are by custom exempt from industrial occupations, and are reserved for certain employments to which a certain degree of honour attaches. Chief among the honourable employments in any feudal community is warfare; and priestly service is commonly second to warfare.'

Actually, Veblen continues to list four main lines of activity for the leisure class: government, warfare, religious observance and sports. And, as World Cup fever truly grips (perhaps for only 4 more hours as England face Ecuador at 1600) it is interesting to note our continued fascination with the leisure class - we might call them celebrities now I suppose - who play for £120000 a week.

I want to explore the links Veblen identifies between warfare, consumption and leisure in another post. What interests me briefly here is whether Christian leadership is still seen as part of the 'leisure class' -  a get out from real work, an escape of some sort.

Perhaps I'll do no more than present the question; what I would like to add is this fascinating quote from a letter a great friend and critic of Thomas Merton wrote to him. It talks of 'the monastic', but made me think on the insularity of some full-time Christian work:

"The point of being a Christian in the city is to try to humanize modern technology and modern society, and you [Merton] are trying to escape this. Let us admit that at the outset I am radically out of sympathy with the monastic project. […] All monasticism rests on a mistaken confusion of creation with this world, and so they suppose that by withdrawing in some symbolic fashion from creation they are leaving the world. But creation is precisely not the world, but its antithesis, and so what they do is essentially the opposite of salvation. They withdraw from creation into the desert taking ‘this world’ with them and then they dwell apart from creation, but in a newly erected kingdom of the prince of this world. You have not withdrawn from this world into heaven, you have withdrawn from creation into hell."

Rosemary Ruether writing to Merton. In Merton: A Biography, Monica Furlong, p 287

Technorati Tags: Books, Consumption, Leisure, Merton, Ministry, Ordination, Religion, Veblen, Work

Surface Tension | Lost Worlds

"One of the great losses of the Information Age is texture. Consider the pre-computer desk: a litter of papers, large and small, handwritten, printed and typed, course and fine; letters in varying hands, envelopes of various sizes bearing stamps from all over the world. Here are books, annotated and bookmarked; here is a typewriter with its ribbon and its heavy steel frame. Here are photographs and drawings, coins and banknotes, documents bearing seals and counter-signatures, pristine originals and faded carbon copies... Papers lie in piles, navigable vertically according to what has been most recently consulted; some are turned sideways-on to mark the stack.

"Now consider today's equivalent. All is stored on the network and accessed via mouse-clicks on a clean glowing screen. Everything is the same: an image seen through glass. We touch nothing, mark nothing, smell nothing. In the new world of I.T., it is not just the desktop that is a metaphor: everything is a metaphor, where nothing yellows with age and everything is clean and new. We are become creatures of sight alone, our whole attention focused on a hundred and fifty square inches of expensive glass.

"We have lost something in the process. Not just texture. Something more. The computer makes everything retrievable; but it doesn't retrieve everything. Only the surface. Scratch the surface and - look! - more surface. The rest is lost."

From Michael Bywater's excellent Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost, & Where Did it Go?

Technorati Tags: Books, Lost Worlds, Technology, Work

Contemplative Youth Ministry | Being Present to 'The Other'

I volunteered to be part of the 'grid blog' flagging up Mark Yaconelli's book 'Contemplative Youth Ministry', and duly received a copy to read from the publisher.

It's very good. We were traveling up to Iona with some friends, one of whom was also reading it, and she was also very positive.

A quote I'd like to pull out is on page 101, where Mark is reflecting on the practice of contemplative prayer with young adults, as opposed to a 'doing' style:

"Sadly for many of us there are few precious moments among our many human interactions when we feel someone is fully present to us... If you look back over your life, you may find that the moments that had the greatest impact on you were moments when you were in the presence of someone who was fully present to you."

This is the true essence of contemplation - not that we find ourselves, but that we engage with 'the other'; not that we become centred, but that we find space for 'the other' within our centre, and thus become fully present to them.

And if we can help people to begin this journey when they're young - then all the better.

//

Previous post on the grid-blog [ here ]
Next post due tomorrow [ here ]

Technorati Tags: Contemplative Youth Ministry Grid Blog, Youth Ministry

Coal | Does Urban Development Require Exploitation?

I've been reading 'Coal - A Human History' recently. It's a fascinating look at the profound impact coal has - and is still going to have - on our history. Used as a soft jewelry stone by the romans, it was only later taken up as fuel in London because of the rapidly retreating forests which were being decimated for fuel. The accounts of the horrendous air quality that this uncontrolled coal burning caused are incredible: everything was covered in soot, and the death records suggest that lung problems were the main killer of the time. Things weren't helped by the mad science that suggested that coal fumes cleansed the air of the miasmas that caused the plague.

When the Industrial Revolution exploded in Manchester in the early 1800's, coal was literally the driving force. James Watt's coal-powered steam engine allowed both the efficient draining of mines to allow greater depths to be mined, and huge factories to be mechanised too. What has shocked me about the book are the accounts of the conditions in which the first generation of the 'working class' lived. Having only recently left their fields, where they had no clocks or time-schedules to keep, they were plunged into 24-hour shift work in the most appalling conditions. Children were sent to work in the factories or mines as soon as they were able. One account tells of an 8 year old girl whose job it was to open and shut the traps in the mines to prevent the build-up of dangerous gases. She did this for 13 hours at a stretch in pitch black, alone for the vast majority of it, saying she was too scared to sing to herself for comfort. One commission on the problem described things thus:

"Chained, belted, harnessed like dogs in a go-cart, black, saturated with wet, and more than half-naked - crawling on their hands and feet, dragging their heavy loads behind them - they present an appearance indescribably disgusting and unnatural"

Unsurprisingly, life expectancy was very low. The smoke from the innumerable chimneys meant that the sun rarely penetrated into the ranks of slum-terraces built to house the workers. Well over half of children born did not survive beyond 5, a figure half that of those left in rural labour. When the coal-boom hit the US years later, things were not that much different, and miners were treated extremely badly.

The question this has left me with is this: do cities have to go through a period of exploitation in order to develop? As we look on in horror at child labour practices in other developing countries, and recoil in shock at the horrific conditions in which children have to live and work - whether it be in mining or sweat-shops or on dumps - we perhaps forget that we were doing exactly the same only 150 years ago. Can we expect them to do any different, or is this impulse to exploit innate?

Technorati Tags: Coal, Exploitation, Power, Child Labour, Sustainable Growth, Technology, Work

A Message From My Publishers

Save the SPCK!

So say's Dave at CartoonChurch. Their shops are threatened apparently. So don't buy Pete's book online. Get down your local SPCK and make the men in sandals happy.

Emerging Leadership Day | Churchless Faith Follow-up Book

Two quick links:

Firstly, I am looking forward to sharing some thoughts on leadership in emerging organizations at the blah... learning day.

I'll be joined by Maggi Dawn, who will reflect on trying to re-imagine leadership in the ancient structures of the Anglican church and Ana Draper of L8R, who has recently completed her MSc in psychoanalysis, guiding us in some thoughts about leadership from a psychoanalytical/theological perspective.

It's on 29th April at Moot Towers, St. Matthew's  London SW1P 2BU

To find out more and to book a place visit blah leadership learning day.

Secondly I'm really excited to hear that the follow-up to Alan Jamieson's groundbreaking book 'A Churchless Faith' is set for release very soon.

“This follow-up to A Churchless Faith is both fascinating and disquieting – fascinating because it shows that people rarely stand still in their journey of faith, whether or not they attend church. And disquieting because it underscores once again just how irrelevant or unhelpful the institutional church has become for so many reflective and intelligent believers today. This book provides further valuable insights into the growing phenomenon of church leavers, whose protest the church ignores at its own peril” - So says Dr Chris Marshall (St. John’s Senior Lecturer in Christian Theology, Victoria University, Wellington)

Stay posted by visiting Prodigal Kiwis often - the excellent blog by Alan Jamieson and Paul Fromont. Good people. Fine thinkers.

Technorati Tags: London, Theology

The Last Post...

...is due. According to the Financial Times.

"...which brings us to the spectre haunting the blogosphere - tedium. If the pornography of opinion doesn't leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium"

"For Marx and Engels, journalism was trivial - an impediment to serious, memorable and above all influential work. “Mere potboiling,” wrote Engels of the more than 500 articles he and Marx wrote for The New York Daily Tribune, “It doesn’t matter if they are never read again.”

And that, in the end, is the dismal fate of blogging: it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism; yoked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts - a choric song of the word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news."

[Thanks to JR for the link. He so needs a blog it hurts.]

Clearly the writer hasn't read (sic) ;-) or my post on the subject [here] where I paraphrase Ed Murrow in Goodnight and Goodluck:

"Given that blogs are so popular a medium (ok, this one excepted ;-) we need to make sure that they are more than 'merely wires and lights in a box.' 'If they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.' 'Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information.'"

Technorati Tags: Blogging

Solition | Endings | Merton

Just spent the weekend with Si and Gareth over in Northern Ireland. Good to see Pete Rollins too (his book is going to go ballistic). They also had the guys over from The Bridge in Ventura for a few days, and it was excellent to spend time hanging out, doing some Guinness, and doing the Celtic Solition day on the Saturday. It was a great time, but hung with sadness as we heard of the death of someone from The Bridge. It's been a painful year for them.

Some of the conversations turned to why we had stopped Vaux, and it's still something I/we think about a lot. I might do some posts of reflections about this over the next few weeks, but talking got me thinking, and my thoughts turned to this passage from Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation.

"All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered.... I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could become visible when something visible covered its surface. But there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed. I am objectified in them. When they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am my own mistake."

I think in a funny way we at Vaux had grown worried about the false self that we were projecting. We'd wound a lot of bandages, and it was time for a bit of naked truth. This is, for Merton, the essence of contemplation. To put down the fantasy self and "pass through the centre of our own nothingness [...] and awake as our true selves." "We become contemplatives when God discovers Godself in us."

I'm glad we left the building. The stones were heavy. Perhaps you'll find us in a tent somewhere, someday.

Technorati Tags: Fantasy, Merton, Religion, Spirituality

Release Your Inner Mr Man/Little Miss

Make your own Mr Man or Little Miss here. Resistance is futile. You know you're going to have to. The Mr Emergent™ competition starts here.

Technorati Tags: Cartoons

"Wires and Lights in a Box" | Good Night and Good Blogging

This is doubtless old news for those Stateside, but Good Night and Good Luck has just been released here, and I have to say, I was very impressed.

As my wife and I left the cinema many people were, like us, asking "so what did you make of that then?" A film that has no incidental music (though some fabulous jazz numbers), is shot almost entirely within one building and includes some long inserts of original footage of Congressional committees. What did we make of it? Dry. Verbose. And if you can't sit through incredibly important cinema without jingles and fx to keep you interested, you've suckled too much at the Cathode Ray Nipple.

For those who don't know, the film, directed by George Clooney, is about Ed Murrow and his news team, who took on Senator McCarthy and his communist witch-hunt in the early 1950's. They won the war (McCarthy was investigated himself) but lost the peace (they were effectively fired).

Nodding heavily to the current situation in Guantanamo and Iraq, the film is a serious and challenging piece about the supine nature of the media, and their seeming spinelessness in the face of chilling government action, and is framed by Murrows' speech to the Radio-Television News Directors Association.

Technorati Tags: cinema, film, Media, Politics

The Architecture of Happiness | Lost Worlds

Been doing a bit of work for Greenbelt, writing invites for speakers etc. One of the people I've been in contact with is Alain de Botton, who's last book Status Anxiety I quoted in the book.

He has a new book forthcoming, called The Architecture of Happiness. The blurb:

What makes a house beautiful? Is it serious to spend your time thinking about home decoration? Why do people disagree about taste? And can buildings make us happy? In "The Architecture of Happiness", Alain de Botton tackles a relationship central to our lives. Our buildings - and the objects we fill them with - affect us more profoundly than we might think.

To take architecture seriously is to accept that we are, for better and for worse, different people in different places. De Botton suggests that it is architecture's task to render vivid to us who we might ideally be.

If it is architecture's task to 'render vivid to us who we might ideally be', then the spaces we create for our gatherings are very important. I've also been reading Bywater's excellent Lost Worlds, which is basically a taxonomy of loss. Melancholic, funny and outrageous in turn, his entry on churches particularly caught my eye:

Churches [...] no longer can encompass any human grandeur of aspiration. It only two models for any sort of ultramundane dignity are the Municipal Utilitarian and the Executive Hotel.

What have we lost, that this is what things have come to? Perhaps what we have lost is the model for our being. Once we aspired to the condition of Gods. Now we aspire to the condition of computers.

Having spent the last week doing DIY, I've been reflecting that sometimes the Emerging Church has been about creating personal spaces within which we try to render vivid who we want God to be. Rather than working to render public spaces of awe and mystery; cathedrals not low-ceilinged industrial units.

At Vaux we used to dub ourselves 'Worship Architects'. Encompassed in that was a desire to create spaces within which people could worship, but not direct them exactly how to. But the relationship between the architecture of a space and behaviour within it is more complex. And in future we'll need to bear that in mind in the spaces we create.

Technorati Tags: Architecture, DIY

Carpenter from Nazareth Needs Joiners

Contender for worst Christian sign ever.

In case you've been wondering, it's DIY week. Or half term - never can remember what it's really called these days. Certainly not holiday... Will need a relaxing week's teaching after all this. Carpentry, wallpapering, re-wiring, insulating... The list goes on. And on.

I remember hearing one David Pawson speak - yup, the guy who wrote 'Leadership is Male' (thankfully 'Limited Availability') - who said that he was very happy for people to come and stay with him and his wife, but only if they were prepared to do a day's work. He backed it up with some proof-text, and claimed he'd deny you your dinner if you hadn't done enough work. A dinner his wife would doubtless have to have cooked. The same wife who he wouldn't let pull the switch on an electric chair, though he'd do it himself.

One of those bizarre Christian talks you never forget.
Think I've earned my pie tonight anyway.

Technorati Tags: DIY, Emerging Church, Work

Blook | (sic) | Lulu

For those who asked, I've just received the final (hardback) product from Lulu, and the quality is excellent.
If I was being finnickity I'd prefer matt to gloss finish on the cover, but apart from that, no hesitation at all in recommending them.

How much do I prefer page to screen?

Technorati Tags: Blook, Blooks, Lulu, Plogging

Graham Doel Asks...

As you may have seen, Graham was blogging through the book recently, and, having done so, posted some questions, which I'm going to try to answer here.

I'll start with an easy one:

Have you ever tried to get a plumber in a hurry?

No. But my dad has. When I asked him to repair a creaky floorboard in our new house. "Mind the pipes, dad" I said. And he put 10 perfectly lined-up nails through one. Ouch.

It struck me that your experience of the so called "Emerging Church" is born out of frustration and subsequently involvement in "Alternative Worship". How long do you think it will be before the Emerging Perspectives become part of the establishment?

Technorati Tags: Books, Da Vinci Code, Emerging Church

Neophilia [5] Subvert the Fantasy Church

Links: Neophilia [1]  |  Neophilia [2]  |  Neophilia [3]  |  Neophilia [4]

Anyone been finding blogging more difficult than it used to be? Lost the novelty a bit, and now what seemed so easy and freeing is more of a chore at times? Lots of people I've read seem to have done recently... Welcome to the fantasy cycle of the neophiliac.

I've linked to the other posts in the series above - and in the right bar under the series clicks - but to summarize, I've been fascinated by Christopher Booker's work The Neophiliacs - Revolution in English Life in the Fifties and Sixties and believe it has strong messages for us as an emerging movement.

Why? Because he identifies the potential pitfalls of newness: falling into a neophiliac fantasy cycle:

Technorati Tags: Books, Emerging Church, Fantasy, Rebirth, Sustainable Growth

Plogging | Blooks | etc.

Links to some good discussion around plogging / writing blooks:

Jason Clark has some stuff here, and also a link to the original blook here.

Jonny has some wider ideas about how Lulu could be used to get materials out there, and Maggi has some great thoughts, with interesting discussion going on, about the wider implications in terms of copyright, writing forms etc.

As the boundaries between forms become more fluid, it's definitely something we'll see more of; the screen just hasn't hit it as a comfortable reading format yet.

And if we are happy to publish our comments globally on each other's blogs, we ought not to be shy of them being on the printed page, should we?

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Blooks, Books, Emerging Church, Lulu, Plogging, Blook

Plogging: You Read It Here First

One of the things I dislike about blogging is the volatility of posts: you write your heart out, and in a couple of days it's disappeared into the aether, too far down for scrolling, rarely to be seen again.

Perhaps this is why Doug Pagitt has decided that blogs are not a good way to conduct discussion and debate. I disagree, but personally need a different format to keep up with what I've written. I just don't find online archives a good way to browse back.

Hence I hearby declare the word created, and announce the arrival of Plogging: Publishing a hard copy of your blog.

I called the book (sic) - "an adverb used in brackets after a copied or quoted word that appears odd or erroneous to show that the word is quoted exactly as it stands in the original" - which sums it up pretty well I think. Mine is a beautifully bound edition of the unexpurgated posts, comments and tags from this blog, July - December 2005.

It's really easy to do through Lulu - an excellent online publisher, which I think is going to radically change the nature of publishing as we know it.

Hardback edition available [here]

Softback edition available [here]

PDF previews of the first few pages are available there too. I'm personally really excited about having a hard copy of the blog - it runs to 260 pages or so - and being able to browse a book, rather than a screen! Looking through it, it's amazing to be reminded of the stuff people have contributed... dirt, humour, insight. Doing so makes me want to challenge Doug to think again. Going private on discussion may not do everyone a service.

No I don't expect any sales. And no I haven't considered copyright of people's comments ;p

Enjoy

Technorati Tags: Books, Emerging Church, Lulu, Plogging, Blogging