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.

Prayer - Better Than Broadband?

This sign appear outside my local church the other day.

And I just wondered, does anyone actually believe this? Do the people in this church really believe it? I know that in my more evangelical days I had a more 'hotline' view of prayer - but surely this idea that we can have immediate access to God is just a bare-faced lie? I'm tempted to 'go inside and find out more,' because I'd be interested to know how they would explain to someone who was sick and got immediate access to God that God was very likely to tell them to just deal with it.

Perhaps some people do have this sort of day-to-day experience of prayer. I'd have thought most were on some sort of dial-up. Or worse. We are obsessed with immediacy of connection, of course - higher speeds and more wide coverage. But its helping no one to try to pretend God behaves the same way.

Technorati: Broadband | Prayer

Soul Synaesthesia

This month’s Believer documents a strange case from Hungary of audio-kinetic synaesthesia. The subject, whenever he hears certain words, ‘sees’ them as discrete and definite actions or gestures.

Colour synaesthesia is more common: sounds or numbers are seen as distinct colours, and some estimates reckon that around 1 in 23 experience it.

And I just wonder if some of us suffer some kind of soul-synaesthesia. All these sounds, words and senses kick off an involuntary response in the spirit that wonders why and how, and wanders, in wonder…

Technorati Tags: Synaesthesia,Believer

We Turn From the Light to See

"We turn from the light to see."

Don Paterson, The Book of Shadows.

Technorati: Paterson

Life after Life ¦ Christianity and Euthanasia ¦ Reverend Death

I finally got round to watching 'Reverend Death', Jon Ronson's documentary about George Exoo, a Unitarian minister who has performed around 100 'assisted suicides', mainly for those who have been turned down by other organisations practising legally in places/states where it is carefully controlled because they do not have terminal illnesses.

Most of the people he seemed to help were suffering depression, or from ME. The film followed him 'helping' one woman who had chronic fatigue and 'couldn't go on', though half way through the first attempt she started buttering a bagel, and announced her house-mate was due back any minute. This sent the guy packing quick-sharp: what he is doing is clearly illegal, and this was taken up in the film as the FBI chased him for extradition to Ireland to face charges of assisting a woman in Dublin to commit suicide.

It is possible to see Exoo as a very prolific serial killer akin to Harold Shipman - a British doctor who ended the lives of perhaps 215 people, most of whom were nearing the end of their lives too. Certainly, it seemed he got some sort of thrill out of 'fulfilling his calling' - which is precisely how Exoo saw things.

One thing he would do for all his clients ('because', as he said many times in almost Pythonesque comic style, 'you've not done this before') is give them a copy of 'Life After Life' - a video detailing the near-death experiences of a bunch of characters (some of whose stories didn't quite seem to hold up).

Exoo's reasoning is that 'death is a great adventure to a wonderful place'. And this is where things get interesting. Because if, as Christians or otherwise, we really believe in some after-life, then should we be critical of Exoo, or of euthenasia at all? (He claims that Jesus practised some sort of suicide, which Stanley Hauerwas refuted, before being able to come up with any proof text to show God didn't approve of suicide.)

I was watching the programme with someone I am close to, who trained as a nurse. She mentioned that in practice, in hospices and elsewhere, euthanasia is pretty common.

She then revealed that as she had watched her father lie dying of cancer in the 60's, his GP had passed her a suitable amount of morphine and told her to 'stop his pain.' She thought about it for a very long time, and then did gradually increase his dose to relieve his pain, knowing that this would kill him.

I personally think this was an incredibly brave and humane thing to do. I don't think it excuses Exoo, or his associate who does the same for a $7000 fee (Exoo takes no money) but I do think if we are to state that we believe in an after life, we need to do so in an active sense, by which I mean making sure that we fully value this life, and don't simply cheapen it as a blip before the 'real' version begins, while permitting people the option to humanely end life at an appropriate moment in a dignified manner.

Top-Down | Bottom-Up | Powers

An excellent week away, helped by the fantastic sunshine that rayed on us every day, while the South got soaked in rain.

Reading material for the train/ferry/bus etc. on the way up/down was this month's Prospect, which contained an article from some old Blairites challenging Brown to move away from top-down centralised governance to a more liberal bottom-up approach:

Labour politicians too often see a social problem—obesity, children at risk on the internet or declining interest in high culture—and make two assumptions: first, that the problem is amenable to a policy solution; and second, that this solution ought to involve the establishment of a council, commission or task force. But many of the issues facing modern society are too complex and too cultural for such a wooden approach.

Coming back I've just received an email from an organization struggling from within over whether they should be taking one or the other approach, and many of the discussions we had on Iona related to the same issue.

In other words, the debate continues to rage, and usually follows the same line: those in power want to preserve power structures because, from their perspective, it's the only way to get things done, while those outside those structures see the world very differently and realise things aren't working as well as those in power think they are.

I've been into this in detail in the book, but, to summarise: power and leadership are about facilitating communication or, in the governance situation, creating environments within which the best possible outcomes for people are likely to emerge. You can't legislate for decency, but you can create the kinds of frameworks within which people are more likely to be decent to one another.

I think this is the tricky situation which both our Labour government and certain wings of the church find themselves: they feel so threatened by some external power (terrorism / biblical liberalism) that they panic and want to legislate hard in an attempt to protect us. I currently feel that I'd rather enjoy freedom and decent human rights / civil liberties and be blown up a free man, than be safely cocooned in a tight-assed, Orwellian world.

Technorati: Liberal | Prospect

"The Man Who Betrays God is the Stronger of the Two"

I've been reading some Yeats recently. In his short play, Calvary, Jesus is confronted by Judas as he walks with his cross:

Judas: I betrayed you because you seemed all powerful.

Jesus: My Father,
Even if now I were to whisper it,
Would break the world in his miraculous fury
To set me free.

Judas: And there is not one man in the wide world who is not in your power?

Jesus: My Father put all men into my hands.

Judas: That was the very thought that drove me wild.
I could not bear to think that you had but to whistle
And I must do; but after that I thought,
'Whatever man betrays Him will be free';
And life grew bearable again. And now
Is there a secret left that I do not know,
Knowing that if a man betrays a God
He is the stronger of the two?

It's a strange play, from a strange poet, but this passage seems to encompass all the problems of free will and divine omnipotence so beautifully. I've yet to read Pete's new book - funny, my complimentary copy just doesn't seem to be forthcoming (the measly git) - but I wonder if we can see some of that fidelity in Judas' thoughts here: subverting God, precisely because God 'seemed all powerful'... and in that bizarre power-struggle of free will and knowledge, God allowing himself to be subverted. As I write in Signs of Emergence, I think Judas has been wrongly tarred by Christianity, and actually can serve as a very helpful, if troubled, mirror onto our own misconstructions of God and God's power.

Technorati: Jesus | Judas | Calvary | Rollins | Yeats

Saviour Sibling?

A bill regarding the use of human embryos is currently passing through parliament at the moment, and, naturally, causing a huge amount of debate. One piece on the BBC caught my ear the other morning - a Bishop was asked what he thought about the creation of so-called 'saviour siblings': human beings created for the sole purpose of saving another. And I thought, this is going to be interesting, how is a Christian going to respond to that?

He didn't go there of course, but it remains a difficult area of theology: is Jesus just a 'saviour sibling'?

Technorati: Embryo | Saviour Sibling

Don't Piss About London: Vote Ken Or The Monkey Gets It.

London goes to the polls this week. While the rest of the country has local council elections, London votes for its Mayor. It's the biggest directly-elected budget-holding post in the UK: £13 billion annually to spend, employing 103,000 people and a £39billion transport investment programme over the next 10 years.. And there are some massively key decisions to make which will impact on London for generations: the nature of the cross-rail project, the renewal of the contracts for the modernisation of the Tube...

And people are still seriously thinking of voting for Boris Johnson? Don't piss about London - this is serious.

Let's be clear - I really like Johnson. He's very funny, and articulate on TV. But he's simply no idea, or experience, of the complexity of running of major urban economy. The biggest job he's previously held is editor of The Spectator. While doing so he gave a lot of support and work to one Andrew Gilligan. Gilligan currently works on the Evening Standard, and has spent the past 17 weeks writing the most vitriolic attacks on the current Mayor, Ken Livingstone. The Evening Standard is the only proper London evening newspaper, and their hugely biased campaign has been disgusting.

Ken is no angel - he likes a drink, and a couple of his people have been less than perfect - but Boris would wilt in a day under the same scrutiny. Boris is:

• prone to terrible gaffes, mostly on the issue of race. Not what you need in the most diverse city in Europe.

• a political chameleon, who has u-turned his way through elections since his student days.

• a useless economist, who has screwed up the figures on his flag-ship transport joke policy.

• given to violence. It is well known he offered to sort out 'disposing of' someone who had offended a friend.

So, London, don't piss about here. If you live in London, explore the issues properly and I'm sure you'll Vote Ken, and put Green at number two. The Boris joke is over. We need more than a monkey in charge. And if you know someone who lives here, make sure you tell them to get out and do something sensible with their ballot.

Technorati: Boris Johnson | Evening Standard | Gilligan | Ken Livingstone | London | Mayor

The New Conspirators

There are lots of reasons why you really should go and buy Tom Sine's new book 'The New Conspirators', and none of them are that it's got a quote from me telling you to on the back.

One of them would be that I think it's the best looking Christian book I've seen for ages. Really good design work. Unfortunately, the US version is the usual pap, so you'll have to go direct to Paternoster and get the one that'll properly grace your shelves.

Another would be that Tom Sine is a genuinely incredible person. Carson can talk about 'Becoming Conversant With the Emerging Church', and others can prattle on about the emerging conversation; Sine actually is conversant with a massive number of people from around the world. When he tells stories, people ought to listen.

When the great book of life is opened, some would see it that it'll be the stellar Christians like Mclaren, Baker, Rollins and Wallis who should get all the plaudits. I wouldn't want to take anything away from any of them, but quietly, 'one mustard seed at a time' Tom has been actually inspiring people to do the stuff. It's a quiet, background role, perhaps, but I think if you could trace the significance of his words and actions through all the things that have happened because of them, you'd have quite an amazing list. Vaux certainly owes him its existence in many ways.

So go buy the book and get some low down on the real stuff people are doing beyond the spun-sugar of so much else that markets itself as the emerging conversation. And you'll have a nice looking cover to boot too.

Technorati: Carson | Sine | Rollins

Rollins' New Book Gets Pulped. Ouch.

Poor old Pete - seems like some Fundie at the printers for his new book has taken exception to the title of his new book 'The Fidelity of Betrayal', done some reworking, and sent it out to stores as 'The Betrayal of Fidelity.'

Ouch. That's gotta hurt sales.

Both copies have been pulped.

New MA at Kings

Kings College have a new MA which they wondered if I'd be happy to flag up, which I am.

It's in 'Politics, Theology and Faith-Based Organisations', and you can read more about it in the doc attached below.

Time and Chance | Theology | Sport

It's been a huge day of sport in the UK. Depressingly the team I support got dumped out of a cup competition, and England were also beaten in a big rugby international by Scotland. But later on, Jonny's team - who've had literally hundreds of millions of pounds spent on players since being bought by a Russian oligarch - were beaten by a tiny side from a league below them, and dumped out of the cup too.

Joy and sorrow. Adrenaline and depression. Highs and lows. Season after season. It never ends.

Prospect, the politics/culture/arts magazine I subscribe too have recently begun a monthly sports column, having argued that it was about time it enjoyed the same cultural weight as the performing arts, and to be judged by the normal standards of public life.

I have a good sporting rapport with lots of people within church circles, and Jonny and Jordon blog some sports too, but, as in cultural life, it is really ignored as a theological locus, unlike literature, music or art. I'm beginning to wonder why this is. Part of the trickster in me wonders if it's just because the effete bookish types who ended up theologians were always the last to get picked for playground teams in school (though Camus had been a promising player). Perhaps it's something deeper.

Mentions of sport in the Bible are few and far between. Paul talks a bit about running the race... but it's hardly the taking part he thinks that counts. He races to win, not wanting to 'run like a man running aimlessly... I beat my body and make it my slave.' (1 Cor 9) We don't see Jesus ever doing something so frivolous as take part in a game of anything. Was this because society had such little time for leisure? As a Roman, Paul would have been more used to the idea of a successful culture creating leisure time due to its riches, and thus giving time for sport, for playful shows of strength and skill.

Hard edges of the church have looked down on sport in the past, seeing it variously as too sensual, too close to passion. And yet many of the UK's leading football teams can trace their roots back to evangelical men's clubs and the 'muscular Christianity' they promoted to keep the working class out of trouble and pubs. Perhaps it's harsh on those who gave so much to that work, but the hangover I've sensed seems to be a rather patronising attitude to sport: it's good for you, it'll probably keep you out of trouble, but it's got nothing really to do with faith.

Which leaves me wondering why I'm passionate about it, or, more accurately, why I've allowed myself to become more passionate about it, in inverse proportion to my proximity to evangelicalism.

I wonder if the answer might be in Ecclesiasties 9, where the sage says:

I have seen something else under the sun:
The race is not to the swift
or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise
or wealth to the brilliant
or favor to the learned;
but time and chance happen to them all.

Time and chance. These are the twin curses of the sports fan: all victories are temporal. Each season has to be fought again from scratch each year, and past glories mean little. And, no matter what we might say, so much is down to chance. That 'goal of the month', that incredible shot, that goal - we can claim some great skill, but really we know that 99 times out of 100 it would not have come off, would have scuffed off a boot into the stands.

And this is where I think sport gives us a great theological grounding: the race is not to the swift. God does not play for us, does not ram the ball home and his riches do not guarantee victory. The highs and lows, the passing seasons, are part of this marathon. We must enjoy them, and yet, as all sports fans know, not ride hubris-high and expect some final victory. Not yet. Not in this advent, in this now and not yet...

So I think it's about time sport was taken more seriously. I'm done with people patronising the passion, the partisanship, the emotional energy, longing for us to turn our minds to higher things. It's about codes, about being bound to a team. They had a word for this binding, this commitment to something in Latin. Religare. That's right. Sport is a religion. And, as such, informs faith. So, anyone want to bat some theology of sport around? Or it is just me convinced God is right into Man United? (Sorry, couldn't resist ;-)

PS - Nick Hornby, in his brilliant monthly column 'What I've Been Reading' talks about Ed Smith's What Sport Tells Us About Life in this month's Believer. Hilarious. And helpful encouragement that I'm not mad.

Technorati: Art | Chance | Prospect | Sport | Theology

The Nicene Creed | Constantine and the Beginnings of Power Religion

Last April, in the build-up to Easter, I posted a series of thoughts about Jesus and Paul's journeys toward Jerusalem, and the very different attitudes they took when arrested there. I argued that in Paul's 'strategising' to get himself to Rome, we see the conception of power-Christianity, which perhaps came to full birth with the rise of Constantine and his assimilation of Christianity as a political and military tool.

For those interested in exploring this further, I highly recommend listening to this episode of the fantastic BBC programme 'In Our Time', which discusses the Nicene Creed. What's fascinating is how this statement of faith was actually itself a set of statements designed to allow certain Bishops to 'sign up' to the view of faith Constantine wanted. It was 'delicate theology and robust politics.'

As such, it too is couched in politically loaded language, and thus, as the contributors point out, a creed that helped move Christianity from a religion of peace, to one of war and power; from a 'sea of boats all moving on their own tacks generally toward belief in Jesus, to one mothership, which demanded this creed as a boarding pass.

As you may know, the council was called in part to deal with the 'Arian Heresy', and Arius himself became a figure of hate in the Church. He died in a public toilet as his bowels exploded, and the church later set up a statue of him on that site, encouraging people to piss and shit on him. Nice touch that. Just what Jesus would have done.

 

Crazy for God | Frank Schaeffer at Greenbelt 08

"I'd rather be arrested for shoplifting than ever be an evangelical leader again. There was a certain basic and decent honesty about stealing pork chops that selling God had lacked."

It's only March, I know, but I'll put a punt on Crazy for God still being one of my top 5 books of 2008 in December.

The subtitle, "How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back", pretty much sums the book up nicely. Frank is, of course, the son of the massively influential Christian leader Francis Schaeffer, who was a profound influence on my parents and their generation's view of faith. Francis Schaeffer set up 'L'Abri' in Switzerland where everyone who was anyone hung out at some point in the 60's. The Rolling Stones, Led Zep, Os Guinness and every other star in the Christian constellation all passed by there to argue faith and culture with Francis and the L'Abri workers.

While Frank skiied, avoided school, hit on the scores of girls who passed through and scored with plenty of them, and his right hand too. This is what makes Crazy for God such a refreshing read: here's someone from the true Christian royalty actually telling it like it is, with all the sex drugs and rock and roll edited in. If you don't want the honest truth about a teenager helping a disabled friend jack off, praying for him to be healed by emptying a jar of oil over his head and ruining his clothes in the process, then this book isn't for you.

But if, like so many in the emerging movement, you've wrestled with your parents' faith, wildly oscillated between crazed commitment - and Frank does a very good job outlining how he did set up the Religious Right, and exactly what he thinks of it now - and total rejection, then you'll absolutely love it. Indeed, as the US heads into election fever again I'd say this should be required reading for all who are looking for their candidate to back up their faith perspective. Here's a book by someone who really knows, and has really been through it: extraordinary childhood, celebrity, acclaimed artist, teenage father, Hollywood director, jet-setting evangelical speaker... and he gave it all up, and had so much taken away, and did end up stealing pork chops.

It's a genuine laugh-out-loud read, moving, committed and written like the proper novelist he is (and if you haven't read Portofino, you must) and I'm really excited that he's agreed to come to Greenbelt this summer. That's reason enough to get your ticket now, before the March discount deadline ends.

Technorati: Francis Schaeffer | Frank Schaeffer | Religious Right

Sort it out gays - stop destroying earth!

The Telegraph reported recently that an Israeli MP has blamed the recent spate of earthquakes in the Middle East on gays. The Knesset has recently repealed various laws about homosexuality, and this created the siesmic events.

Gays were also to blame for flooding in Britain last year, according to one Bishop, and one might also argue that with their thrusting steel tubes penetrating and bringing down two of America's largest twin erections, 9/11 was some sort of twisted stunt to highlight the destructive power of gay love, a judgement on liberal America, if you will.

So sort it out gay people - we don't want more floods and earthquakes and terror attacks! Stop it!

The Mergees - Sort it out Emergent, We Want an Award Ceremony

So the Oscars have been wept along to, and we've had the BAFTAs and the BRITs and the Grammys... I think people are missing a trick here. Come on Emergent, give us an award ceremony! We demand a tacky hotel and venue, with numbered tables, free alcohol and cut away shots to Andrew Jones as he shuffles when the Lifetime Achievement category approaches!

Someone should design a gong... I reckon a brass cast of a tea light should do it.

And the award for Best Use of a Video Projector in a Badly Lit Space goes to...

Further categories and nominations welcome. The 'Mergees' start here...

Technorati: BAFTA | Emergent | Oscars | TSK

What Are The 'Grand Challenges' for Theology for the 21st Century?

Wired reported a couple of days ago on the conclusions of Google co-founder Larry Page's working group on improving life on earth, and the list of '14 Grand Engineering Challenges of the 21st Century'. They included things like making solar energy affordable, reverse-engineering the brain and providing energy from fusion. Energy, quality of life, quantity of life, in summary.

This got me thinking: what might a list of the grand theological challenges of the next 100 years look like? Well, I'm no Larry Page, but I mailed out a bunch of people in my address book, texted and called a few others, and had lunch with one, asking them, very simply, what they thought should be on the list.

Actually, not that simply. Because I also asked if they thought whether such a list could even be created. Page's list is more simple: science - our knowledge of our physical world - does progress. We have better materials and technologies than we used to. But has our understanding of God actually moved forward? Or do people simply dig ever-deeper into their rutted positions?

So what did people say? You can find the unexpurgated version here, but, edited down a little:

Brian Maclaren (writer) Grappling with Jesus' good news of the kingdom of God, realizing how it differs from the popular Western gospel of "how to go to heaven after you die and be happy and successful until then.

Nic Hughes (designer) I wish that someone, some group, something, somewhere would develop a theological project that captured the imagination. All the good ideas are elsewhere. Cross-discipline theological labs please?

Vanessa Elston (teacher) In very basic terms how do we move from a reformation/protestant/enlightenment emphasis on the salvation of the individual to one of communal participation in salvation.

Rowan Williams and Sharia Law

Archbishop Rowan is getting huge amounts of flack for his comments on a selective use of some parts of Sharia law in certain communities in the UK. Typically, his arguments, based on some serious reading, have been caricatured and turned into shock headlines. Which suggests he was perhaps ill-advised - this sort of reaction was bound to happen.

"This means that we have to think a little harder about the role and rule of law in a plural society of overlapping identities....I have been arguing that a defence of an unqualified secular legal monopoly in terms of the need for a universalist doctrine of human right or dignity is to misunderstand the circumstances in which that doctrine emerged, and that the essential liberating (and religiously informed) vision it represents is not imperilled by a loosening of the monopolistic framework....

In conclusion, it seems that if we are to think intelligently about the relations between Islam and British law, we need a fair amount of 'deconstruction' of crude oppositions and mythologies, whether of the nature of sharia or the nature of the Enlightenment. But as I have hinted, I do not believe this can be done without some thinking also about the very nature of law. It is always easy to take refuge in some form of positivism; and what I have called legal universalism, when divorced from a serious theoretical (and, I would argue, religious) underpinning, can turn into a positivism as sterile as any other variety. If the paradoxical idea which I have sketched is true - that universal law and universal right are a way of recognising what is least fathomable and controllable in the human subject - theology still waits for us around the corner of these debates, however hard our culture may try to keep it out. And, as you can imagine, I am not going to complain about that."

The speech is an important one about how we respect difference, and, in particular, how people with allegiances to multiple to frameworks (Britain, Islam...) might benefit from a legal system that accommodates them. In fact, such a system already exists in an ad hoc sense, both in terms of Judaism and Islam, and he is simply suggesting a formalising of it. Is this concept too threatening to our identity as good Christian Brits? Is 'the law' all we've got left?

Don't knee-jerk. Read the full text here.

Technorati: Islam | Rowan Williams | Sharia

Power Religion | Food | The Hunter-Gatherer Eucharist [5]

Power Religion [1] | Power Religion [2] | Power Religion [3] | Power Religion [4]

So, how might we try to gather some of this together into a ritual, a performance, a remembering worthy of the rich tapestry of signs it suggests? I think, firstly, we have to humbly accept that we simply never will do this most mysterious meal full justice. But secondly, we must commit ourselves to trying. The bland, tasteless bread and wine that is served at many of the churches throughout the world is appropriate for the bland and tasteless act of weak theatre that communion has so often become. Here is a ritual, a commandment, an act of collective memory, an enactment that has so much power... and it demands that we don't allow it to be neutered.

The memories that we are working with are loaded with paradox. We remember a man dying, a bloody sacrifice, an injustice... and commemorate the beginning of our reconciliation, the breaking of elements that draw us together. In these posts we have been thinking about the bread and wine acting as prompts for grief at our domestication of the earth, our spread of cultural mediocrity and blandness where there was such vibrant diversity. We have also seen how they suggest to us the breaking of the hunter-gatherer God. (Something I haven't touched on is the symbolism of Jesus as the 'lamb of God' - Diamond makes the case for domestication of animals like sheep as a root cause of much human disease, and thus responsible for the wiping out of many times more indigenous peoples than European guns.)

I wonder then if the Hunter-Gatherer Eucharist ought to contain within it more 'savage' elements. Rather than eating fine bread, perhaps we might incorporate a battering of the wheat, a physical milling and breaking of the grain into flour. Rather than sipping fine wine, we might similarly trample grapes, and thus get back to the raw materials and processes involved in food production. Alternatively, we might celebrate with found or scavenged items. Freegans collect and eat discarded food from dumpsters behind restaurants. There is risk here, and dirt, and life.

The Hunter-Gatherer / Food Producer distinction does not simply exonerate the Hunter-Gatherer as some wild and truer way of life. Food production began in part because the hunters had exterminated most of the large, passive mammals that once roamed the earth. And food production has led us to have to get along, to be interdependent, rather than simply killing the stranger.

So we must also turn the Eucharist into a meditation on our own use of resources. Are we living lightly on the earth, or are we feasting from it? Are we drinking fine wine and ripping into fresh bread as exponents of a religion of power, or are we partaking in the body of Christ, the body of the hunted, the broken, the condemned, the poor, the misunderstood, the dying prophet who, like a grain of wheat, fell to the ground and had to be buried before bearing wild fruit?

I hope for one that my eating of this strange meal might lean more toward the latter, and somehow sow the seed within it, as Christ's eating did, the downfall of power religion.

Thanks for journeying on this little series.

Technorati: Anarchy | Body of Christ | Guns, Germs and Steel | Hunter-Gatherer | Jared Diamond | Power | Agriculture

Power Religion | Food | The Hunter-Gatherer Eucharist [2]

Power Religion [1]

You might be wondering what the hell the last post was about, and where I'm going with this. Join the club.

In the previous post, I outlined Diamond's basic thesis in Guns, Germs and Steel, and retold the story of Pizarro's conquest of the Inca Emperor Atahuallpa. But what is the significance?

The pertinent question is this: how could 160 Europeans overcome 80000 Inca soldiers? The answer is simple: they'd domesticated horses, and had guns. But why had Europeans ended up doing this, and not the Incas? Were the Incas less intelligent?

Power Religion | Food | The Hunter-Gatherer Eucharist [1]

It's been out for about a decade now, but I finally got round to reading Jared Diamonds' book Guns, Germs and Steel. I think it's excellent.

The basic thesis, for those who haven't read it, is that humanity, having developed out of the same group of lucky apes a long time back, has obviously developed in radically different ways in different areas, and, rather than attributing the fact that it was Europe that conquered Africa and the Americas (rather than the other way round) to innate racial differences, it is the environments that these peoples evolved in that led to the Europe being so 'successful' and powerful.

I'm not going to blog through the book, but one aspect of it - the link between the evolution of farming, food technology and power that Diamond establishes - has prompted in me a series of posts about this and the link to power religion, and the eucharist in particular. We'll see how we go.

2008 will be about...

...action on climate change; governments will admit it will hurt

...reaction against privacy breaches: overuse of CCTV / government data-loss

...reaction against the classical liberal agenda: immigration caps / multiculturalism as a worthy but more-difficult-than-we-thought project / communitarianism

...serious criticism of democracy as a way of getting things done

...the collapse of the emerging church as a popular project

...nanotechnology: virtually invisible, DNA-scale activity, and thus:

...nanofaith

...convergence: collapse of email/mobile/facebook/blog/linkedin/yada into synched platforms

...the realisation that, as McLuhan foresaw, "technologies are not simply inventions which people employ, but are the means by which people are re-invented," and thus a retreat from screen-time, and thus:

...paradox.

Or... what do you think?

Technorati: McLuhan

Sometimes Facebook Makes You Weep...

Poor thing!

Technorati: Facebook

In Praise of Eccentricity

Just back from a wonderful weekend in the depths of Wales. I didn't find RS Thomas, or any great rural epiphany, but, in keeping with the joys of weekends in other people's houses, had a great time dipping into some books.

The most enjoyable was Edith Sitwell's English Eccentrics*. It's an eccentric volume itself, but delicious for that difference. The Folio edition I was perusing began with a quote from John Stuart Mill:

"In this age the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time."

The quote comes from his 1859 book 'On Liberty', where he regularly rages against 'custom', believing it leads to conformity, and thus lack of freedom:

"Even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes."

Eccentricity simply means 'having a different centre'. For this reason alone, and with no thought for wanting to be 'quirky' or 'different', I'd like to sing in praise of being eccentric. Within this definition it is only the eccentric who can speak prophetic criticism. It is only the eccentric who can, by the gravity of their thought, draw close and change the orbit of the masses. Bauman writes in Liquid Life of "the mind-boggling quandary of having to mark oneself out as an individual, while also remaining obviously an acceptable part of the group" and it is this pressure that draws us into predictable, one-dimensional orbits. Being such a satellite around such a large mass is safe, yes, but cold and life-less.

The force to break away from this comes in two forms. The greater force, perhaps, is the gravity of the a-centrics, the vacuous cult of celebrity that tempts us with ideas of total freedom: responsibility-free sex, rootless trans-atlantic existence and the exultation of form over content. But nothing can have no centre, save nothing itself.

So it is down to the eccentric, the differently centred, the 'dirty trickster' as my book would have it, to provide some alter-orbit. The physics is clear on this: the closer this eccentric orbit swings to the other mass, the greater its changing effect. Eccentricity is not an excuse for seclusion or flight, but an invitation to challenge the prose-flattened, cathode-ray world with some vital poetry.

[* The book. Not the online fashion store. Urgghhhh.]

Technorati: Eccentricity | Eccentrics | Mill | Sitwell

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America

Very interesting article by Nicholas Guyett, around Chris Hedges' book in the current issue of the London Review of Books. Hedges was a theology student, and is also a very experienced war reporter.

Well worth a read, or buy the book here.

"According to Hedges, we may be only one cataclysmic event away from a total reordering of American politics and a takeover by the theocrats. Many of the Christian conservatives I spoke to last year fully expect another 9/11, but their gloomy view of the future has more to do with Ezekiel than the Fox News Channel."

Technorati: Christian Right | Fascism | Fox News | Hedges | 9/11

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

Life For Free (as long as the poor keep buying) | Ad(non)Sense

Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised by the news today that Virgin Atlantic are soon to announce a free trans-atlantic service. On each flight, a small number of fee-free passengers will simply have to put up with being pinned into their seats having commercials fired at them for the entire trip. Like the NYT, the WSJ and London's FT, they are simply following the same business model that makes a free-to-use site like Facebook 'over $10bn': we get life without paying, as long as we put up with commercials.

The Two Halves of Life

"In the first half of my life I fought the Devil. In the second half, I fought God."
Nikos Kazantzakis

Angst about sin and purity; worries about traditions and who's in and who's out; individuation, desperation to innovate, neophilia.
And now something... other.

I am exploring.

Technorati: Jung | Kazantzakis | Rohr

Is Your Faith Endo- or Exoskeletal?

Manuel de Landa, in his brilliant book A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History writes of the two skeletons that humankind have developed. Our endo(internal)skeleton "made new forms of movement control possible, freeing [us] to conquer every available niche." Later, around 8000 years ago, we then developed the urban exo(external)skeleton, whereby "bricks of sun-dried clay became building materials for homes [...] and defensive walls."

Snails have exoskeletons. A protective shell within which to hide. Our early cities were simply exoskeletal defensive structures to protect communities against constant pillage and plunder, thus allowing culture and community to grow.

Mammals have developed endoskeletons. Non-protective, they instead allow huge improvements in a body's motion control. We can stand, run, hold, sew, build.

So, in the manifestation of the Body of Christ that you are a part of, is that body endo- or exoskeletal? Is it there as hard external shell to protect and shield us from the plundering of 'the world'? Or is it an internal strength, allowing new forms of motion control, allowing a gathered people to join and stand and build?

The question is pertinent for all of our networks. Are they protective covers that help us feel connected, but prevent real engagement, and are they in fact in danger of being so big-boned that they crush us into inactivity?

Technorati: de Landa | Endoskeleton | Non-Linear History | Exoskeleton

The-No-Longer-Interested-Spouse-of-Christ

As I have mentioned here before, I have recently written an article about Facebook (and other social networks) for Third Way. I sent a copy of it to a simian friend of mine based in the US – who I naturally keep up with mostly via the internet – and her response to a passage where I outline the danger of the Body of Christ ending up simply as ‘the buddy of Christ’ I found really engaging:

I think the Western Church has become something even worse than the “buddy of Christ” I think we’ve become the no-longer-interested-spouse of Christ.  The partner who is so disengaged in the relationship that they are dissolved in apathy and not even interested in divorce but have resigned themselves to a love-less, passion-less living out the rest of their days.  I don’t mean to be a doomsayer but I must say that is what strikes me when I interact with most people in normal American churches, not to mention the feeling that I get when I have to sit in a service.

I found this profoundly moving actually, and quite uncomfortable to read. Which usually means it needs reading and digesting slowly and thoughtfully.

There has been a lot of discussion - virtually around the web, and at almost every party/function/whatever I've been to in the last few weeks - about the digital tsunami that appears to be drowning people.