The Complex Christ | Signs of Emergence

iPod | Cake

"You don't walk into a cake shop, stick your finger in the middle and take a bit. That's bad manners."

Elvis Costello on the iPod generation.

Technorati: Costello | Elvis | iPod

Down to the Green Darkness

I'm in Ireland at the moment, finishing a novel, staying with a great friend who lives on the north coast. Yesterday evening we went surfing - one of those things I enjoy but do not well - and when I got back I'd had another email from a regal friend containing an article from Anne Lamott. She's a great writer, and in a piece about Easter had written "Life happens, death happens, and then new life happens"; a beautiful summary of Christianity.

But it was this poem by RS Thomas that really moved me. I've been playing with a poem about the ocean since a few lines came to me while out in the surf in Polzeath, Cornwall, over the summer. And, as I think I've written here before, there's a section in the book I'm writing where the protagonist looks out at the sea and muses that humanity is really no more than an irritant on the surface of the earth, and that, having climbed out of the oceans millennia ago, the oceans are simply going to rise and take us back.

But Thomas puts things so much better:

I have this that I must do
one day; overdraw on my balance
of air, and breaking the surface
of water go down into the green
darkness to search for the door
to myself in dumbness and blindness
and uproar of scared blood
at the eardrums. There are no signposts
there but bones of the dead
conger, no light but the pale
phosphorus, where the slow corpses
swag. I must go down with poor
purse of my body and buy courage,
paying for it with the coins of my breath.

Technorati: Ocean | Lamott | RS Thomas | Surf | White Rocks

Don't Even Think What the Theology Graduate Would Ask...

The graduate with a Mathematics degree asks, "Why does it work?"
The graduate with a Science degree asks, "How does it work?"
The graduate with an Engineering degree asks, "How does one build it?"
The graduate with an Accounting degree asks, "How much will it cost?"
The graduate with an Arts degree asks, "Do you want fries with that?"

Technorati: Mathematics | Graduate

Salvaged Faith ¦ Baptized in Arial Black ¦ RS Exam Bloomers

We've been having school examinations the past week. I had to mark a bunch of scripts (the kids are 11/12 years old) of an RS paper on Christianity. Some of the answers were just priceless:

 

In a series of questions on parts of a church - what is an altar, what is a pulpit...

What is a font?

"I'm not sure what font they wrote the Bible in, but I reckon it was probably Times New Roman or Arial Black or something."

Genius. Though the cynical francophone atheist might have prefered 'Comic Sans' ;-)

 

What is the Salvation Army?

"The Salvation Army are a bunch of people who salvage Christians."

I think this is going to be a key emerging market! Anyone think their faith needs salvaging? Not sure how much I'd get for mine...

 

 

Technorati: RS | Exam | Bloomers | Font

Divine Comedy vs Divine Tragedy

In a great piece of polemic, Julian Gough has written in Prospect this month about the tendency for Western literature to express itself in the tragic, rather than the comic:

"Two and a half thousand years ago, at the time of Aristophanes, the Greeks believed that comedy was superior to tragedy: tragedy was the merely human view of life (we sicken, we die). But comedy was the gods' view, from on high: our endless and repetitive cycle of suffering, our horror of it, our inability to escape it. The big, drunk, flawed, horny Greek gods watched us for entertainment, like a dirty, funny, violent, repetitive cartoon. And the best of the old Greek comedy tried to give us that relaxed, amused perspective on our flawed selves. We became as gods, laughing at our own follies.

"But, since the middle ages, western culture has overvalued the tragic and undervalued the comic. This is why fiction today is so full of anxiety and suffering. It's time writers got back to the serious business of making us laugh."

The article is flawed. For one thing it itself contains no jokes; it also fails to mention Shakespeare, whose comedies did light up the Middle Ages. More importantly, Gough's thesis appears to be that the reason we have so little comedy is that 'God has died':

To have the gods laughing at us through our fictions is acceptable if the gods are multiple, and flawed like us, laughing in recognition and sympathy: if they are Greek gods. But to have the single omnipotent, omniscient God who made us laughing at us is a very different thing: sadistic, and almost unbearable. We do not wish to hear the sound of one God laughing. The western comic novel has often had a harsh, judgemental edge. Swift has a hint of Yahweh about him. But the recent death of God has freed a lot of space for the comic novel.

Actually, I think the whole thesis could be framed in reverse: the reason we have so little comedy now is precisely because so few of the world's 'literati' that Gough delightfully mocks have any notion of the divine at all.

Either way, comedy is something we never did well in Vaux. And, having read Gough, I rather regret that. The Emerging Church at worship can take itself far too seriously. There is a rich comic vein in all dirt work, and especially in our often ridiculous practice ;-)

Technorati: Comedy | Divine | Gough | Greek | Prospect | Shakespeare | Vaux

Interview in 'Prospect' with Rowan Williams | Russia, Suffering & Personalism

"For most of us it’s a question of what authority we are prepared to recognise, and I think authority often comes from something endured, either by ourselves or someone else. Think of Nelson Mandela. Think also of Gee Walker, the mother of the murdered Liverpool teenager Anthony, who forgave her son’s killers. Suffering confers a certain authority. We learn from it. Dostoevsky is often accused of masochism. But he’s not saying suffering is good for you. He’s saying suffering is how you are likely to learn. Don’t be frightened when it happens to you."

Full text [here]

Technorati: Prospect | Dostoevsky | Rowan Williams

Why Does American Christianity Always Seem to Wait for the Real Thinking to be Done Elsewhere?

A few of us have been reading Marilynne Robinson's wonderful novel Gilead recently. I can't recommend it highly enough.

One episode jumped out at me last night. The trickster, the Prodigal perhaps, of the novel is debating faith with the protagonist, an old preacher, when he asks:

'Do you ever wonder why American Christianity always seems to wait for the real thinking to be done elsewhere?'

The preacher replies:

'Not really' I replied, which surprised me, since I have wondered that very thing any number of times.

They are referring, in part, to Barth's thinking, and the novel is set in the 50's. And I wondered if people thought there was any truth in that, or if still the case, or if things had changed? Is Pentecostalism America's unique gift to the church?

Technorati: American | Christianity | Gilead | Marilynne Robinson | Barth

Finally Teleportation is Possible ¦ So That's How Philip Did it

I've always gawped in wonder at the bit in Acts 8 where "the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away, and the eunuch did not see him again, but went on his way rejoicing. Philip, however, appeared at Azotus".

The only teleportation reference in the Bible?

Anyway, seems like they've finally worked out how to do it. A brilliant paper by a top US defense scientist on practical teleportation can be found here

Best quote from it:

A traveler stepping through the throat will simply be teleported into the other remote spacetime region or another universe (note: the Einstein equation does not fix the spacetime topology, so it is possible that wormholes are inter-universe as well as intra-universe tunnels)

In other words, we can teleport you. But we've no idea where you'll end up. Could be somewhere in this universe, could be somewhere in a parallel one.

Volunteers? If Apple release iTeleporter, who'll use it in a service first, Grace or Moot? My money would be on iKon turning up at Greenbelt and causing havoc with it ;-)

A Humanist Jesus?

Interesting post here, via Steven Johnson.

"Paul was wrong. Our faith is not foolish if Jesus is not literally and physically risen from the dead. We know our faith is true, because we know that death has not defeated him. As a humanist, I do not discard the rich legacy and richness of the Christian tradition, rather I claim to be the true heir to the Christian patrimony. Christians embrace a shallower version of Jesus. I know this because I continue to be transformed by Jesus's love and he continues to inspire my humanist faith"

Technorati: Humanism | Steven Johnson

Emerging Church Critique | David Byrne & Jesus Camp

Great to see a fabulous line up for critiquing the Emerging movement.

Eight.
White.
Men.

"I hope that the movement or conversation in its present form will increasingly divide between those who deeply and intelligently desire to be faithful to Scripture while learning to communicate the gospel to a younger generation, and those who, whether mischievously or ignorantly, happily domesticate and distort the Scripture because of their analysis of contemporary culture."

Thanks Don Carson, always nice to know you actually want more division.

[Un]Connectedly, thanks to Paul for this link to David Byrne on Jesus Camp.
His blog looks well worth an RSS.

Technorati Tags: David Byrne, David Byrne, Jesus Camp, puppy, Sexism

Let There Be (Solid State) Light

Let There Be (Solid State) Light

"I hope the award of this prize will help people to understand that this invention makes it possible to improve quality of life for many millions of people. This is not just a source of light that makes enormous energy savings possible, it is also an innovation that can be used in the sterilisation of drinking water and for storing data in much more efficient ways.

"It is estimated that it is possible to alleviate the need for 133 nuclear power stations in the US by the year 2025 if white solid-state lighting is implemented."

Technorati Tags: Environment, Technology

Democracy

From Malanda, via Barry Taylor

Pray this resolution is passed soon. And is respected more than some of the others passed in the region over the past few years.

Technorati Tags: Democracy, Israel, Justice, Lebanon, United Nations

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

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

Forget Flushing - Use Less

I recently posted a piece taking up Mayor of London Ken Livingstone's advice to only flush when really necessary.

Thanks to Jon who's just mail me this piece from The Guardian. It's pretty shocking. All that lovely coffee you drink? The rice we eat? The water required to produce these goods is astronomical. As a typical meat-eating, milk-guzzling westerner, I consume as much as a hundred times my own weight in water every day.

Technorati Tags: London, Environment, Sustainable Growth

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

Studying Religion

"Some people are sure that the world would be a better place without religion. I am not persuaded, because I cannot yet characterise anything that could replace it in the hearts of most human beings. (Perhaps we should try to eliminate music while we're at it. It inflames the passions and seduces many young people into wasted lives.) What people care about deeply deserves to be taken seriously. Exempting religion from scrutiny is actually a patronising way of declaring it to be all just fashion and ceremony."

From the exchanges between Daniel Dennett and Richard Swinburne, recorded in this article in Prospect.

Technorati Tags: Emerging Church, Science, Religion, Theology

"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

Is The Need to Create the Same as the Need to Save?

So asks Damnflanderz with his usual perception, responding to the post on Grizzly Man.

Thoughts?

I'd say there's some truth. But perhaps the need to create is the need to be saved?
Do we create to sanctify, or create to be sanctified? Or is sanctification not part of it?

"Where there is no gift, there is no art."
But where there is no creation, is there no salvation?

Technorati Tags: Art, Creativity

Dead Dick

This short sermon clip from Dick Lucas, vicar of St Helen's, Bishopsgate, just has to be listened to to be believed; had me in stitches and disbelief in equal measure. As Ian said, if he'd made this cock-up, he'd have to leave the job!

(For those aware of the high standing of this most respected of hard-line evangelicals, there is a extremely naughty element of schadenfreude that one probably ought not admit to ;[) )

Thanks to Ship of Fools, and Ian of Moot for posting it.

Technorati Tags: Blogs, Dick, Emerging Church, Sermon

What Would You Do With £4,500,000,000?

That's the value of the property portfolio of Church of England plc - the Church Commissioners.

I'm on an electoral roll... Am I a stakeholder? Can I pursuade the board to do certain things with the cash? I hate to ask, but WWJD?

Fine time to pay tribute to Tony Banks MP - a true Trickster voice in parliament - who quipped in 'Church Questions' in the House of Commons in 1996s, when it was revealed they'd lost hundreds of millions in poor investments:

"May I suggest that one way of maximising [Church Commissioner] income would be to build congregations? Perhaps the best idea would be to privatise the Church of England, to get in a regulator-- OfGod, or something like that--and a few consultants, and then start marketing a Lord who is suitable to the 21st century."

OfGod. Nice. Think they might have something to say about redistributing that 4.5 billion.

Winning the War?

"I declare that World War III is now being waged by short-haired robots whose deliberate aim is to destroy the complex web of free wild life by the imposition of mechanical order."

Timothy Leary in his Manifesto, written on escaping from prison and fleeing to Algeria.

I think we're gradually winning now, Tim. We got tags on our side.

Happy Chris™as Everyone!

Have a great few days. Here's to the Trojan Baby.

Caesarean Sections

The bitter old man stands at the gates of the earth
Waiting Watching

Guarding the only entrance and exit to this citadel planet.

The babies file in and the dead file out

And he watches them

Grimly keeping count.


He watches He waits

He shivers to shake

The tired cold from his limbs

For he must stay awake

For the one they say will attempt a salvation.


He keeps one eye on the horizon

On the distant reaches of the future

Where-from surely his nemesis will ride with armies

And demand entry:

The battle of the gates of the earth

So heighten awareness and tighten security and all the while…

He does not notice the infant God

Slipping in among the embryonic ranks

Of those awaiting entry.

Become powerless

To slip the trap of the powerful.


A Trojan baby

Now inside the citadel planet.

Waiting, hiding, growing

Evolving an inner salvation

(The original subversion)

© KB 2004

On Riches and Freedom | Faith and Direction

"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?"

Lech Walesa. On his first visit outside the Soviet bloc.

On Commitment vs. Involvement

"Do you know the difference between commitment and involvement?
Think of ham and eggs.
The chicken is involved. The pig is committed."

Martina Navratilova, interviewed in 1982.