30 April 2007

nouslife.blogspot.com, is worth

Nice ego massage, if only I believed it!
Your blog, nouslife.blogspot.com, is worth $35,566.02
How Much is Your Blog Worth at Dane Carlson's Business Opportunities Weblog

ERii reclaims Virginia

Without meaning any disrespect to the dead and traumatised, I couldn't help but think of a certain factoid about American independence when I read this...
Plans are being made for the Queen to meet survivors of the Virginia Tech shootings during an official state visit to the US next week, according to reports last night.
. Why is the British monarch visiting Virginia? Well, I'm told that Virginia never concluded a treaty with Britain at the end of the war of independence and so technically is still claimed, arguably, as a British sovereign territory. So, of course, she wants to comfort her subjects :-p
Queen to meet survivors of Virginia university massacre | higher news | EducationGuardian.co.uk

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29 April 2007

Been there, got the t-shirt somewhere ...

I'm in the age group described here as 'prime time' and, even though my context is Britain, I recognise this.
One doesn’t have to be on the pastors’ conference circuit long to figure out that prime-time clergy (ages forty to fifty-five), are marinated in this kind of thinking. They have been told repeatedly that this is the only leadership model that will ensure success. (And make no mistake: in new millennium America, success equals the greatest number of seats filled on Sunday morning.) Theirs is a mono-vocal, mono-vision world—one that affords the most uniformity and thus the most control. It is a world of hyperpragmatics where the ends (church growth) can justify the most dehumanizing of processes.

Actually, from the point of view of Evangelicals, I would have to say that those most attracted to the emerging church thing are probably those who feel in their bones that there is something wrong with doing church in that kind of way. I have to confess that I found being once upon a time in a church context where, in effect, I was expected to lead in that kind of way, was one of the more difficult pastoral contexts as it fitted ill with what I thought I was about, and what the church was meant to be about. So, when quietly I came to the conclusion that the church was running on empty in terms of the emotional and physical resources of its members, and quietly decided that Sabbath was in order for any that needed it, well, it caused consternation. But I still think I was right. I think that to lay the 'you will mount up on eagles wings' trip on them would amount to abuse and an attempt to put God to the test (by using God's apparent promises to undermine God's larger purposes).

I therefore was forced to the conclusion that God didn't necessarily will unlimited numerical growth, which implies that sometimes some numerical loss is right, particularly if that is associated with people finding ministries or pasture elsewhere (which did happen). I sometimes think that big churches actually tend to inhibit the growth of the kingdom by turning the many into passengers and weakening the smaller churches who can be more effective in their 'usage' and 'growing' of people.

And it is not edifying to find church leaders engaged in the status games related to church 'success'... we need ways to make ministry more collaborative for the health of pastors, ministers, presbyters and priests. And laity as a whole, come to that.
Shepherds or CEOs? | Out of Ur | Following God's Call in a New World | Conversations hosted by the editors of Leadership journal

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Appeal for the Establishment of a Parliamentary Assembly at the United Nations

Yes, I endorse the Appeal for the Establishment of a Parliamentary Assembly at the United Nations

And I encourage you to do so too ...
Take Action - Sign Appeal | Campaign for a UN Parliament

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You and me, both ...

Scot McKnight has an acquaintance who also finds himself with my dilemma.
I find myself constantly making caveats when I call myself an Evangelical to separate myself from a whole segment of the religious right. I might be an Evangelical in the tradition of John Stott or Mark Noll, but increasingly I feel like they’re in the minority. Maybe I should stop calling myself an Evangelical and just say that I generally have an Evangelical understanding of doctrine, but I don’t subscribe to much of the baggage that comes

Scot's interlocutor ends by saying, "I’m so sick of dealing with the mentality of conservative Christians…." and I know just what he means.
But then, I guess some people experience the same about me ...
It'll be interesting to see Scot's response.
Jesus Creed » Letters to Emerging Christians

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Human footprint

As I feared ...

I have opined before that I liked what Cameron was saying but really doubted that the Conservative party would be able to change as much as his rhetoric required. Well, it is beginning to look like those doubts may have been well-founded.
Friends of the Earth has just analysed the manifesto of the Scottish Conservatives and given it nought out of 10. That is an even worse result than the analysis of the Conservative party's voting record in the European Parliament - where much environmental law is determined - at the time of the 2004 elections. The Tories were not just the least green party in Britain, but the least green in the whole of Europe. At local level, Conservative councils are simply not heeding Cameron's green call. Even in his own constituency, the Tory West Oxfordshire council is cutting its recycling budget, despite having one of the worst recycling rates in the country. Tory Swale council is holding up the wind farm in the Thames estuary that would provide 1% of all the UK's electricity needs.

The real shame is that people will vote for this with a degree of feeling good about doing so partly because they think it would be good for the environment. However, it would appear that in actual fact it would be disastrous: the Tories will not have the environmental will power to resist the short-term profit-based calls to do things other than the right thing environmentally.
Blue won't be green | Guardian daily comment | Guardian Unlimited

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Cosmic ordering.

Here's a new spirituality offering I hadn't heard of before, though not a new way of looking at things.
Cosmic ordering, a belief that an individual can use his or her own desires to "connect with the cosmos" and bring them to reality,

The interest for me is the controversy about it being offered as a staff training workshop in a university setting. I'm interested because it reminds us that one of the marketplaces of ideas for spirituality in our society is training and personal development -and Christians have been signally bad at being in that agora. I'm interested too because I was, when I was a university chaplain, making efforts to enter that agora, with some success. Part of the point was precisely to conscientise staff development -indeed the university as a whole- about the ideological nature of all such offerings and to begin to tease out the implications for religious and spiritual diversity.
South Bank head defends 'cosmic ordering' workshop | higher news | EducationGuardian.co.uk

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Play, creativity and image of God

Thanks to John Moorhead for exploring in greater depth something that has been on the edge of my thinking radar for a while but which I've not been able to get to explore further yet.
The connection between human play and God’s creativity is significant for consideration of play as it is manifest at Burning Man. Theologians need not abandon the notion that something is dreadfully wrong with human beings as recorded in the biblical story and as evidenced by humanity’s devastating actions against themselves, nature, and Creator, but this aspect of the biblical narrative might be held in tension in contrast with the notion of co-creatorship so that a theology of play as an aspect of creativity of the imago Dei can be explored.

The whole posting is worth looking at, not least for the resources which are shown in greater detail in the comments.
Thanks, John, I'm looking forward to the book.
Morehead's Musings: Burning Man and Play Theology

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Alcohol and social norming

A number of us are not really surprised that there seems to be a social symbolic interaction dimension to drinking and alcohol use. It's good to see some scientific evidence on the matter.
"Many heavy drinkers mistakenly believe that their behaviour is more common than it actually is," Dr. Wild said. "By seeing how their alcohol use compares to actual population norms, this can motivate heavy drinkers to re-evaluate their use of alcohol."

Surely part of the issue about binge-drinking is a culture which validates and glories in drunkeness and has its own 'mythology' about it. I could go on about the way that behaviour is affected more by the 'permission' being drunk supposedly gives and the evidence that backs that up ... but I won't.
ScienceDaily: Help Comes In The Mail For Drinkers

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Now we see it ...

I'm surprised it has taken so long. Perhaps they wanted to make sure that this news only ended up on the less-read business pages rather than becoming a big political issue. But I think that this was the real point of the Iraq conflict.
Baghdad is under pressure from Britain and the US to pass an oil law which would hand long-term control of Iraq's energy assets to foreign multinationals, according to campaigners.

Iraq poised to hand control of oil fields to foreign firms | Business | The Observer

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28 April 2007

A world parliament?

I know that the postmillenialist of a tribulationist disposition will be horrified because this is just the kind of scenario certain writers have made lots of money infecting minds with. However, it ain't necessarily so. And to me the argument for looking at the issue is compelling and George Monbiot states it clearly:
Those of us who want a world parliament are often accused of trying to invent a system of global governance. But there is already a system of global governance. The UN Security Council, the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organisation make decisions which affect us all. They do so without our consent.

And later he writes,
No political issue now stops at the national border. All the most important forces – climate change, terrorism, state aggression, trade, flows of money, demographic pressures, the depletion of resources – can be addressed only at the global level. The question is not whether global decisions need to be made. The question is how to ensure that they are made democratically. Is there any valid answer other than direct representation?

Quite so. What we need, therefore is a way to hold them to account democratically. Though that is not done simply. However,
The purpose of a world parliament is to hold the international bodies to account. It is not a panacea. It will not turn the IMF or the UN Security Council into democratic bodies: as they are controlled by the veto powers of their major shareholder and permanent members, nothing but abolition and reconstruction could do so. But it does have the potential to impose a check on them. It wields no army, no police force, no weapons, no ready-made powers. Instead, it possesses something that none of the other global bodies have: legitimacy.

Ironically, I think this is a more 'Christian' way forward than the Left Behind abdication of responsibility which it seems to me, is merely a right-wing ideology hiding behind a decidedly dodgy approach to scripture hich may even owe more to Islam than to historic Christianity ... (ooh now there's a wind-up, ask me later).
Monbiot.com » No More Ventriloquists

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More recycling but people aren't happy

In the UK there are a lot of local authorities who now collect the household rubbish once a fortnight rather than once a week. Where this has happened, a lot of complaining has gone on. It seems to amount to the predictable dislike of having to change habits. However ...
A new analysis by the Local Government Association suggests that the 144 councils that collect household rubbish one week and food waste the next are managing to recycle or compost almost a third of what they pick up (30%). That compares with 23% among the authorities that are not using the new system.

I'm mainly concerned on a personal level that adequate opportunities to recycle are provided at the kerbside. For example, in our house, if only there were opportunities to recycle cardboard.
Fortnightly rubbish collection means more recycling, says government | Waste and pollution | Guardian Unlimited Environment

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Joint Christian and Muslim education?

Church Times - Christians and Muslims look at creating joint schools Looks potentially really significant. Watch this space for further developments. It makes a lot of sense: when I was in Bradford, quite a few CofE schools actually had a majority of Muslim-background children. So finding ways to honour that and build on it seems a logical way forward.
THE FIRST state-funded interfaith schools in Britain could open within three years.


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Atonement controversy rumbles on

I'm afraid that I strongly suspect that this has more to do with boundary maintenance by conservative evangelicals who appear to have captured UCCF at the moment and are paranoid enough to feel threatened by those whose commitment to the gospel and scripture has some differences with their own. So, as the Church Times reports it;
At the heart of the controversy over Mr Chalke’s views was his rejection of one understanding of penal substitutionary atonement as “a vengeful father, punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed”. He wrote: “The fact is that the cross isn’t a form of cosmic child abuse. Understandably, both people inside and outside of the Church have found this twisted version of events morally dubious and a huge barrier to faith.”
His book was denounced by the principal-elect of Oak Hill College, the Revd Mike Ovey, and two of his students, Steve Jeffery and Andrew Sach, in a response, Pierced for our Transgressions: Rediscovering the glory of penal substitution (IVP, 2007).
... Dr Wright says: “What has happened since the initial flurry of the debate about The Lost Message of Jesus has looked, frankly, like a witch-hunt, with people playing the guilt-by-association game: hands up anyone who likes Steve Chalke; right, now we know who the bad guys are.”

Quite so. As far a I can see the real beef is the popularised misrepresentation of the doctrine. Properly understood, the objections are met. For me the real problem is that it is so easy in the current cultural climate to misunderstand it. Only last night a grandmother was telling me how a grandson of hers was not going to church with his parents just now because he felt that a father who would ask his son to be crucified is monstrous. That's a nine-year old's view. We have a problem, folks. How do you explain the idea in terms a 9 year old can readily grasp? Indeed, recognise that for a lot of people, their understanding of religious ideas is not probably much advanced on that child.

My own thinking, at the moment, is that we need to place it all in the context of understanding forgiveness properly and a robust trinitarianism. Forgiveness is a choice by someone who is hurt not to demand recompense of the offender but to 'swallow'/'take' the hurt themselves. It is to choose to be hurt and not to 'export' that hurt to another. Maybe part of the problem is that our culture doesn't really understand forgiveness because we are much more into excuses and explaining away. We have culturally lost an understanding of forgiveness as choosing to hold the hurt and not to redirect it but rather to absorb it and to strive for the inner conditions to rebuild or maintain positive relations with the offender. It hurts to forgive. I suspect if it doesn't hurt, it isn't forgiveness.

How does this fit with the atonement. Well, simply put, I find it helpful at the moment to look at the cross and to see an effective icon of God absorbing the hurt of sin. That is the cross is playing out in spacetime the absorption of the hurt that sin causes. To forgive sin costs God, the cross is a showing forth and an actual experiencing and dealing with that cost. It is a cost to God and God is 'paying'.

The other dimension of forgiveness we do well to recall, is that love is not love that is not outraged by hurt done to the beloved. So if it is true that God deeply loves us, then any hurt, wrong, injustice outrages God just as it does us in our best moments. That outrage is what is traditionally called wrath. I would seriously doubt the love of anyone who does not feel righteous anger at the wilful damage of the beloved.

Now the complicating factor is that God just as passionately loves the abuser as well as the abused. And in a total picture we are all, to some extent and in different ways, abusers as well as abused. In identifying with us by love and incarnation, God is hurt by our abuse not only of our gifts from him but of each other. To forgive, God has to absorb the pain involved and refuse vengeful responses.

That's where I'm up to. I sense I need to push it further, but I think it's important.

One of the issues arising is whether this can translate to answer that 9 year old.

Church Times - Atonement row gets personal as Evangelical partnership splits

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Not For Sale

If like me, in the wake of the Bicentenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade by the British parliament,you were horrified to discover the extent of various forms of slavery still in the world, then this site may be for you. There's due to be a blog soon too.
Not For Sale

27 April 2007

Reframing Migration for good

I've made some of the points myself on various past posts relating to immigration and the like. But this says a lot that is worth thinking further about. It's from World Changing, a site I recommend as something you might consider subbing to the RSS of.
imagine all these enterprising, ambitious people, and all the money they send home (and all the institutions with which they interact to send it) being bent towards even more beneficial ends, becoming better, longer levers for really remaking the nations from which they're traveled into places of prosperity and sustainability. Imagine deciding to make migrant labor truly worldchanging.
Maybe we need to start to rethink migration, not in the light of the discussions we've had in the past (huddled masses and all), but in the light of a 21st Century, globally-intertwined society. Migrants, though they may be looking to better themselves, ought perhaps to be seen (here in the Global North) as our partners in creating the prosperity we expect; and we ought to perhaps regard our interactions with them as the best opportunity we have for global diplomacy and sustainable development. Indeed, I wonder if what we need most of all isn't a new social compact -- one which recognizes the necessity of migrant labor in maintaining the economic prosperity of the North, and seeks to directly and explicitly make the exchange a fair one, useful to both sides. That kind of honesty and fairness seems pretty far off today, I'll admit, but I think it's ultimately a pretty essential component of a world that works, and perhaps it's time that we started advocating for it.

Development agencies, take note.
The only caveat would be from the experience of Punjabi migrants in Britain. I recall seeing a film of the communities they had been sending money back to. Full of uninhabited luxury houses: the money had built the houses but the economic infrastructure was such that the families didn't want to stay but joined their emigrant family ... how to counteract and turn into a force for community development.
WorldChanging: Tools, Models and Ideas for Building a Bright Green Future: Can Migration Change the World?

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26 April 2007

The Secret is it's the latest version of prosperity teaching

By way of a 'heads up', watch out for the latest version of prosperity teaching.
The Secret is out, promising everything from bigger bank accounts to a spiritually fulfilling life, ... the “law of attraction” ... If you want, say, a million dollars, you must first think it. If you want to get out of debt, don’t think “debt.” It just attracts more.

Secret book attracts Christian fire

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URL shrinker that doesn't expire.

It's not just that you can dwarfURL - make your long URL's a lot smaller with dwarfURL's short URL service! but, having found that tinyURL links 'fail' after a while, I am pleased to discover this one guaratees that
your newly created link will never expire.
. You also get a history and can password protect.

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politics and culture of knowledge

Wikipedia represents the democratization of knowledge itself, on a global scale, something possible for the first time in human history. Wikipedia allows everyone equal authority in stating what is known about any given topic. Their new politics of knowledge is deeply, passionately egalitarian. Today's Establishment is nervous about Web 2.0 and Establishment-bashers love it, and for the same reason: its egalitarianism about knowledge means that, with the chorus (or cacophony) of voices out there, there is so much dissent, about everything, that there is a lot less of what "we all know." Insofar as the unity of our culture depends on a large body of background knowledge, handing a megaphone to everyone has the effect of fracturing our culture.

And the rider to that is:
As wonderful as it might be that the hegemony of professionals over knowledge is lessening, there is a downside: our grasp of and respect for reliable information suffers. With the rejection of professionalism has come a widespread rejection of expertise—of the proper role in society of people who make it their life's work to know stuff. This, I maintain, is not a positive development; but it is also not a necessary one. We can imagine a Web 2.0 with experts. We can imagine an Internet that is still egalitarian, but which is more open and welcoming to specialists. The new politics of knowledge that I advocate would place experts at the head of the table, but—unlike the old order—gives the general public a place at the table as well.

I suspect that is right: we are entering a period of a new negotiation where the way that we assess the bona fides of 'experts' opens up to a wider audience. It may be that knowledge professionals still get the benefit of the doubt, but in a world where problematisation is more to the forefront and awareness of the possibilities of seeing things differently. We need therefore to educate people to think and to do so Christianly. That does not mean parroting opinions but having a sense of the shape of doctrine and biblical history as well as being well-informed about matters of cultural significance such as science, politics and philosophy.

Of course the other issue implicated in this is that most people don't have the time, inclination or sometimes ability to be able to participate fully in the creation or dissemination of knowledge, so we have to rely on those who do. So it becomes an issue of accountability structures.

The article goes on to discuss the issue of Wikipedia's apparent 'epistemic egalitarianism'. The age long debate on knowledge, 'plausibility' and accessibility goes on.
Edge 208

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Media influence: more evidence

A further piece of evidence in the debate about media influence. It supports my contention that there is indirect influence of an indirect causal kind. In other words media influences by creating conditions where certain views and actions are given privileged status for consumers/users of media which then weigh in on subsequent decisions.
Food intake following the food adverts was significantly higher compared with the toy adverts in all weight groups, with the obese children increasing their consumption by 134%; overweight children by 101% and normal weight children by 84%. It was also found that weight dictated food preference during the experiment. Food of differing fat contents was made available to the children to eat at their own will, ranging from high fat sweet snacks to low fat savoury products. The obese group consistently chose the highest fat product - chocolate - whereas the overweight children chose jelly sweets which have a lower fat content, as well as chocolate.
I think what this further indicates is that there are people who are likely to be more susceptible to certain kinds of messages and that those who are most susceptible are more likely to respond more fully.

In other words, we are mimetic beings born with the drive to learn by imitation which morphs into a tendency to copy what we see or hear. It is in large part a driver of our social cohesiveness for good and for ill. It is an inescapable part of being social and as such is the psycho-biological mechanism for imaging God socially -or not! It is probably the main glue that holds human organisations together and as such is deeply implicated in the phenomenon many Christians refer to as Principalities and Powers...
ScienceDaily: TV Food Advertisements Increase Obese Children's Appetite By 134 Percent


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Geldoff's right; it is enlightened self interest

Of course enlightened self interest might be seen in a more ecological perspective as creating virtuous cycles. This is in response to the failings of G8 nations so far to make good on their pledges about aid to Africa at Gleneagles. The reason we should care, according to Bob is this.
"If we do not take a responsible and long-term view of Africa, and its need to develop and make progress, we will end up ultimately with our own self-interest back in countries like Germany and the UK being damaged as a result of the poverty, the conflict, the mass migration, the spread of terrorism and so on,"

It seems to me that we can choose death or life at the moment. Either we aim to increase world security by helping others or we spend our money on arms. (Which appears to be the current kind of thinking that is leading the developed nations: tool up ready for the unrest that climate change, less oil and no real change in poverty will bring).
In 2005, G8 pledged $50bn for Africa. Now the reality | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited

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Don't watch this if you're easily offended

It is irreverent humour and because it is ab/using the words of a hymn it could upset some people. For those not based in the UK, it's a clip from a programme called 'songs of praise' which originally was conceived, I think, as a way to bring Church to the housebound, or to indulge those who liked hymns but not church (quite a big demographic in the UK once upon a time, I suspect).

YouTube - SONGS OF PRAISE (WITH SUBTITLES)
What I find interesting about what has been done with this, is that bar a couple of lines, the subtitled substitutions 'sound' completely plausible. The words being sung are the actual hymn words, but the subtitled offerings actually sound such that it is hard to imagine what the singers actually are reading to sing from.

This is a good illustration of how our perceptions have a close relationship with our expectations: we don't perceive reality directly; it has to be mediated via sense-making mechanisms which fill in gaps and generally tidy up the raw data so we can use it for decision-making. Speech is a good example of this, and songs more so because the raw data can be very imperfect but the presumed ordered content is high; so we have a lot of potential help from grammar, phonology etc ... but it can go very wrong!


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What are godparents for?

I was hoping for more sociological and cultural analysis than celebrity gossip, but nevertheless the first para gives a little window into the matter that may be worth noting
Ordinary godparents are for ensuring your spiritual health, providing an extra source of presents for ungrateful children while they are growing up, and giving teenagers somewhere to storm off to when their real parents don't understand them.

I wonder how many godparents interpret the idea of 'ensuring your spiritual health'? In this parish, much is made of godparental duties. But as with most cases it is hard to get godparents to attend preparation, it may be a bit hit and miss. But centering preparation around the idea of spiritual health might be a fruitful metaphor to focus and drawing people to consider the gospel.
What is it to be healthy? How do the answers to that question map across to spirituality? Is there a helpful way of talking about the work of Christ that easily draws on that metaphor in such a way as to make the living out of it reasonably obvious?

What are godparents for? | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited

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23 April 2007

This I find strangely charming

There's something about the concept and the execution of these that really appeals to me.

I hope Michael Paulus doesn't mind me linking to one of his pictures in the interests of making his work better known. One of my sons is doing art (illustration) at college and he likes these too.

Here's what I want to say ...

Every so often, I come across something that says a shed-load of things that I tend to agree with and I want to stand up and shout, "hear, hear". So while the context of this piece is local elections in Glasgow and the candidacy of the British National party, the same points are the kind of things I would want the parents (or whoever is poisoning the minds) of the teenagers in year 10 I was until recently teaching about racism etc. Here's what Walton says. I've snipped pieces to focus on the things I'm really keen to amplify.
They say Glasgow is the asylum capital of the UK, and complain about 'bogus' asylum seekers streaming here to get everything handed to them on a plate, while poor honest British drunken scum languish without the price of the next pint.

That's just what annoys me about the fascist rhetoric; not only inaccurate but failing to point the finger at the feckless natives who, apparently want to complain about 'them' taking 'our' jobs but not actually wanting to do those jobs themselves -of which there are many- so they leave them to those who come in. Hark at me; sounding like a 1980s Tory!
You'd think Glasgow was a tropical paradise that everyone wanted to live in. It is the asylum capital of the UK - but that's because the city council takes asylum seekers because they have so much sub-standard accommodation - that locals won't live in - and get paid by central government to house them. ....

Too right. It makes me angry that 'we' then go and add to their trauma by victimising and scapegoating them. Sheesh.
Asylum seekers are generally fine human beings who have got into trouble for standing up for their principals in the world's trouble spots. And since British imperialism, past and present, economic, cultural and military, is the cause of much of the trouble in the world, the least Britain can do is grant asylum.
Yeh, while we're apologising for our negative historical impacts as a nation, how about doing a little bit of helping out those who are victims today? And in fact, we need to realised this:
The truth is, Britain would collapse without immigrants. The NHS would collapse first - about a third of its staff are immigrants. Then the pension schemes and the tax base and national insurance. Britain has low unemployment - without immigrants, there'd be no one to do the menial work the British are not prepared to do themselves.
See above.
Rather than immigrants sponging off British people, it's the other way around: Britain sponges off the rest of the world. The country can't feed itself, and its clothes are produced in India and China. It's rich because of its imperial history, and it can afford to keep the rest of the world in servitude. Immigrants pay tax, but can't claim the benefits of that tax, because they are not citizens. The BNP vote are unemployable because they are too drunk, lazy and stupid to succeed, despite living in a nanny state where everything is handed to them on a plate. They blame hardworking immigrants for their failure.
Sounds harsh, but I have to say, it really sort of looks that way.
And then there's the really scary bit.
But having said all of that, the real fascist threat to Britain doesn't come from the BNP - it comes from New Labour. They are the ones who have embarked on new imperialist adventures, put a CCTV camera on every street, introduced the database state and proposed biometric ID cards. I don't know what the Nazis are complaining about - Blair, Brown and Reid are marching us towards fascism as fast as they can.

Quite so. And the reason is that they know that in an increasingly insecure world (cue projections on climate change effects) "strong" government may manage to come out on top in the global order. They are betting we will corporately prefer comfort to justice and to export violence for the sake of 'peace' at home. We're being softened up for a new world order built on the violent enthrallment of other nations. It's the UK response to the Project for a New American Century. At least that's how it looks to me an my more paranoid days. Dear God, I hope I'm wrong.
Red Star Coven: The fascist threat to Britain

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NYC congestion charge announced

Significant because it's in the USA.
... in a speech to mark Earth Day. Pledging to make New York "a brighter, healthier and more economically prosperous city", Mr Bloomberg couched the charge in terms of climate change. "The science is there," he said. "It's time to stop debating it and start dealing with it."

Of course there are objections and this article cites an argument that it is regressive. The reply is that in a capitalist system money talks (I summarise and paraphrase). It misses the point, I guess that it is the poor who disproportionately suffer from the effects of cars and traffic ...
New
York mayor sees London as congestion charge model | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited

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Further national apologising. This time Basques.

The trend for offering corporate apologies continues.
Basque Premier Juan José Ibarretxe read an institutional manifesto agreed by consensus by the Basque Government (the Basque nationalist parties PNV and EA and the Spanish leftist party EB) and the socialist party PSE-EE. He apologised to the victims for "not have managed to rise to the occasion as a society", as "we haven’t been able to transmit collectively our support to the thousands of people victims of violence."

It's important to read just what is being apologised about because the apology isn't from any body that might be regarded as responsible for ETA's violence (and so they are not, understandably, directly apologising for that, although the implication is a condemnation of that violence). So it's limited, and I'm still trying to work out what the point of doing this is. But it is interesting to note that the concept of corporate repentance is still there and seems to be striking a cord. If that is so, the next question for me is whether this represents a growing awareness of the corporateness involved in being human, and a diminution of individualism?
EiTB24::Portada

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22 April 2007

Violence legitimised becomes monstrous

Once violence is legitimised it gets easier to find people to kill for ideological reasons. What we need is to simply delegitimise violence. If we don't we get versions of this.
chlorine bombs being built by al-Qaeda to terrorise and kill their Muslim brothers, who, we must remember, were so recently oppressed by the atheistic regime of Saddam Hussein. It is as if Protestant and Catholic groups in the French Resistance used the Nazi occupation to blow up each other's churches and market places and slaughter each other's children. Actually, it is weirder in Iraq because the Sunni extremists of al-Qaeda are killing and torturing more Sunnis than Shia, let alone US soldiers.

The thought process is psychopathic: it has the same logic we heard in the ravings of the gunman at Virginia Tech. There is a similarity of exhibitionism, too, a need for attention that must escalate the horror to maintain some kind of foothold in the Western news bulletins.

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | When will Islam damn the chlorine bombers?

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20 April 2007

Guns may not kill people but they help...

I think I have to agree with Moby on this, in fact I said something similar a couple of days ago. "if the shooter had been armed with a stick or a baseball bat you'd be looking at 1 or 2 injured people in the infirmary.
instead there are 32 innocent victims, all because a state like virginia has no restrictions on the purchase of automatic weapons by people over the age of 18."
a terrible, terrible tragedy | moby.com:

Learning in networks

My challenge from July, I suspect, will be to do something constructive with this.
we argue that we need to move away from the institutionalised logic of the school as factory, to the network logic of the learning community. Indeed, we need to move beyond the concept of ‘extended schools’ - whereby schools extend the range of services they provide – towards a notion of extending learning, whereby learning institutions rethink the possibilities around what can be learnt, where learning can happen and who is involved in the learning process. What this paper implies is that it will not be possible to personalise education whilst maintaining a conception of learning as happening only in certain places, under certain assessment regimes and involving certain people. Instead, we suggest that rather than continuing to build a system based upon the ‘megastructures’ of schools, universities and a national curriculum, we need to move to a system organised through more porous and flexible learning networks that link homes, communities and multiple sites of learning.

Futurelab - Research - Publications - Towards new learning networks

St George, the dragon and the patronage of England

Well, I have certainly offered my opinion previously that the better candidate for patron saint of England would be St Alban. However, on the edge of St.George's day, Garth Hewitt in the Church Times has defended St.George on the basis that it is St.George of Lydda who is meant and that this St.George is really rather a good thing. And he has a point.

Now, if you are not a CT subscriber you won't be able to see what is written. So I will outline briefly Garth's findings and assertions.

In this version St.G is convinced by a vision accompanying the martyrdom of Christians to throw in his lot with their faith and is himself martyred. The story of the dragon is symbolic; the princess is the church he protects the dragon is (as per Rev.13) the persecuting Roman Empire. The saint is shared with Eastern churches including Indian and so is an ecumenical figure. And his identification with a Muslim figure and Elijah makes him a bridge figure between Palestinian faiths. And if that wasn't enough, he has ecological credentials too as a guardian of trees.
periodically debates about the patron saint of England, and his suitability for the position.

Church Times - Why St George is patron of unity and ecology
See also here.And his interesting credentials as a black man are indicated here.

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16 April 2007

Fill in the blanks for Praying the Pattern

I discovered that there is a site looking for a review. I'm wondering whether any intrepid reader is willing to give it a go.
Rate the book
Write a review and share your opinion with others. Try to focus on the content of the book. Read our instructions for further information.
Praying the Pattern

Praying the Pattern - Reviewscout.co.uk

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15 April 2007

What the vanity search dragged in...

Curious as to what would turn up if students of mine should do a google search on my name I found a salutary lesson in my web footprint. In the course of which I found a really old letter of mine that is on the Indy's letters pages. In it I was obviously commenting on an article about funerals. You'll be able to piece together what the issue was from the quote.
As someone involved in the conducting of funerals I would be more than happy to find next-of-kin wanting to think over the event as well and as thoroughly as he does. He implies that Church of England funerals are not capable of being personal or relevant to the grief processes of next-of-kin. This is not so.

I then go on to tell how and offer a hypothesis about the real problem with funerals in our society. I still think I may have had a point.
Letter: Society must learn to mourn Independent, The (London) - Find Articles

He Qi on the Resurrection.

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.

Gallery_2 Shopping Cart

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14 April 2007

Wind power for urban areas

I keep finding articles on wind power from machines that are not windmill shaped. How long before we see some really serious use of these kinds of designs? Or is there something about them that really is unsuitable? Have a look and make up your own mind
Turbulent flow is the enemy of traditional turbines. How about a non-traditional turbine?

Check out this site too.
Climate Change Action

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Playgreen

Flagging up a new wiki dedicated to amassing info on greener living. Maybe worth RSS sub?
Playgreen - The wiki on green living

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Penal substitution and an object lesson in media manipulation

The other day I blogged about the issue of penal substitutionary theories of atonement. Lo and behold within days there's a minor spat in the UK about it, not in response to my writing (naturally, not enough important people read what I say), but in response to the remarks of one dean which were then leaked to a couple of bishops likely to disagree with the bit that was presumably presented to them. They reacted to what was presented and the media had created a stir of ecclesiastical disagreement. In fact though, when you look at what Jeffrey John said, you realise that he actally agrees with those who were manipulated and probably selectively (mis)quoted into taking an apparently other position. Jeffrey John wrote.
“Why should God forgive us through punishing someone else? It was worse than illogical. It was insane. It makes God sound like a psychopath. If any human being behaved like this, we’d say they were a monster." The explanation “just doesn’t work, though sadly it’s one that’s still all too often preached ... The most basic truth about God’s nature is that he is Love, not wrath and punishment.” Some Christians went all through their lives without grasping that, Dr John said. “The cross is not about Jesus reconciling an angry God to us; it’s almost the opposite. . . On the cross, Jesus died for our sins; the price of our sin is paid; but it is not paid to God, but by God. . .”

Which actually is no problem to well-read and thought out evangelicals who would entirely agree. However, I'm not sure whether I've just been a bit overoptimistic, but I do think that the real problem here is that the media have manipulated the situation to make the difference of opinion bigger that it really is. It is interesting, though, that that last sentence of John's is almost exactly the same thing that JI Packer wrote about the matter thirty years ago defending a traditional evangelical view of 'propitiation' in a UCCF monograph under the TSF banner.

What I learn from this is to be wary of the way the media present issues and to understand how they make controversy appear out of nowhere. In this case by selective quoting and asking for comment on those quotes. Presumably also it is not counted 'inaccurate' to miss out any of those annoying riders that people often add such as "If that is a fair representation of what he said...", "Not having seen the whole thing I am not sure how much I can say, but if he said X, then the problem with that might be ...".
Church Times - Dean stands by Radio 4 talk on cross
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11 April 2007

The end of religion the beginning of faith

This is the point where the issue of religious pluralism founders ultimately. At least so I thought when I was reviewing a book advocating religious pluralism. The thing tends to want to accord religious institutions 'salvific' parity. But what if, as many Christian evangelicals do, you tend to think that religion is a flawed friend of faith, spirituality and salvation, at best?
It means that religious pluralism is flawed by the lack of means to critique religion.

Now this article is not about religious pluralism but rather non-religious Christianity. And it seems to me that such a thing could and should exist. I wonder whether the same shift is possible for other faiths?

What if “religion,” and by this I mean the institutional and organizational form around faith, is no longer necessary for the future of faith?
Religions exist in certainty and sanctity; faith lives in inquiry and fluidity. The reason traditional faiths are having a hard time of things is that the present situation is one in which certainty is suspect and sanctity is being redefined.


Actually, a very interesting mini article from Barry Taylor of Fuller. Another intriguing thing he writes is.
One of the most interesting dynamics of the present time is the collapse of distinction between the sacred and the profane. Contemporary society allows for the “holy” to be found in the most unexpected places. As Christopher Partridge writes, “The new spiritual awakening makes use of thought-forms, ideas and practices, which are not at all alien to the majority of Westerners. They emerge from an essentially non-Christian religio-cultural milieu, a milieu that both resources and is resourced by popular culture.” The future of Christian faith lies in its ability to inhabit this gray world, not attempting to “sort it out” as much as to be available to help others navigate and negotiate the complexities that such a dynamic raises. To “go with the flow” might seem a trite way of describing theological engagement, but a commitment to fluidity and a willingness to swim in the cultural waters rather than insisting on one’s own paddling pool is a necessary perspective.


The interesting thing is also the reactions to this opinion piece. Some people just don't seem to 'get' the idea of separating institution from faith, expression from basis...

John O'Donohue's blessing

"when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight. "
From John O'Donahue, Anam Chara

Blogging: overtesteronised and unaccountable?

I don't think that I share the alarm of the author over the future of blogging being undermined by incivility: my guess is that the rage merchants will be increasingly sidelined by people looking for serious and helpful content. A case in point is my own search habits and my desire not to inflame but to moderate opinion. The flaming and mudslinging is a spectator sport for those who like to see the online equivalent of boxing or WWE.
However, there is one issue that could help.
My immediate hunch is that the anonymity of the web is the problem. People do not tend to call each other Nazis in public meetings, or on radio phone-ins, because other people would know who they were. But if you're called DaffyDuck you can insult whoever you like. If democracy means anything it means accountability - and that should include accountability for our own words.

It'd help in respect of spamming too. There's a thought....

There's an interesting draft code of conduct being proposed which has six points:
1. We take responsibility for our own words and for the comments we allow on our blog.
We are committed to the "Civility Enforced" standard: we will not post unacceptable content, and we'll delete comments that contain it.
We define unacceptable content as anything included or linked to that:
- is being used to abuse, harass, stalk, or threaten others
- is libelous, knowingly false, ad-hominem, or misrepresents another person,
- infringes upon a copyright or trademark
- violates an obligation of confidentiality
- violates the privacy of others

We define and determine what is "unacceptable content" on a case-by-case basis, and our definitions are not limited to this list. If we delete a comment or link, we will say so and explain why. [We reserve the right to change these standards at any time with no notice.]

2. We won't say anything online that we wouldn't say in person.

3. We connect privately before we respond publicly.
When we encounter conflicts and misrepresentation in the blogosphere, we make every effort to talk privately and directly to the person(s) involved--or find an intermediary who can do so--before we publish any posts or comments about the issue.

4. When we believe someone is unfairly attacking another, we take action.
When someone who is publishing comments or blog postings that are offensive, we'll tell them so (privately, if possible--see above) and ask them to publicly make amends.
If those published comments could be construed as a threat, and the perpetrator doesn't withdraw them and apologize, we will cooperate with law enforcement to protect the target of the threat.

5. We do not allow anonymous comments.
We require commenters to supply a valid email address before they can post, though we allow commenters to identify themselves with an alias, rather than their real name.

6. We ignore the trolls.
We prefer not to respond to nasty comments about us or our blog, as long as they don't veer into abuse or libel. We believe that feeding the trolls only encourages them--"Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, but the pig likes it." Ignoring public attacks is often the best way to contain them.


I think that it is interesting that many Christian sites I visit seem to do these things as part of a 'do as you would be done by' 'love your neighbour' sort of informal ethic ...

The blogosphere risks putting off everyone but point-scoring males | Guardian daily comment | Guardian Unlimited

Memory: recall, fantasy and religious claims.

This would seem to be quite an important piece of research, particularly as it has implications for so-called evidence for reincarnation, alien abduction etc.
people who commonly make source-monitoring errors respond to and imagine experiences more strongly than the average person, and they also tend to be more creative.
"It might be harder to discriminate between a vivid image that you'd generated yourself and the memory of a perception of something you actually saw," he said in a telephone interview. Peters also found in his study, detailed in the March issue of Consciousness and Cognition, that people with implausible memories are also more likely to be depressed and to experience sleep problems, and this could also make them more prone to memory mistakes. And once people make this kind of mistake, they might be inclined to stick to their guns for spiritual reasons, McNally said. "It may be a variant expression of certain religious impulses," he said. "We suspect that this might be kind of a psychological buffering mechanism against the fear of death."

Of course, we are also going to have to work out how it affects the apologetics relating to the resurrection. I suspect not a huge amount because of the way that in principle it adds nothing new to the panoply of objections and the kind of 'forensic' workover that the likes of Josh McDowell, Nicky Gumbal and Frank Morrison have given it. But I may be wrong.
FOXNews.com - Study: People Who Recall Past Lives, Alien Abduction Prone to Memory Errors - Science News | Current Articles

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09 April 2007

C. S. Lewis College

Hmm, seems my kind of thing ...
As part of its long-range vision, the Foundation looks forward to founding a fully accredited, four-year great books college with a center for advanced Christian studies and school of visual and performing arts.

C. S. Lewis Foundation - Living the Legacy!

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Mission Shaped Church ebook -free

I hadn't realised that Mission-Shaped Church is available as a .pdf ebook. But now I do and so do you!


Sites Unseen - Earth's Mightiest Alternative Christian Link Portal

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The paradox of original goodness and original sin

Thought-provoking article today on youth crime. Touched a load of things for me that seemed to resonate with my experience of late of teens in the school I'm at currently in Tyneside. And I can't help thinking, again, of Jesus' words about it being better to be thrown into the sea with a millstone roundd your neck than to cause 'one of these little ones' to sin. Apart from anything else, it seems to me, this means we can't simply operate, morally, with a model that only recognises moral responsibility as the determinative factor in human behaviour and sinfulness. It plays, in fact, into my thesis that humanity is corporate as well as individual and that being formed by those around us is the vital transmissive route for the root of sin that we often call 'original'.
Those who would birch and flog the teenagers who go bad seem convinced that human action takes place in a vacuum. There is no excuse for murderous, bullying, thoughtless behaviour, but to ignore the circumstances that led to that behaviour is simply crass. Being poor will not in itself make you more likely to murder another person of your own age, but being poor, brutalised and unloved - or loved in a way that alternates neglect and indulgence - might.

It's the statistics of sin. Like the statistics of existence: we know that it is overwhelming probability that gives us the regularities that many have called the laws of physics. So we can catch a glimpse of the strange possibility that original sin is the overwhelming probability of social formedness inscribing into each of us the basic data that will mean that one way or another, we will find that something we are given by the morally imperfect beings who nurture us (or to whom we look for nurture) interacts with the necessities of our being human; our finitude, our necessarily unique perspective on the world, our concern to avoid pain or to pursue pleasure ... whatever ... to produce thinking and actions which are, to put not too fine a point on it, sinful. And in turn we pass on the memetic virus. (Not that I hold with meme theory, but as a metaphor it has its uses).

In this we see the paradox that we are born both originally and basically good but that we are also bound to sin. Mimesis is the bootstrap that pulls us to learn and become members of our family and then our society. But we are bound to imitate also the sinful content of the messages we incorporate into our individuality. We are well familiar with the way that it runs from them; so much experience in self-examination and reflection on the ways of sin. Thus, from the article:
gang members run with each other because the street is the one place where they can justify and pity themselves with impunity


Any theory of atonement beyond this point in our cultural history will have to take account of this. That's why I recommend

Labour has failed to tackle the roots of youth disorder | Guardian daily comment | Guardian Unlimited

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08 April 2007

Resurrection is making a come-back


jonnybaker: happy easter!

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from that profoundly secret, still, moment in the dawn of the day, when God raised up Jesus

The Rector of the Parish we live in has the soul of a poet; I enjoyed one of the phrases he wrotesaid this morning.
As certainly as the Universe itself is unfurling still from that
one vast explosion of creative energy we call the Big Bang,
so a new creation, a new way of living ripples still
from generation to generation – even to us –
from that profoundly secret, still, moment in the dawn of the day,
when God raised up Jesus; when God opened new life, for us, in him.



let the trees of the forest sing: My Easter Sermon


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Guilt, gospel, racket and substitution

For as long as I've been aware of Giles Fraser, (and I've escorted him round the venues at Greenbelt and heard him speak, I like the guy), he's had it in for the penal substitutionary theory of atonement. And he seems to be becoming more vehement. Now I agree with him that the popular versions of it do tend to lead into so dodgy ethical and metaphysical territory. And I think, certainly in terms of popular presentations and perceptions, this is a point worth hearing.
Nietzsche argued that Christianity gets going by first inventing a religious-type problem - like hell - and then offering itself as the solution; that it's a fictional/metaphysical deliverance from a fictional/metaphysical affliction. In other words: a racket. This may be true of some versions of Christianity - particularly the nasty evangelical salvation story known as penal substitution.

However, that last bit was a bit OTT. Mainly because it is not fair. It's not fair because whatever else we say about PS theory, when it is properly stated it avoids most of the pitfalls that would earn it the adjective "nasty". We should note that it is the popular versions that are problematic.

I think that the critique is on surer grounds with Nietzsche's quoted view. And this relates to my point a few days back about guilt-arousal preaching. We have lost it culturally when we are having to persuade people of the problem we are claiming to have a solution to. We should be connecting the already felt issues with the Good news in much more direct ways. That's why where people are coming to Christ it is often to do with finding their place within the cosmos, a sense of vocation or of connection that is foremost. Guilt and the need for SP theory is not really on most people's radar. I suspect that we need to make connections between the cross and resurrection on the one hand (and note both terms) and the search for meaning, placedness, 'vocation' and God's good purposes for the world. Forgiveness just isn't a central or primary concern for most people. And worse, by trying to insist it ought to be, we actually are heard to be moralistic and guilt-tripping thought-police: not at all good news.

Embrace freedom | Guardian daily comment | Guardian Unlimited


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Easter ponderdom

Thanks to our Bishop Tom Wright and to the Guardian we have an intriguing thought or two for Easter.

That's why the Easter stories tumble out in bits and pieces, with breathless chasings to and fro and garbled reports - and then, stories like nothing else before or since. As the great New Testament scholar EP Sanders put it, the writers were trying to describe an experience that does not fit a known category. They knew all about ghosts and visions, and they knew it wasn't anything like that.
Equally, they knew the risen Jesus wasn't just a resuscitated corpse, still less someone who had almost died but managed to stagger on after all. They had the puzzled air of people saying, "I know this sounds wacky, but this is truly how it was." They were stumblingly describing the birth of new creation, starting with Jesus but intended for the whole world.


Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Face to faith


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06 April 2007

Cathedrals see a steady rise in congregations

While we're on the subject of churchgoing in Britain, here's the surprise.
In 2000, when weekly attendance figures were first collected, the number of regular worshippers at the 43 cathedrals was 14,300, compared with 24,800 last year. Seasonal attendance has also increased: 130,000 people attending services over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in 2006, compared with 94,300 in 2000. Attendance at Easter Eve and Easter Sunday services has risen to 52,400 last year from 47,900 in 2000.

So what's going on here? I confess I don't know but my guesses lead me to ask the following questions, which, if I get the chance I will try to answer. My questions are whether the increased attendances at cathedrals have connections with decreased attendances elsewhere; in other words are we seeing transfer growth here? Particularly with the decline in local churches meaning that the whole traditional robed choir thing is harder to maintain. I'm also wondering how far this may have a relation to a desire to attend without further involvement? The reason possibly shares a driver with the last question: the decline of local church-going may have entered a negative loop which exacerbates the features of decline, that is the disheartening aspects of decline actually further promote decline as people find it harder to be resilient in the face of decline and 'bail' to something that buoys them up and may give them rest from their small church labours.

So we could be witnessing a squeeze of the smaller local church as on one hand the traditionalists bail out to cathedrals and cathedral-like churches, and on the other the radicals bail out into informal 'emerging' set-ups and the 'revivalists' (for want of a better description) bail into large MOR front-led praise-band set-ups.

Of course the knock-on effects are pressure on clergy and active lay people in the declining set-ups which issues in depression and turns the screw of the negative feed-back loop one more twist. It's a 'those who do not have, even what little they have will be taken away' situation.


Church Times - Cathedrals see a steady rise in congregations

Three million worshippers ‘wait to be asked

Worth pondering; the results of a recent survey on churchgoing or not in the UK today. Here's a salient quote.
The survey of 7000 adults questioned those who did and did not currently attend church. The research concluded that an estimated 7.6 million people (one in seven) attended church each month, and 12.6 million attended at least once a year. Although 53 per cent of respondents described themselves as Christian, nearly two-thirds had nothing to do with a church. Most of these — an estimated 29.3 million — were regarded as unreceptive and “closed to attending church”.

My questions are about identifying the minority waiting to be asked since there are clearly many more who will say 'no', and my experience is that your average outgoing church after a few years has pretty much exhausted its fringe contacts. I'm also concerned about what they find if they do go; my experience as a peripatetic service leader over the last few years makes me concerned in some cases. I don't think we realise how remote from contact with everyday life and concerns our churches have become. Even, and in some ways, especially those that are 'lively'. By God's grace, of course, some of this can be overcome. But let's not make God's grace an excuse for not taking the issue seriously: that is tantamount to putting God to the test.


Church Times - Three million worshippers ‘wait to be asked’



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05 April 2007

Christian and vegetarian: a match made in heaven.

It's good to see other emerging-type Christians coming out as vegetarian. Steve Taylor gives four good reasons, two of which I particularly stand up for myself.
humans have protein needs that can be met by both beans and beef. But you can grow lots and lots of beans in the space it would take a graze a cow. In other words, if humans ate more beans and less beef, than more humans would have their protein needs met. In a world of hunger, I became increasingly uneasy about my meat consumption. ...
becoming increasingly aware that many in the emerging culture were vegetarian, and that good, contextual, missiology would want to consider Paul's words "to the Jew I become a Jew, to the vegetarian, I become a vegetarian."
So I went vegetarian. One of the upsides for me has been a far greater link between my everyday life and my spirituality. My Christian faith feels more entwined with my lifestyle and I am made constantly aware of the justice issues around human consumption every time I eat.


I'd also echo his words on the dietary need for meat. It is Likely that Jesus ate meat, but not at the several times a week rate all too many in the west think is a right, but at a modest sort of rate of occasionally. For people in Jesus's time it was largely economic necessity, in our time emulating the practice as a matter of building infrastructure for a juster world is important. So I echo Steve in urging Christians to be vegetarian, my concession to those who find that scary is to say "or at least vegetarian for most of the week".

Got a point... water to Scotland is like coals to Newcastle

Musing on being held up by a lorry ferrying Eden Spring water, Walton Pantland explores the implications further, and deserves to be heard on this.
So you have stolen water from a drought-ridden part of the world being imported to one of the most drenched. Water is already a major source of conflict in the Middle East, with Israel 'making the desert bloom' by stealing most of the Jordan.

The Highlands of Scotland are saturated with clean fresh water. It falls from the skies, it squelches underfoot, and streams, burns and rivers are full of it. If you need to drink from a water cooler, it's not as if Scottish companies don't bottle the stuff.

But I'm sure it makes good market sense.


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03 April 2007

The trouble with biofuels

We must remember, though, that biomass from waste will only meet a tiny proportion of our energy demand – there is little chance of it having any measurable impact on our greenhouse gas emissions. Above all, we must remember that the EU Biofuel Directive, UN policies, bilateral biofuel agreements, etc. have nothing whatsoever to do with this ‘green’ idea. They are putting a global blueprint into action which is threatening local communities, biodiversity, water supplies, rainforest and the climate across the globe.


biofuelwatch: blog: Filed in: , , ,

accountability and bureaucracy

A good question from an amusing and insightful essay.
There can be bureaucracy without accountability, but can there be accountability without bureaucracy?

An important question way beyond the Higher Ed community it's written from. It's a principalities and powers sort of question, and so has interested me. Is bureaucracy a necessary evil or can it be a kind of nervous system? And what distinguishes the two cases? I have to say I have come across instances of benign bureaucracy and, off the top of my head, would say that they have been to do with putting welfare of people first and balancing the needs of users and workers and have been marked by a humane approach rather than the petty form-filling jobsworth attitude. So I would add bureaucracy to my list of principalities, theologically understood to be part of God's purposes for good but capable of fallen behaviours.
Jonathan Wolff on accountability and bureaucracy | comment | EducationGuardian.co.uk

02 April 2007

Email Angela Merkel

EU readers; can I encourage you to email the Chancellor of Germany about negative effects of neoliberal proposals by the EU on less developed trading 'partners'? (In reality they would become dumping grounds and have their own economies mauled) this would be with a view to encouraging the German presidency of the EU to be one that promotes fairer trading arrangements
Email Angela Merkel
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Slavery, culpability and responsible global citizenship

Priyamvada Gopal writes in the Guardian today something that we were discussing in my Lent group last week. There we decided that it is difficult to say that we, today, are responsible for past slavery but that we can learn the lessons and try to make a difference today in the all-but-slaveries of unfair trade and TNC exploitation. We also noted that it was a bit of a mismatch to celebrate and feel proud of our nation's contributions to civilisations while trying not to accrue the negative kudos of the underbelly of empire.

Here are some quotes.
Atonement-speak obscures the distinction between "guilt" - a private, often religious emotion connected to personal wrongdoing - and a more demanding and necessary move: acknowledging that our lives are shaped by historical processes through which we have accrued benefits at the expense of others. As the service itself demonstrated, the atonement mode of acknowledging the past comes complete with built-in absolution, a rhetorical clean chit that you can give yourself without further consideration of how the past lives on in the present, and how you might redress material inequities inherited from that time.
And that is of course, exactly the danger: we will just let the thing become past without actually thinking about the way that our present prosperity has been built on exploitation and the time-forward entail of that is structural inequalities which serve to continue and even widen the gap further. We may not be personally responsible for the genesis of those inequalities, but we are for their continuance, to some degree. But we also have to face the full truth of the past which includes this:
We know that government and politicians stop short of a full apology because they are aware of legal implications that would strengthen the case for reparations. Moreover, reparations themselves would force us to face up to the fact that the horrors of the past were not merely momentary lapses of moral judgment that can be redeemed through public enactments of remorse. They were systematic projects of national self-enrichment at the expense of other societies. ... A real apology would involve not only the cancellation of so-called "third world debt", itself the consequence of colonial depredation, but also some form of reparations (including relabelling "aid" as such).

That is a very interesting project to undertake. It may not change much what we are doing now, at our debt-relief and aid-giving best, but it would change the psychology from largesse to doing our duty. And there are good and bad aspects to that.
And as an ongoing dimension of recognition of past wrong, is to start to name present wrong and respond accordingly.
Given that slavery and indentured labour were part of a philosophy of exploitative profit-making which the writer Barry Unsworth critically calls "sacred hunger", we might also use this commemorative year to ask ourselves to what extent our lifestyles continue to appease this appetite. Profiting from cheap labour is far from a thing of the past: witness the continuing movement of large corporations to poor countries where they can pay low wages in abusive working conditions.

And, this will please some of those in our Lent group, we give it a 360 degree dimension.
Such self-critical reflections apply to descendants of the enslaved and the colonised as well. The Antiguan writer Jamaica Kincaid reminds her fellow descendants of slaves to reflect on "who captured and delivered [their ancestors] to the European master"
. I suspect that this would involve certain Muslim nations too.

Much to reflect on and we have not got to the final conclusion yet, but the debate continues and I commend some of the comments on this article. such as
And in the end, it is all woven so finely into the fabric of history that the 'good' and the 'evil' cannot be pulled out and made distinct, except by tendentious selection. There never was a society colonised by Empire, that did not have its own faults and did not practise its own oppressions. Is the one large 'crime' of Empire so much worse than the thousand small crimes of, for example, the Iroquois torture-stake, or Indian sati, or Aztec sacrifice, or the Barbary slavers, or, or, or.....?

Or
it is obvious that having the Romans invade everywhere, take over and then forcefully teaching us all about order, government, engineering and civilised behaviour was in 'net' terms a very good thing for the world. The same is equally obvious of the British Empire, the French Empire, the 'cultural' American Empire and arguably the Soviet Empire.

However the boot on the other foot of course, (or is it the other side of the same coin?) is that Dr Gopal works at an institution that charges students from the same third world countries almost seven times what it charges the sons and daughters of wealthy natives.

And then.
Is it all Europeans who are to blame?

I thought that women were oppressed, marginalised, and not given any political voice during those years - so it can't be their fault.

And about 70% of the male population didn't actually have a vote until Universal Male Suffrage kicked in, so you can't really hold them to account.

In fact, slavery served only to undercut and unemploy the average working man, so if anything he suffered a net loss because of it. Bridges and roads were built by private businesses, which the state paid for, so if the country is to be held to account for a collective public purse, well, it has already been paid for. Chase the descendants of the people who were paid for this, if blame wants to be laid somewhere - after all, they're the true recipients of the benefit, not an entire nation-state.

When the Emancipation of Slavery act kicked in in 1833, the government paid considerable recompense to the slave owners - I remember there was a Bishop of Leeds or something who owned 633 slaves, and received a not inconsiderable sum for his trouble.

And ...
Yes, slavery was part of the British empire as it was part of the Roman empire, the Chinese empire, the Aztecs, the moghuls, the Ottomans, the Arabs, the Sokoto sultanate etc. Everyone.

Britain's uniqueness comes through its moral change. NO other state before Britain deliberately gave up slavery. Before that everyone thought it was normal. If Britain had chosen differently we may still have slaves today.

And how about:
It's very odd to think that people could still be 'proud' or 'ashamed' of the British Empire, as if empire-building was a team sport. It was the endeavour of a social, commericial and political elite, that was trans-national - our London capitalists colluded with the Virginia slave-masters, the Ghanian traders, etc. The idea that 'we' as a nation should examine our past in the framework of what 'we' did seems sub-GCSE.


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