First contact: the trouble with linguists

Great mini-story on linguistic relativity; a reductio ad absurdam. Hat tip to Mark Liberman at Language log. Warning of a touch or two of strong language. Looks like the author is David Chess. The title is one I gave.

Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if we hadn't been each other's First Contacts. Virgin civilizations, groping each other in the dark.

"Damn it, damn it, damn it," the smaller of the two men moaned, his head down in his arms on the broken table, as the sounds coming in through the half-boarded-up window swelled louder.

"If they wanted to destroy us, why didn't they just send a missle, an asteroid, a fucking army?"

The taller man took another drink from the bottle in his hand, staring without seeing at the window.

"We started it, you know."

"Bastards, bastards."

"We nearly destroyed them."

"Should have."

"It was the linguists," his voice was rough and slow, detached, almost toneless, "that went out in the first starship. We taught the Tanatha suicide."

"Bastards." The sounds outside moved away a bit, grew softer.

"Their language was utterly alien. No reflexive forms, strange verb tenses. Eventually they learned enough of it to try to ask them questions, eventually they asked them what their word was for 'suicide'. They didn't have one."

"Bullshit."

"They didn't. They had no reflexive forms, and 'to be' and 'to kill' were such utterly incompatible concepts that they had been literally unable to imagine killing the person that you are. Until we asked the question, and kept asking it until they understood."

He took another long drink, a deep breath, and shuddered. The man at the table raised his head just long enough to wipe his eyes.

"It nearly destroyed their civilization. They didn't have the millennia of evolved defense mechanisms that we do, the cultural institutions that discourage killing yourself, the structures to deal with it.

"They experimented.

"They died.

"Their cultures crumbled."

"Not fucking far enough they didn't," the smaller man muttered, and lay his head down again with a thud.

"They fell so fast. Our linguists came back on the last starship they sent out, along with what was left of their Tanatha colleagues. Half the crew died on the way, but they got here."

"Bastards."

"And their linguists, the ones that stayed alive, learned our language in return, and one day they knew enough to ask, to ask what was our word for --"

"No, no, no, no, no," the man slumped over the table moaned monotonously, as another explosion bloomed outside and a chorus of voices raised in an ululating scream, full of fear and an incomprehensible ecstacy.

Could Turkey create a liberal Islam?

Here an intriguing potential source and impetus to Reform in Islam: Adrian Hamilton: Could Turkey create an Islam acceptable to the West? - Adrian Hamilton, Commentators - Independent.co.uk. The heart of the matter for me is stated here.

"What is different about Turkey's move to liberalise the more oppressive tenets of the hadith is not so much what it is doing but that it is a state department of religious affairs which is doing it, at the behest of a governing party of Islamist origin elected to power in a secular country. That opens up the intriguing possibility that Turkey, an eager applicant for joining the EU, could bring with it an Islam redefined to become acceptable to a liberal west. It equally arouses fear that this is just the start of bringing Islamic law and values to a country that has been secular in constitution and culture since Ataturk turned it into a republic over 80 years ago.

Now that is really quite exciting. However, the road is rarely smooth, as such moves will themselves be interpreted by the wider Mohammedan* Islamic community:

It is easy to exaggerate the particular significance of the Turkish move. Turkey is no longer a centre of Islamic thought. Since the growth of orthodoxy is in itself partly a reaction against the west, anything that smacks of making Islam more westernised will tend to bring an immediate counter-reaction. The diktats of a department of religious affairs of a secular state is hardly the place where a reformation of a religion is going to start

.
Another thing to watch.

*I'm using the term "Mohammedan Islam" despite the opprobrium of using 'Mohammedan' in many circles. I think that this is a reaction to western 'orientalism' which made an analogy with Christianity, where the religion is named for the founder. Islam sees God as the founder, or Adam and says that Mohammed is 'merely' a prophet. However, I don't accept those reasons: huge chunks of Islam accord Mohammed intermediary status and actually I don't buy the founder myth. The reality is that it is a religion founded by Mohammed of Medina. Also, the term 'Islam' means submission [to God], and as such I regard it as applicable to Christians (who submit 'in Christ') though it may not be my favoured terminology, it is in our Baptismal promises. So 'Mohammedan Islam' in contrast to 'Christian Islam'.

Pat Rafter turns to Buddhism and Hinduism | NEWS.com.au Entertainment

Yesterday I blogged about the attraction Buddhism has for westerners, and in this article we see an example of that: Pat Rafter turns to Buddhism and Hinduism | NEWS.com.au Entertainment. But it also points out the disincentive to following:

"Rafter said he hadn't fully embraced the Buddhist life because it was a big commitment and hard work. One of his brothers, in the US, practised 10 hours a day. 'I'm sort of scared to make the step. It's pretty big. You can do it half-arsed and I've done that for a long time.'"

I have to say that for me one of the least appealing aspects of the Buddhist account of the universe is the eons of suffering and the long, long, long, long, long, long, long ... hard road it holds out in prospect of working out a bundle of karma. Though, of course, in an a-personal account of things, it's hard to know what value to place on that suffering. But even within this one life it's a tough prospect to be serious. This is where the Christian doctrines of grace and of God actively taking suffering on board and releasing into reality the means to redeem and transfigure suffering can become very attractive. Yes, it can be hard, but we don't struggle alone or with little hope.

Evangelical Drop-Outs

An interesting resume of a study here from the USA: Evangelical Drop-Outs | Out of Ur | Following God's Call in a New World | Conversations hosted by the editors of Leadership journal:

"Among the 7 in 10 who dropped out of the church a diversity of reasons were discovered:
• Wanted a break from church: 27%
• Found church members judgmental or hypocritical: 26%
• Moved to college: 25%
• Tied up with work: 23%
• Moved too far away from home church: 22%
• Too busy: 22%
• Felt disconnected to people at church: 20%
• Disagreed with church's stance on political/social issues: 18%
• Spent more time with friends outside church: 17%
• Only went before to please others: 17%"

It looks to me like a lot of this is about churches not being communities that create a real sense of belonging or a sense of the importance of corporate expressions of faith.... ?

Internal Passports Reminiscent Of The Soviet era

This is a chilling and strangely revealing phrase as reported here: Internal Passports Reminiscent Of The Cold War (from The Herald )

"Giving evidence to the (House of Commons) Home Affairs Committee on Tuesday, Meg Hillier, Minister for ID cards, said we should see the cards as 'passports in-country'."

Quite, internal passports were a major form of control in the USSR. The idea of us being subjected to a potentially similar method of control is, as I wrote before, chilling.

Another prayer before learning

Some readers may freak out a bit at the title, but I should remind you that the Druid revival in Wales -well Britain- from the Romantics onward was often related to Christianity; the Druids were seen as a kind of Old Testament -fulfilled in Christ (see Stephen Lawhead's Merlin for an example in novel form) Druid's Prayer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Grant, God, thy refuge;
and in refuge, strength;
and in strength, understanding;
and in understanding, knowledge;
and from knowledge, knowledge of what is right;
and from knowledge of what is right, the love of it;
and from loving, the love of God.
God and all goodness.

It is used at the opening of Eisteddfodau and seems to me to be a rather nice prayer for learning in class.

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

Thanks to Kester for posing an intriguing question at The Complex Christ | Signs of Emergence: What Are The 'Grand Challenges' for Theology for the 21st Century?: and then asking a dozen or so acquaintances to give brief answers to "what might a list of the grand theological challenges of the next 100 years look like?"
I've added a comment for my two penn'orth.

Personally I suspect one of the big challenges will be to articulate a way of dealing with plural religious experiences in a society where we know a lot more about the way the brain works. Neurotheology meets experiential pluralism. I suspect we will struggle with plausibility structures in wider society that will favour Buddhist-style takes on mind and spirituality -impersonal ultimate reality, modular mind and 'fictional' self etc

I'm wondering whether I can encourage any readers to 'bite' on this question?

UK shaken by 'significant' earthquake

Yeh, I know it wasn't huge and thankful it wasn't of disaster proportions. I slept through it only to be woken by my wife after it had passed because she was a bit emotionally shaken by it as well as physically. As far as I can tell no structural damage. I slept through the last one in 198? too.
UK shaken by 'significant' earthquake - Home News, UK - Independent.co.uk: "A 'significant' earthquake shook the UK in the early hours of this morning, causing damage to buildings and leaving at least one person injured. The tremor hit at around 1am and was measured at 5.2 on the Richter scale."

Antidepressants Only Benefit Certain Depressed Patients, Study Suggests

Notice how different this headline is to the way it has been reported in the papers.Antidepressants Only Benefit Certain Depressed Patients, Study Suggests is different to many papers which said antidepressants don't work. That's not quite right. And to be fair, I seem to recall that when fluoxetine first came out it was said that it should only be used for severe depression. But it shows that the way that trials and science is carried out is not well understood popularly, I guess.
"the improvement in depression amongst patients receiving the trial drug, as compared to those receiving placebo (dummy tablets), was not clinically significant in mildly depressed patients or even in most patients who suffer from very severe depression. The benefit only seemed to be clinically meaningful for a small group of patients who were the most extremely depressed to start out with. This improvement seemed to come about because these patients did not respond as well as less depressed patients to placebo, rather than responding better to the drug."

Reincarnation vs. Rebirth vs Resurrection

Because a lot of westerners are attracted to Buddhism partly by the doctrine of reincarnation, it is worth noting that many western ideas of it are not really Buddhist. See here.

Buddhism teaches the doctrine of rebirth. Between a series of lifetimes there is a relationship of causality, not of identity. To make this more clear, let's use the example of the falling dominos. If I place a series of dominos standing up in line next to each other, and I strike the first one to make it fall down, this causes the second one to fall down, and the next, until the last in line falls down. The fall of the first domino is the cause of the fall of the last one, but there is not a shared identity between the first and the last domino. When somebody dies, rebirth is caused by the continuation of the mental processes of the dead person in a new body. The new person however is not identical to the one that left the previous body (a lot of causes and conditions come into play to shape this new being), nor a completely different person (because of causality relation).

It's an important thing to be aware of as Christians, because the fancy is in westerners that it is personhood that somehow gets transferred to a new life; actually, in Buddhist teaching, it's a knot of karma that somehow ends up in another life. Actually, in a kind of way I could support that as a CHristian depending on just how you thought the causality worked, but the issue would be about the survival of the person. And that's where the fact of a God who is personal (though not exhaustively so, as many misunderstand) is important. Personhood is important in Christianity, but not so much in Buddhism. Our personhood 'survives' (or is resurrected) because it reflects and is sustained by a personal God in whom relatedness and communication are important. It is interesting that the concept of personhood remains important in our culture (a hangover from the heavy Christian influence of the past?) to the point of affecting Western appropriation of 'exotic' religions. (This can be seen in some Western converts to Mohammedanism/Islam who carry a hangover idea of God as Love, which is essentially alien to Mohammedan islam).
I could say more but I've got to go the the hospital. Happy to deal with comments though.
Reincarnation vs. Rebirth

Prayer before study together

Hat tip to Maggi here: maggi dawn: A World to Believe in for this prayer, which I'm considering adding to my collection of prayers before lectures.

"O God who creates and calls all people:
Transform our learning into wisdom,
fill us with faith that inspires,
open our hearts in hospitality;
so that we may come together
to listen to one another
and to work for our common future,
for a world to believe in. Amen"

'Sharia is not the problem'

A kind of postscript to the ABC Rowan's sharia remarks and the overblown aftermath. Here an article about a Muslim woman seeking a divorce, where her position seems to be better under sharia than in the British courts. As she comments we hear some important things. 'Sharia is not the problem' - Living, The New Review - Independent.co.uk: "says Khan. 'The thing is, some people practise Islam according to the way their forefathers did. But in Islam the learning is never-ending – you're always finding new ways, always interpreting. In this light, the current argument about sharia law in Britain is a pity: it's sad to see people saying anti-Islamic things when they haven't read what the Archbishop's lecture was about.
'There are laws here which are close to sharia already. Look at the benefit system and disability allowance: that's basically the Prime Minister – the leader – looking after his people. In sharia law, it says the leader of a nation has to look after the people. Whereas, is [Pakistani President Pervez] Musharraf giving benefits to his people? No. ... People who have a negative attitude say that it is barbaric, but really, it is moderate Muslims, rather than the extremists, who are the ones who turn to it."
That latter comment is interesting. I would guess, having read The Islamist, that this would be because such courts in Britain would be regarded by extremists as halal for compromising with a Kufar system.

All-day drinking 'a failure'

I can feel an 'I told you so' moment coming on. Give me a moment to lie down hoping it'll pass .... There. Now, All-day drinking 'a failure' - Home News, UK - Independent.co.uk: "The report, to be released on Tuesday, will reveal that the transition to a southern European-style drinking culture – a key aim of the controversial legislation – has failed to materialise since the Licensing Act was introduced two years ago. It will also show that there are no 'clear signs yet that the abolition of a standard closing time [for pubs and clubs] has significantly reduced problems of crime and disorder'."
Now the key thing here is the whole culture thing. It is clear that there is a huge socio-cultural dimension to this in fact, I think, one going back a long long way. So the difficulty is that if you change the opportunities without changing the mindset you're likely to get what apparently we have got: the opportunity is used to abuse further.

Now, I agree with the idea of striving for a more south European drinking culture. I just don't think that extending hours is going to achieve that without things that would encourage a change of mindset and attitudes. What we need to do first is note how 'heroic' drinking is narrated in certain subcultures: the implicit message is that drinking a lot is a giver of social status. Listen too to the unchallenged assumption that in order to have a good time you have to drink to drunkenness. The strange effect of this latter is that the proof of a good night out is the hangover and even the (alleged) lack of memory of events. Of course, the latter is probably quite commonly a way to avoid taking responsibility for more embarrassing or bizarre actions. In fact, the absolution from responsibility for our actions is probably part of the mystique. There is quite literally at this point, a religious or spiritual dimension to it. There's a dionysian loss of self-regard and a mythical return to innocency.

But it is a myth in anthropological terms: a story to frame action which operates ideologically and therefore obscures matters in some areas too. In this case the cost is widely played down and woe betide the killjoy who may draw attention to some of them: health, morality, family-life and the fact that it is a kind of tax on the uninformed and deprived, profiting people who run the drinks companies and their shareholders ...

So, one of the things we have to do is to challenge the myths, perhaps on their own terms. Stories of how a good time can be had without tanking up, perhaps. We also need role-modelling of other ways. Of course, once upon a time the temperance movement did much of this. I'm not sure whether that tactic could work again, and I'm dubious about the way that it turned peoples' heads exegetically; bringing about the hermeneutic contortions to try to demonstrate 'wine' wasn't wine and that Jesus didn't drink alcohol.

So let's try to change things, but let's be aware, you can't have this kind of cultural change on the cheap. It was to try to curtail the excesses of widespread alcohol abuse that things like the restricted licensing hours were brought in in the first place. Wasn't it?

Language, savants, animals and thought

At first this article might look like a slightly esoteric bit of brain science about animal and human brains and minds. However, it has important consequences for the way that language is significant for human development. Do Animals Think Like Autistic Savants?: "Since animals do not have verbal language, they have to store memories as pictures, sounds, or other sensory impressions.' And sensory-based information, she says, is inherently more detailed than word-based memories. 'As a person with autism, all my thoughts are in photo-realistic pictures,' she explains. 'The main similarity between animal thought and my thought is the lack of verbal language.'"
Which would make the taxonomic dimension of human language pretty significant. The information loss of language is one of the significant features enabling rapid information transfer. I'm wondering how this interrelates with the detailed memories in the AS-person like Grandin but that's maybe a less-important issue for the focus on the effects of language on human mind and cognition.

It also occurs to me that this seems to give potential confirmation to the MBTI distinction between people who prefer to perceive detail first and those who prefer ideas to be in the lead role (between S's and N's respectively).

Development aid in ICT

It's good to see FLOSS being in the forefront of enabling the two-thirds world to develop where ICT is involved. The EU has invested some money to research this.

The FLOSSInclude project will carry out an in-depth analysis of the technical, business and socio-political needs for the growth of FLOSS use, deployment and development in the target regions. The project further aims to build on the network developed during the course of the study to promote international collaboration between the EU and developing countries.

FLOSSInclude will expand on earlier work by some of the consortium partners, such as the groundbreaking FLOSSWorld study , by providing a rich contextual analysis based on the specific expertise and country experiences of the participating organisations and countries.

In pilot efforts, the partners will implement FLOSS solutions, tools and services to ensure they are cost-effective and practical for each environment. The result will be a roadmap for future EU development research cooperation, with concrete and validated solutions for clearly identified needs. Together with a massive push in dissemination and networking, the FLOSSInclude aims to ensure a lasting impact beyond the project duration.

colour.me.in

See if you can work out why I've featured this myspace site and why it makes me proud. MySpace.com - colour.me.in - UK - Indie - www.myspace.com/letscolourmein

We'll save the planet only if we're forced to

I suspect he is right. 'He' being Johan Hari, writer of this Indy article: Johann Hari: We'll save the planet only if we're forced to - Johann Hari, Commentators - Independent.co.uk. I like the parenthetical comment at the end of the quote, here.

"In reality, dispersed consumer choices are not going to keep the climate this side of a disastrous temperature rise. The only way that can ever happen is by governments legislating to force us all – green and anti-green – to shift towards cleaner behaviour. Just as the government in the Second World War did not ask people to eat less voluntarily, governments today cannot ask us to burn fewer greenhouse gases voluntarily. It is not enough for you to change your bulbs. Everyone has to change their bulbs. It is not enough for you to eat less meat. Everyone has to eat less meat. It is not enough for you to fly less. Everyone has to fly less. (And yes, I hate these facts as much as you do. But I will hate the reality of runaway global warming even more.)"

I'm also interested to note that he makes the case for less meat-eating...

Tate & Lyle sugar to be Fairtrade

Hoorah!: BBC NEWS | UK | Tate & Lyle sugar to be Fairtrade:
"To earn a Fairtrade label, firms must pay local producers a fair price, and invest further to improve working conditions and local sustainability."
There's still some work to be done: "The switch to Fairtrade affects the firm's packs of sugar sold in shops. The cane sugar the company provides to manufacturers is not yet included in the Fairtrade conversion plan. "
Now recall that fair trade is also about community development: "Carlos Magana from the Belize Sugar Cane Farmers Association told BBC News 24 that the link-up with Tate & Lyle would not just benefit farmers. "It will enhance education, health and other community projects," he said. "

Your memory can create better childhoods

This is a really intriguing and potentially transformative piece of research. The Children's Society are asking people for childhood memories to help them ... well, read for yourself:

Did you know that the UK is the worst country in the developed world to grow up in*? It seems that many of our best childhood experiences have been lost to today’s generation. ... We are gathering hundreds and thousands of childhood memories that will contribute to The Good Childhood® Inquiry, the UK’s first independent inquiry into what makes a good childhood. This will help us understand how to make childhood better today. Please share with us your favourite childhood memory.

We want to learn about your best childhood experiences so that children today can benefit from them.

If you would like to participate go to this page. Hundreds and thousands of childhood memories — Your memory can create better childhoods

Insightful Problem Solving and the Brain

In a report of a piece of research, By Jove, We've Got It: EEG Correlates Of Insightful Problem Solving: we are told, possibly the more important piece of information: "excessive amount of gamma brain rhythm (the same rhythm gets enhanced with selective attention) might cause this mental road block. It clearly indicates that focusing or attending too much on a topic might have a detrimental effect." (my emphasis). Which seems to correspond to my own experience and tactic of taking time out from a problem in order to come back to it more insightfully later (well, sometimes). One more point in favour of Sabbath as a principle in my view.

Conversation Week 2008

Contribute to deciding what are the most important questions today...
Conversation Week 2008

Supplier obligation

It looks like my earlier observations that we need to find ways to give an incentive to energy suppliers to help consumers consume less energy while still able to make a profit is being taken seriously by the UK government. Visit this web page to see the start of a consultation phase to work out how to do it.Defra, UK - Environmental Protection - Sustainable Energy - Supplier obligation: It claims that the "Government’s vision is to see a supplier obligation through which consumers will continue to enjoy at least their current level of warmth, light and comfort, whilst also achieving substantial carbon and energy savings."
As I say, I can only think that moving to a service model (which British Gas seem to be doing with boilers) which conceives of the utility company more as a seller and maintainer of means to keep one warm, lit and able to use devices than of the energy per se. But maybe there are other better ideas. I just haven't found much exploration of this issue yet. Of course, if you know better ... comment.

What Is the Cognitive Rift Between Humans And Other Animals?

Now this is interesting, because the four things identified look rather similar to some of the higher-order thinking functions in Bloom's taxonomy. The findings are written up for us here. What Is the Cognitive Rift Between Humans And Other Animals?: "Hauser presents four distinguishing ingredients of human cognition, and shows how these capacities make human thought unique. These four novel components of human thought are
the ability to combine and recombine different types of information and knowledge in order to gain new understanding;
to apply the same 'rule' or solution to one problem to a different and new situation;
to create and easily understand symbolic representations of computation and sensory input;
and to detach modes of thought from raw sensory and perceptual input."
I make that
synthesis
application
comprehension
analysis.
If I'm not mistaken.
Interestingly for me, these seem to play into the stuff I've mentioned before in relation to Adam naming the animals. In order to do that, all of those kinds of thinking are needed, I think....

Civilisation depends on soil

There is a thesis that civilisations last about 1000 years because that's how long it takes them to deplete their soils. The exception is Egypt because the Nile constantly replenished the soil (at the expense of Ethiopia further up the river, it may be mentioned). So our planetary survival really is about looking after our soil...

You talk about Rome not as much collapsing as consuming itself. That really struck me. Are we consuming ourselves?

DM: Well you know, if we put aside the questions about consumer culture and think just in terms of soil, given that we are eroding soil on an order of magnitude that’s faster than it’s being created — that is, modern agricultural soil erosion rates are as many as 10 – 100 times faster than soil creation — a minority of farms are a net soil source, but very few, so we are consuming ourselves to death. It’s like a bank account. If you spend money 10 times faster than you make it, you go broke. Soil is no different. You produce it, you use it and then it’s lost. If erosion is faster then production, we’re running out. The question is how fast and that’s where the good news lies because the rate is so slow, a millimeter or two a year, we actually have the opportunity to turn it around but it requires farming practices that are different than what we’ve done traditionally and conventionally. If we look at the adoption of no till data, we can show like I did in the PAS paper, you can get agriculture back to the no erosion rate. You can produce food without eroding soil.

SGM Lifewords' Easter resources

This looks worthwhile signing up for. It's atSGM Lifewords; Easter resources site: "This Easter, SGM Lifewords is hosting an online reflective journey through Holy Week – you can sign up by email on the right, and we’ll explore the story together through animation, music and spoken word."

Infrastructure for the Future

It's true that we tend to take infrastructure for granted. It's also true that a lot of western infrastructure is old and undermaintained (probably a result of utilities privatisations). So we actually do need to do what Alex Steffen suggests in this article: WorldChanging: Infrastructure for the Future We Want. "As we undertake their repair and replacement, we ought to be thinking like people native to the 21st century. We ought to be imagining systems which aim to provide the end services we want (access, communications, food, water, sanitation) in the most efficient, flexible and sustainable ways possible." He then mentions some specific areas. We should be paying attention.

The myth of sacred prostitution

Clearly we'd have to look at the evidence presented and its interpretation to make a proper decision. It's reported at MetaPagan: Exploding fallacies: "In this study, Stephanie Budin demonstrates that sacred prostitution, the sale of a person's body for sex in which some or all of the money earned was devoted to a deity or a temple, did not exist in the ancient world. Reconsidering the evidence from the ancient Near East, the Greco-Roman texts, and the Early Christian authors, Budin shows that the majority of sources that have traditionally been understood as pertaining to sacred prostitution actually have nothing to do with this institution. The few texts that are usually invoked on this subject are, moreover, terribly misunderstood. Furthermore, contrary to many current hypotheses, the creation of the myth of sacred prostitution has nothing to do with notions of accusation or the construction of a decadent, Oriental 'Other.' Instead, the myth has come into being as a result of more than 2,000 years of misinterpretations, false assumptions, and faulty methodology. The study of sacred prostitution is, effectively, a historiographical reckoning."
Why am I drawing attention to it? Well, interpreting some of the NT texts relating to homo-erotic behaviour turns in part, for some interpreters, on the idea that there was such a thing as sacred prostitution and that this is the real target of the denunciations in, for example, Romans 1. Now it could be that this reappraisal of the idea is more embedded in neo-pagan apologetics and so that will have to be taken into account as a reading strategy when looking at this book.

New CO2 Capturing Material -watch this space

Watch out for this. "ZIF-69 is like a carbon dioxide trap, allowing only CO2 in, while screening out molecules with different shapes. Under pressure, the compound allows the carbon dioxide in, but not back out. Then, when scientists decompress the material, the gas is released, allowing scientists to dump the captured CO2 into a storage system.Such properties could make carbon capture substantially more efficient, although its efficacy under real conditions is unknown. Yaghi doesn't think the material will be ready for field tests for several years."
Just note that this is a capture technology. The storage angle is also needed.
New CO2 Capturing Material Could Make Plants Cleaner | Wired Science from Wired.com:

Our Flock Mentality

This will be no surprise to anyone who has attended a march where the SWP have been active and seen what they do in order to try to lead a crowd towards their preferred outcomes. The research is mentioned in this article: Sheep In Human Clothing: Scientists Reveal Our Flock Mentality: And "The findings show that in all cases, the ‘informed individuals’ were followed by others in the crowd, forming a self-organising, snake-like structure. “We’ve all been in situations where we get swept along by the crowd,” says Professor Krause. “But what’s interesting about this research is that our participants ended up making a consensus decision despite the fact that they weren’t allowed to talk or gesture to one another. In most cases the participants didn’t realise they were being led by others.”"
The SWP agitators clearly try to achieve a critical mass of people who lead chants and so infiltrate themselves, unobtrusively, as leaders and then up the stakes in terms of participation until they are able to lead off a significant crowd into more disruptive activities. This is, of course, significant for my writing on the Powers and emergence.

Why speaking truth to power is hard

An intriguing piece of research, this: When People Feel Powerful, They Ignore New Opinions, Study Finds which indicates that "The best way to get leaders to consider new ideas is to put them in a situation where they don’t feel as powerful, the research suggests. “If you temporarily make a powerful person feel less powerful, you have a better chance of getting them to pay attention,”"
I think that this probably indicates that if you want good thinking from leaders, they need to feel a little insecure, or you need self-aware leaders who actively put structures in place to offset this psychology of power. It does suggest that distributing power and accountability are important for the health of a society. And it's intriguing, therefore, to think about God's apparent preferred governance option in the Hebrew scriptures which seemed to be decentralised without a king...

Children really do need a father

In a study of studies reported here Children Who Have An Active Father Figure Have Fewer Psychological And Behavioral Problems it would seem that a research consensus is emerging in favour of having positively active fathers involved in children's lives. "The researchers are urging healthcare professionals to increase fathers' involvement in their children's healthcare and calling on policy makers to ensure that fathers have the chance to play an active role in their upbringing." The difficulty, as so often, will be to encourage this without stigmatising and devaluing the parenting of those who cannot at any particular time, fulfil that ideal.
What I'd like to know, beyond this, is what is it about the involvement of fathers that makes these kinds of differences? And would that relate to using fathering as a key metaphor in relating to and thinking about God in Christ?

Rubbish offers hope of meeting green energy targets - Business News, Business - Independent.co.uk

Rubbish offers hope of meeting green energy targets - Business News, Business - Independent.co.uk: "The Government and local authorities are investigating the potential of anaerobic digestion, a technology that uses natural bacteria to break down organic material such as food waste and farm slurry, producing liquid fertiliser and a gas that can be used to generate electricity, or be piped into the gas grid, or turned into fuel to power vehicles. The process also generates heat that can be diverted to warm nearby homes or businesses."

Pitch Processing In Brain

I seem to recall seeing something before about pitch, language and music. This may be related: Linguist Tunes In To Pitch Processing In Brain. For me it's interesting that "data reveal that melody of speech is processed in neither a single region nor a specific hemisphere, but engages multiple areas comprising large-scale networks that involve both hemispheres. 'And moreover, we find that these networks are not circumscribed to language processes, but instead interact with more general sensory-motor and cognitive process in addition to those associated with language,'" Not least because this seems to offer a possibility that rooting language in basic bodily metaphors (as per Philosophy in the Flesh) may be well-founded in brain processing. It may indicate that the theory that prosody precedes phonology has some merit to consider further ... but I'll be keeping an open mind on that just now.

Rowan's Sharia remarks: a BBC set-up

In line with the way that I was reading the media but opening up the matter to more concerning scrutiny, Wardman Wire does a fairly in-depth examination of what happened. And it contains many implied caveats for all of us news consumers. Here's the nub of the allegations.

1. The story was trailed at the top of the news programme with the headline: The Archbishop of Canterbury has said that the adoption of Sharia Law in some parts of Britain is inevitable. (No he didn’t, or not in the way that your headline was inevitably going to make people think.)
2. The BBC was running an article before it broadcast the interview under the heading: Sharia law in UK is ‘unavoidable’, with the first paragraph: The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams says the adoption of Islamic Sharia law in the UK is “unavoidable”. (ditto)
3. The BBC website is a key source of news for ALL the media, and has 13 million unique visitors per week.
4. Reactions from bloggers to the headlines were coming in before the 9 minute interview had even finished .
5. As far as I can tell, most of the initial abusive reaction and vitriol (from “idiotic” to “bonkers” through various less gentle insults) has been linked to this story on the BBC website.
6. “Sharia” in this country is as much a “red-rag to a blood-blind-bull” as is “paedophile”. It excites similar extreme and irrational “shoot from the hip” reactions.

Of course commentators were going to react to the headline, not the interview - especially as speed of response is such a differentiator. The reality is that the way the BBC handled this story guaranteed that the furore would happen.

We are then treated to a careful deconstruction of the 'official' line from the BBC on what happened. It ain't pretty but it is important for anyone interested in commenting on news to read.

Our meat addiction is raising our carbon footprint

It really is a bit frustrating: one of the single most effective lifestyle changes that could be made to reduce our carbon footprints would be to eats no or at least much less meat (I still recommend the Jesus diet!). So let's go over it again, this time in words from Microclesia.

The Japanese National Institute of Livestock Science estimates that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.
...
It gets even more personal. Stanford professor Rose Naylor shows that roughly 800 million people suffer from malnutrition, while most of the world’s corn and soy is used to feed cattle and pigs. Depending on animal and process, up to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption. For U.S. grain-fed beef, ... By eating fewer large animals, we (1) use far less energy, (2) generate far less CO2, (3) potentially improve our health, and perhaps most importantly, (4) contribute to a more equitable and just distribution of calories into the world’s neediest communities. That, I believe, is Christ’s heart.

Quite so.

Worship artisanship

I had a sense of recognition of a naming of an aspect of my vocation as I read this: DanWilt.com :: Conversations On Emerging Worship: There's a lot more but these words were helpful.

"A Worship Artisan is a vocational (meaning “called”) spiritual leader who evidences his or her primary leadership gifts through the creative arts.
A Worship Artisan is a trained spiritual leader, theologically, biblically, culturally and historically in the realm of worship activity in the wide range of transhistorical communities that have expressed the worship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit throughout history.
A Worship Artisan is an effective leader of corporate worship, understanding the vital role of creative expression (musical art, visual art, physical art, literary art and dramatic art) in renewing a corporate belief system, a corporate communality, and a cohesive and healthy spiritual formation life in a believing group.
A Worship Artisan is not limited in his or her creative expression to corporate worship expressions. A worship artisan is both comfortable with, and able to engage with, varying contexts in which the goal is to encounter God corporately through the vehicle of music and accessible creative expression. However, a worship artisan is also comfortable expressing very unique and possibly obscure forms of art that find their place in bars, pubs, galleries, the street, stages and many other places."

I had previously played with the term 'liturgical artist' ... more thought needed.

Acupuncture Shows Promise In Improving Rates Of Pregnancy Following IVF

An intriguing bit of research showing a 10% improvement in pregnancy rates using acupuncture. Here's the synopsis: Acupuncture Shows Promise In Improving Rates Of Pregnancy Following IVF and this is the summary of the results.

"acupuncture given as a complement to IVF increased the odds of achieving pregnancy. According to the researchers, the results indicate that 10 women undergoing IVF would need to be treated with acupuncture to bring about one additional pregnancy. The results, considered preliminary, point to a potential complementary treatment that may improve the success of IVF and the need to conduct additional clinical trials to confirm these findings."

Of course be careful of the preliminariness of this and also note, as I keep saying with complementary therapies that degrees of proven success are not endorsements of the traditional explanations for them therapies; you can get something right for the wrong reasons or impose on some results an incorrect interpretation. This is not proof that chi philosophy is right, merely that some people with that way of looking at things made a useful discovery at some point which they were able to harmonise with their beliefs.

We’re not singing anymore… or are we? Exploring worship and the emerging church… at Jason Clark

Taking the title from a well-known chant from football terraces , : Jason Clark asks some helpful questions about sung worship and manages to be reasonably balanced about the way he answers. definitely worth looking at .We’re not singing anymore… or are we? Exploring worship and the emerging church… at Jason Clark. I liked the emphasis on corporate worship as spiritual formation and the sadly uncommon recognition of sung worship as liturgy.

"One of the primary ways that Christians learn about God is not through the preaching but through the singing - the repetition of songs becoming a sung liturgy where the words can bypass our brain at times and yet form deep impressions in us as to who God is/what God is like - they teach us and we learn even when we don’t realise that we are being formed."

This is part of the impetus behind my stalled writing project on culture-jamming worship.

Data is leaky: NIR be warned

Just as UKgov is reeling from various scandalous data insecurities coming to light, here comes some research to show that data security is probably a lost cause. The synopsis is here: How Safe Are Your Personal Records In The Hands Of Government Officials? and we are told; "no matter what steps an organisation takes, they will always run the risk of being compromised by human psychology and the way we perceive risk on a day-to-day basis," I think that this indicates that we should be into risk mitigation not a super-duper centralised database that falls open once cracked. Decentralisation is usually the way to do that kind of mitigation.

Misery Is Not Miserly

What a fascinating piece of research this is: Misery Is Not Miserly: Why Even Momentary Sadness Increases Spending. It first of all throws into question some of the marketing tactics about associating goods and brands with happy, warm and comfortable imagery and connotative meanings of contentment etc. Though it does fit with the marketing ploy of trying to engender a sense of discontent and the link to the research in this case would relate to this hypothesis arising from the findings.

"Why might a combination of sadness and self-focus lead people to spend more money? First, sadness and self-focus cause one to devalue both one’s sense of self and one’s current possessions. Second, this devaluation increases a person’s willingness to pay more for new material goods, presumably to enhance sense of self. Notably, the “misery is not miserly” effect may be even more dramatic in real life, as the low-intensity sadness evoked in the experiment likely underestimates the power of intense sadness on spending behavior. The effect could extend to domains beyond purchasing decisions, causing people to engage in increased stock trading, for example, or even to seek new relationships-- without conscious awareness that they are being driven by their emotions."

For me this needs to feed into my thinking about culture-jamming liturgy and how we worship against a consumerist cultural backdrop. The importance of liturgy that enables us to regain a sense of God's love, of contentment with God's provision and of recognising before God our state and being able in confession to recognise our decisions and motivations become clearer in the light of this research.

Archbishop and Sharia law

I keep highlighting areas where news reporting seems to be giving a different story in the headlines to what the details seem to tell. Well it seems to me that this is another. This is a fairly accurate reportage of what the ABC said. Taken from this reportArchbishop ignites Sharia law row - Home News, UK - Independent.co.uk: "'We already have in this country a number of situations in which the internal law of religious communities is recognised by the law of the land as justifying conscientious objections in certain circumstances. ... There is a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law as we already do with aspects of other kinds of religious law. It would be quite wrong to say that we could ever license a system of law for some community which gave people no right of appeal, no way of exercising the rights that are guaranteed to them as citizens in general. But there are ways of looking at marital disputes, for example, which provide an alternative to the divorce courts as we understand them. In some cultural and religious settings they would seem more appropriate.'"
In other words he was not proposing or defending sharia law, merely saying that, in line with other 'conscience' clauses recognised in British law, some provisions might be accommodated where they don't conflict with existing legal principles or human rights. He was most certainly not defending amputations, the legal half-value of women as witnesses or stonings for adultery or blasphemy. However, to read the headlines you'd think that he had defended and proposed those things.

Shame on the Christians (eg the first few comments on this post) who weighed in on the side of secular headlinists without honouring a brother in Christ with a proper hearing first.
Sheesh.

PS I think my position is vindicated by what is said in this article. And if you want a view of why some people of a Muslim background are wary read Yasmin Alibhai Brown's article (but note that here emotionally understandable engagement with the issue means that she attributes to Rowan what he is careful not to say). And I think Deborah Orr is spot on when she says; "if we are to think intelligently about the relations between Islam and British law, we need a fair amount of 'deconstruction' of crude oppositions and mythologies, whether of the nature of sharia or the nature of the Enlightenment". I think it's safe to say that hardly a soul is heeding his warning. Crude oppositions and mythologies are exactly what people are rushing headlong to display. ... robust as all of these rebuttals are, the fact is that none of them really contradicts what Williams was actually attempting to say. ... far from the setting up of sharia courts that Williams has been painted as advocating, ... Williams is more concerned about other, more challenging elisions of religious and cultural belief in British Muslim communities. He is worried that "recognition of 'supplementary jurisdiction' in some areas, especially family law, could have the effect of reinforcing in minority communities some of the most repressive or retrograde elements in them, with particularly serious consequences for the role and liberties of women"
PPS Faith and Theology also has a nice comment in this post. Particularly apposite, and reflecting one of my own unpublished thoughts, was this: "the Archbishop’s biggest problem is simply that he’s so much smarter than anyone else in the Church, and of course infinitely smarter than the poor news media, who haven’t the faintest idea what he’s actually talking about. The result is a public spectacle of stunning, breathtaking misunderstanding. (Today, some outraged nincompoop in the English Church was even calling for Williams’ resignation...)" And illustrating my point about editors writing or outlining stories before they know the facts: "Kim Fabricius going head-to-head on BBC radio with Peter Hitchens (editor of the Sunday Mail) – the best moment is where Kim forces Hitchens to confess that he hasn’t even read the lecture for himself!"

Poll shows growing opposition to ID cards over data fears

This article is interestingPoll shows growing opposition to ID cards over data fears: "25% of the public are deeply opposed to the idea, raises the prospect that the potential number of those likely to refuse to register for the card has risen. If the poll's findings were reflected in the wider population, as many as 10 million people may be expected to refuse to comply." Note that the figure of 25% of the public is pretty close to the actual proportion of the population that voted for a Labour candidate at the last election ...

Oh and "The poll, commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, shows that British public opinion is deeply split over the introduction of identity cards, with 50% against the idea and 47% in favour."

'Self', Autism and brain imaging

This is an intriguing study. The main hypothesis about A-S people is that they are unable to form models of others' thinking and reactions. This study seems to indicate that this may be because they don't experience a great sense of self to extrapolate from. The report Poor Recognition Of 'Self' Found In High Functioning People With Autism tells us;

In a normal 'self' response there, the brightest area was in the middle of that area of the brain. That response was significantly less in the brains of the youngsters with autism. 'They cognitively understood the game,' said Montague. 'It's not that they don't understand the game. It's that there is a very low level of 'self' response. It's impaired in them and the degree to which it is missing correlates with their symptom severity. The more you are missing the self response, the more autistic you are.'"

Now it needs a lot more thinking about, but if this pans out and the data hermeneutics is robust, then it seems to raise interesting issues about self-hood and social context. Not least of which, theologically, is what Resurrection means for A-S people and to interrogate some views about 'losing self' and 'hating self'. It seems to indicate there may be something in the interpretation that loving neighbour as oneself implies loving oneself, but what if ones sense of self is "dim"? What does this mean for the discipleship of A-S people? And beyond that, what would this tell us about the spiritual formation of those not affected by A-S disorders?

I'm not going to attempt answers here and now. I need to treasure the questions first and let them disclose more to me first.

Discrimination Against Blacks Linked To Dehumanization

A very worrying piece of research, once again highlighting the effect of culture on the forms taken by sinfulness. Discrimination Against Blacks Linked To Dehumanization, Study Finds: "research presented in a new paper by psychologists at Stanford, Pennsylvania State University and the University of California-Berkeley reveals that many Americans subconsciously associate blacks with apes."

Children and parenting studies

A series of studies highlighted by science daily today focus on parenting and upbringing. First up:
Good Parenting Helps Difficult Infants Perform As Well Or Better In First Grade Than Peers:

"The key to first-grade adjustment for both difficult and easy infants was good parenting," said Anne Dopkins Stright, associate professor of human development at Indiana University"

Then here is a study on how mothering in the first couple of years affects general 'bidability';

The study found that children who had developed a close, positive, reciprocal, and mutually responsive relationship with their mothers in the first two years of their lives did much better in both respects--responding to their mothers' requests not to do something and regulating their own behavior--than children who hadn't developed such ties.

In terms of social policy these might mean that there could be savings in what it costs to deal with crime and disorder if we were to support early years' parenting. I would suggest that supporting families to be able to devote one parent to childcare might be worth considering.
Then there is the wider social environment, via its effect or at least influence on parents,

"This study does not show that poverty leads to bad parenting, which in turn leads to poor outcomes in children," according to Dafna E. Kohen, adjunct professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Community Medicine at the University of Ottawa, senior research analyst at Statistics Canada, and the study's lead author. "Rather, this study shows that in neighborhoods where there is socioeconomic disadvantage, children's verbal and behavioral outcomes are influenced by poor parental mental health and parenting behaviors."

See more here. In turn then, this suggests that thinking more carefully about neighbourhood renewal might be good. Once we know these things we should recall Jesus' words, "It would be better for you if a millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea than for you to cause one of these little ones to stumble." which seems to me to imply a culpability before God if we make it harder for people to avoid sin...

And while we're considering that, we might want to contemplate the effects of socioeconomic deprivation on sexual activity among teens.

results revealed that school level socio-economic factors remain very influential even after individual pupils' socio-economic status is taken into account. Dr Henderson explained: ''School-level socio-economic factors, such as levels of deprivation, do have a big influence. This suggests that an individual who is deprived but attending a school with an affluent catchment area may be discouraged from sexual activity, whilst an affluent individual attending a school with a deprived catchment area may be encouraged towards earlier sexual intercourse."

So the Christian right's agenda would appear to be better served, in the light of research, by promoting social justice and diminishing socioeconomic differentials. There's a turn up for the books.

St Patrick’s defends sale of rosaries

I noted this little item last week, Church Times - St Patrick’s defends sale of rosaries: "ANGLICANS in Ireland have defended the Roman Catholic Church and the sale of rosary beads in St Patrick’s, the Anglican National Cathedral in Dublin."
As predictable, it's defending the sale from protestants of the 'Pope=antichrist' school of thinking, presumably on the basis of the Marian nature of the normal use of the rosary. However, it can be used other ways, such as my own adaptation of it into a way of praying through the Lord's prayer and scripture. I'm hoping to publish a book provisionally entitled 'A Book of our Common Prayer' which would have Lord's prayer liturgies and further ways of praying the Gospel Prayer including using a rosary.

Death threats to Nazir-Ali

In an article in this week's Church Times, Church Times - ‘No-go’ bishop gets death threats, we are told of some responses to Michael Nazir-Ali's remarks about no-go areas in Britain. His PA, "Canon Smith said on Tuesday that he had taken the phone calls during Dr Nazir-Ali’s absence in India last month. “The callers said they were going to sort him out, that they were watching his family and, yes, they did threaten his life, effectively.” The thing is that making such comments seems to make his point ...

TM -a proper critique

Joan Bakewell writing in the Independent in the wake of the Maharisihi's death does some nice assessment of TM. She hints at the possibility that it is really money for old rope (ie that the fees are exorbitant for a set of techniques which seem to be no different in principle from all sorts of other schools of spirituality in all sorts of faith traditions. And at the end she explores a much more important critique imho. Joan Bakewell: Meditation is more than flower-power indulgence: "Transcendental meditation imagines a world where everyone is so spiritually calm and at peace that wars become redundant. That is to suppose that tyrants and despots will be chilling out too. Whereas, we know full well they would welcome a meek and submissive population as being so much easier to subjugate to their will. The dangers of universal quietism is that it would abandon all the outrage we bring to our sense of injustice. There is a proper place for anger at the state of the world, for resistance to the forces of oppression. But meditation can help temper the anger."
The only thing I would really want to add to the critique she makes is that TM has tended to try hard to make out it is non-religious, whereas it is quite clearly a kind of Hindu entryist enterprise. I suspect that the main reason it can get away with it is the relative hospitality these traditions of Hinduism have towards a diversity of viewpoints -within limits, of course. It may be worth considering too the role that TM may have played in the turn to the East arising in the flower-power era which is still with us to some extent. Possibly being part of the same cultural wave that sees massive growth in attendances at Buddhist retreat centres in Britain.

Letter to USAmerican presidential candidates

I just signed a global letter to the US Presidential candidates. The outcome of the next US election will greatly affect the world and I thought you might want to sign this letter too. Here’s the link

Yesterday, the final candidates for the next President of the United States became clear. They are Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain. The winner will decide whether the nightmare of the Bush foreign policy is reversed or continued for another 4 years. All around the world, including in the US, people want to see the next President change course. Although only US citizens can vote in the election, we can still have a voice. Global public opinion matters to US citizens -- they know that US respect in the world has plummeted under Bush. That’s why the Avaaz global community has sprung into action. In the next few days, we can influence the candidates as they develop their campaign strategy. Click below to read and endorse the letter to the candidates. And, if we get more than 100,000 signatures, Avaaz will publish it in US newspapers and deliver it personally to the Clinton, Obama and McCain campaigns--sign and forward this email to friends right away.

The message of the letter is simple: we are all in this together. The world is ready to partner with the US, but we need to see a real change of course from the Bush years. The letter is based on a poll of the Avaaz community, which found that our top 3 requests for change in US policy are:

1. Help the world stop global warming
2. Respect universal human rights
3. Use diplomacy to prevent war and resolve conflict

There is a real chance that the candidates could adopt this simple agenda for change, but every day brings more risk that they will commit to another direction.
I think this is may help with regard to an important issue, and I hope you'll join me in signing up!

Avaaz.org - The World in Action

Languages Evolve In Rapid Bursts,

A piece of research from my Alma Mater: Languages Evolve In Rapid Bursts, Rather Than Following A Steady Pattern: "Professor Mark Pagel from the University of Reading said “Our research suggests that rapid bursts of change occur in languages, and this reflects a human ability to adjust languages at critical times of cultural evolution, such as during the emergence of new and rival groups.

The emergence of American English took place when the American English Dictionary was introduced by Noah Webster. He insisted that ‘as an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as Government’. This illustrates that language is not only used as a means of communication, but it is also important for social functions, including promoting group identity and unity.”"
This is one to be careful with, though I don't really doubt that it is probably basically right. The problem is the nature of the data we are left with when dealing with linguistic archaeology: it is partial and in ways that may not reflect well what is going on in a whole speech community or the range of factors that may impinge on written language. However, it does seem likely that 'punctuated equilibrium' may apply to diachrinic language development too for the kinds of reasons hypothesised in the article.

And of course we need to take with utmost seriousness that last quoted point: that language is more than communicating facts, it's also about maintaining social solidarity and difference, identity marking, conceptual tooling ...

Fair Trade, Organic and Eco-friendly Shopping - Ethical Superstore UK

Annie Porthouse put us at the Generous list on to this: Fair Trade, Organic and Eco-friendly Shopping - Ethical Superstore UK: "one stop shop for ethical gifts, eco-friendly gadgets, fair trade and organic groceries"
Definitely worth bookmarking.

Metaphysics and the God of Israel -a review

This looks very, very interesting. So much so that I've put it on my wish list for future reading. I'm particularly interested since it seems to offer help -or at least perspective- to the the issue of God's relatedness to time and space which is a major background issue for thinking about God and language. Here's what Ben Myers writes.

Neil MacDonald’s book, Metaphysics and the God of Israel, is a remarkably creative and provocative attempt to rethink this relation – indeed, to rethink metaphysics as a whole – from the standpoint of divine self-determination. MacDonald’s central thesis is simple enough: the mode of all divine action is self-determination. God acts by determining himself to be the one who acts. In other words, God acts by directing his own identity, by acting on his own being. According to MacDonald, all divine action can be understood along these lines. God is creator, for example, simply because he determines himself to be the world’s creator. This determination is strictly something God does to himself.

The question I have -which Ben tangles with to some degree also- is whether this view doesn't end up making creation essentially un-contingent; in other words potentially uncaused. But I like the way that it appears to be able to pull in some of the stronger insights or possibilities that are important in process theologies while maintaining (I think) a largely orthodox theism. Obviously, I'll have to read the book!

James Jones apologises for handling of 'gay appointment' that wasn't

After a reflection on the biblical ways of handling issues of Christian controversy, James Jones, current Bishop of Liverpool, has offered an apology.

It is with reflections such as these that I entered with anticipation into the dialogue with our partner Dioceses within the Anglican Communion. I also came as we all do to every encounter with a history. I had been one of the nine Diocesan Bishops to have objected publicly to the proposed consecration of Dr. Jeffrey John, now Dean of St. Albans. I deeply regret this episode in our common life. I regret too having objected publicly without first having consulted with the Archbishops of York and Canterbury and subsequently apologised to them and to colleagues in a private meeting of the House of Bishops. I still believe that it was unwise to try to take us to a place that evidently did not command the broad support of the Church of England but I am sorry for the way I opposed it and I am sorry too for adding to the pain and distress of Dr. John and his partner. I regret too that this particular controversy narrowed rather than enlarged the space for healthy debate within the church.

We should note he has not changed his mind, necessarily, except on the way to respond and debate.

News Feed change for Lent

Many of you will realise that I normally use the Guardian as my news feed. For Lent I'm switching to the Independent, partly to see what difference that may make, on the basis that a different perspective may help me to reflect theologically differently...

Peak Oil is here, I think

From the Guardian report:

Global oil production today stands at around 85m barrels a day. The CEO of Total has said that we won't get close to 100m barrels a day, much less the 115m programmed into assumptions about a growing global economy. The former head of exploration and production at Saudi Aramco, which until recently controlled the largest reserves in the world, thinks we are already on a plateau at 85m barrels a day, and can lift production no further. ... If the "peakists" are correct, and the oil establishment suddenly awakens to its dysfunctional culture of overoptimism, here is what is likely to happen. The oil and gas producers are going to start keeping what remains for themselves, in an effort to feed their own economies. Many countries would then face the threat of not having enough oil and gas to run the production processes needed to manufacture the low-carbon technologies that could replace oil and gas. Or, indeed, to feed themselves.

Let the reader understand ...

carbon fast for Lent

This isn't the only thing involved but I love the sybolism:

Participants are asked to begin the carbon fast by removing one light bulb from a prominent place in the home and live without it for 40 days, as a constant visual reminder during Lent of the need to cut energy. On the final day of the fast, people are encouraged to replace the missing bulb with an energy-saving bulb.

And, by the way; Hurrah!
I'll also refer you to an older posting of mine about Lent-keeping because it's still relevant and some of it works with the initiative I'm highlighting in this post. Also have a look at this one and, at another blog, this post.

Speaking Ikea

Apparently there's an amusing little game about guessing what product the Ikea names refer to.

Now it turns out that the names are quite well-thought out.

Ikea product names follow a system: because the company's founder, Ingvar Kamprad, is dyslexic, he found that naming products with proper names and words made them easier to identify.

Sofas, coffee tables, bookshelves, media storage and doorknobs are named after places in Sweden (Klippan, Malmö); beds, wardrobes and hall furniture after places in Norway; carpets after places in Denmark and dining tables and chairs after places in Finland. Bookcases are mainly occupations (Bonde, peasant farmer; Styrman, helmsman). Bathroom stuff is named after lakes and rivers.

Kitchens are generally grammatical terms, and kitchen utensils are spices, herbs, fish, fruits, berries, or functional words such as Skarpt (it means sharp, and it's a knife). Chairs and desks are Swedish men's names (Roger, Joel); materials and curtains are women's names. Children's items are mammals, birds and adjectives (Ekorre is a set of children's toy balls; it means squirrel). So now you know.

I was just wondering, having read that, whether there was an implicit Swedish imperialism in using the names of neighbouring countries for furniture; a kind of claim on territory.
;-)

Speaking peace

Well, I believe them but I'm not sure the right-wing press, eager for an easy reason to run a PC-language riff, will be convinced. (And see here for an example of the way the editorial riffs can develop out of nearly nothing* -assuming the report itself is not one!). I believe them because, looking at the actual phrases mentioned, I do think that they have taken on board some of the better insights of those working in peace and reconciliation:

"This is not about political correctness, but effectiveness - evidence shows that people stop listening if they think you are attacking them."

I salute and celebrate the toning down of the martial rhetoric. I fear it may be too late: it may now come over as mere verbal change. On the other hand by eliding the Islamic reference, is it setting up to fail by not really recognising that it is a variant of Islamic discourse (allorhetorical variation?) that is being used to ideologically undergird the particular form of terrorism being countered.

*We have recently heard of just one instance in the way that one newspaper reported our daughter's recent hit-and-run: not only was 10 years added to her age, but an extra and untrue detail was added; that she was returning home after partying with friends. I guess the latter was in there because "that's what young women always do". She was in fact walking the dog and coming back home after meeting her boyfriend off his bus from work.

My theology?

Interesting little quiz and regular reader will know I'm a quiz-o-phile. This is a slightly different result than a similar quiz a few months ago.

What's your theological worldview? created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan You are an evangelical in the Wesleyan tradition. You believe that God's grace enables you to choose to believe in him, even though you yourself are totally depraved. The gift of the Holy Spirit gives you assurance of your salvation, and he also enables you to live the life of obedience to which God has called us. You are influenced heavly by John Wesley and the Methodists. Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan 79% Neo orthodox 75% Emergent/Postmodern 71% Roman Catholic 57% Charismatic/Pentecostal 46% Fundamentalist 43% Modern Liberal 39% Classical Liberal 39% Reformed Evangelical 36%

However this one is minorly one or two badly-designed questions such as:

There is little or no human element in the Bible, it is a divine book

Maldesigned because it's asking you to agree once to potentially two not-necessarily-co-ordinated statements. E.g. I disagree (strongly) that the Bible has little or no human element but agree that it is a divine book (a position I take to be mainstream evangelical). Also I was puzzled over how to answer

We cannot understand God without looking first at humanity

. "understand" is a big word, and I'm aware of apophatic issues here.... Oh well, that'll be a midpoint answer then.
And I had my doubts about some questions of this type:

Jesus was an excellent moral teacher who's example we should do our best to follow

because while I knew what they were aiming at I'm not sure how I'd interpret the data captured by it. 'Disagree' might actually signal someone who reads/hears that as basically a defining position of certain types of liberal theology. However, taken at mere face-value surely most Christians would agree including many who would disagree if the statement had "no more than" in it (e.g. "Jesus was no more than an excellent moral teacher who's example we should do our best to follow").

More on naps and learning

It was discovered that, across three very different declarative memory tasks, a nap benefited performance compared to comparable periods of wakefulness, but only for those subjects that strongly acquired the tasks during the training session.

"These results suggest that there is a threshold acquisition level that has to be obtained for sleep to optimally process the memory," said Dr. Tucker. "The importance of this finding is that sleep may not indiscriminately process all information we acquire during wakefulness, only the information we learn well."

I should note too that the figure in the article is 45 minutes of REM sleep. This isn't necessarily the 10 minute power nap but rather a siesta. Not quite my definition of "brief" as stated in the opening sentence of the article but clearly not a full-on sleep session.