Super-strength alcohol 'is killing more ... than crack or heroin'

Of course because the actual headline has the words 'homeless people' in the '...' it will be taken less seriously. But I'm interested because of the link to drugs policy. The popular press's knee-jerk reaction to deaths from substance abuse is to call for bans. There's a hypocrisy about this because it's almost certain that we will not hear calls for illegalising alcohol despite the huge health and mortality figures associated with it. Yet what, essentially, is the difference between that and, say, cannabis, or cocaine? The biggest problems with the latter are those caused by the crime they produce and that is a function of their classification as banned substances. Rather than treating alcohol like these drugs which would be a logical response on precedent, perhaps it's time to treat these substances like alcohol and nicotine: regulate, tax, educate and treat. Portugal has been doing so for the last 9 years, I can't find indications that it has made society worse there; something of the reverse, in fact. Nor have I heard horror stories from holiday-makers coming back from Portugal, many of whom, I suspect, have never even realised what Portugal's laws on drugs are.

Super-strength alcohol 'is killing more homeless people than crack or heroin' | Society | The Observer: "these drinks are killing more people than heroin or crack,"

Paper money redesign

This is a good example of how noticing something simple and asking a basic question about whether something very familiar couldn't be 'done' differently can actually be quite revolutionary. Check it out here: US dollar redesign:
"... people tend to handle and deal with money vertically rather than horizontally. You tend to hold a wallet or purse vertically when searching for notes. The majority of people hand over notes vertically when making purchases. All machines accept notes vertically. Therefore a vertical note makes more sense."
So simple you wonder why no-one thought of it before. Of course, you might know that 'they' did: there is often also a sense that a good idea occurs to a number of people independently because the conditions for 'having' the idea are more present at particular points in time. I 'invented' the supermarket trolley coin-return idea about 5 or so years before they began to appear at British supermarkets. I was just told by one of my managers at the time that it would never work, so didn't take it any further (trusting soul that I was)...

Stanley Hauerwas: some quotes from Greenbelt

Just a few things I managed to note down from a couple of talks ...

"Politics is ... a wisdom-determined activity" (which he seemed to be giving as a reason for being skeptical of liberal political positions -I'll have to think more about that; please comment if you 'get' that statement in that respect).

"Learning the language of the craft [of theology] ... determines how you get to tell the story of the failures of your life."

"I don't believe in spontaneous prayer ... it turns out they're formulas people use again and again"

"Ethics depends on developing the eye of a novellist" (I think this may be actually from Hannah's Child).

"The problem with realism is that it can shut down the imagination." (Amen!).

"We need to learn ... how a priest ... [can] acknowledge their failures and learn ..."

Of these, I find myself continuing to think about two: the spontaneous prayer one and the eye of the novellist one. The latter because what I think it means (and what I think I heard in context) is the idea that ethics does require one to learn to pay attention to the human dynamics and alertness to the pain and human complexity of people and situations. I think that this is true more widely of practical theology.

Stanley Hauerwas

 

Greenbelt: Stanley Hauerwas

I went to Stanley Hauerwas' first talk earlier this evening at the Centaur venue. It consisted of a number of readings from his book Hannah's Child which is his autobiographical reflection on the making of him as a theologian. I hadn't read the blurb, so I hadn't realised quite what we were in for, but I was happy to have gone. Interestingly for someone who claims to do theology from revelation and principles, it is a reflection on a life. I think that perhaps this is partly explained by something he said. Assuming that I got it down correctly:
"Learning the language of the craft [meaning of theology] ...determines how you got to tell the story of the failures of your life". I actually think that there is a good definition of practical theology. Of course there's more to be said about that (not least some methodological unpacking) but ... I commend it to you.
Greenbelt - Festival Info Section

Baptising infants and educating out of Spirituality

Quite and interesting article/posting here: Educating out of Spirituality � Such as These part of it (interestingly) resonates with a fundamental message of Mat Fox's Original Blessing (I won't go into what I think is wrong with that book, merely affirm that the original blessing message in itself seems fair enough). Part of it is the curriculum that is engendered: "Gretchen Wolff Pritchard wrote in Offering the Gospel to Children that “Adults come to church on Sunday in order to worship; children come to Sunday school to acquire information” (140-141). The assumption is that it’s more important for young people to know about God that is for them to know God. We are educating our children and youth out of their innate spiritual capacities. God, the subject of our worship, becomes the object of our study."
It's an approach to curriculum more informed, I would say, by Enlightenment attitudes which prize rationality as the pre-eminent human characteristic. I'd like to develop a Christian nurture curriculum based on an approach I started to take with confirmation groups of doing far more about spirituality, formation and spiritual disciplines with an experiential dimension written in, and this is an approach which is pretty consonant with what is being said here.

The link to infant baptism is that I think it's interesting that the big rise in pisteuo-baptism comes with the post-Enlightenment period and exhibits concerns with conscious (rational) faith commitments. It has struggled with issues to do with the incorporation of those who have diminished rational capacities. The biblical basis of infant baptism (ie of children in the household of Christians) is precisely about recognising that faith is something lived and felt as much as, if not more than, rationally apprehended. I could go on, but I think that I have drawn the parallel ...

Follow up:
Case for Infant Baptism (Grove booklets on ministry and worship)  

FAILFaire: celebrating failure

I've been thinking quite a lot recently about failure. Or more precisely about the inevitability yet unpredictability of much failure. I've been coming across business gurus who point out that for every successful project there are many failures and that therefore we have to have a positive valuing of what we can gain from failures: we can learn and we can learn what to improve.
I've also been reflecting how counter-productive is a regime that doesn't really deal productively and compassionately with mistakes. By raising stakes unnecessarily, the energy that could be ploughed into learning and improving and even cleaning-up is ploughed instead into covering-up, in-fighting, blame-games and generally making a workplace less happy and productive.

So imagine my delight to find this: FAILFaire�|� Why FAILFaire?
Basically an organisation dedicated to sharing mistakes in an accepting environment in order for everyone to be able to learn from them: "We believe that only if we understand what DOESN’T WORK in this field and stop pushing our failures under the rug, can we collectively learn and get better, more effective, and have greater impact as we go forward."

I wonder what would happen if Christian literature would have more of this instead of the '10 successful ministries of sheep-stealing' books that abound. In fact, wouldn't you have thought that, with a crucified 'failure' at the heart of the faith, we'd be a bit better at valuing 'failure'? ... Yes, I know about the resurrection, but still; in terms of the generally accepted success-script for a Messiah, Jesus didn't do it properly. And so much of the successes of the early church in Acts seem to be presented rather as opportunist exploitations of God's proddings and acts rather than the playing out of successful strategies. Paul's missionary journeys seem more happenstance and trial-and-error than successful campaigns; if it doesn't work here, move on ...
I may be wrong, but ...

Moral decisions use general-purpose circuits

This is something we need to note and reflect on theologically...

It seems that our capacity for complex, life-and-death decisions depends on brain structures that originally evolved for making more basic, self-interested decisions about things like obtaining calories. Many of the brain regions we find to be active in major moral decisions have been shown to perform similar functions when people and animals make commonplace decisions about ordinary goods such as money and food.

It probably also supports, in general terms, the Lakoff/Johnson contention about the co-option of neural 'circuitry' for thinking analogically or metaphorically in general. I think it may also indicate that a single-purpose language may not exist neurologically, so much as a coming together of a number of capacities (of which the metaphorical re-use would be one.
Major moral decisions use general-purpose brain circuits to manage uncertainty: