More from Henri Nouwen

I found this really helpful. Particularly the last bit commenting on mercy and sacrifice.

We need silence in our lives. We even desire it. But when we enter into silence we encounter a lot of inner noises, often so disturbing that a busy and distracting life seems preferable to a time of silence. Two disturbing "noises" present themselves quickly in our silence: the noise of lust and the noise of anger. Lust reveals our many unsatisfied needs, anger or many unresolved relationships. But lust and anger are very hard to face.

What are we to do? Jesus says, "Go and learn the meaning of the words: Mercy is what pleases me, not sacrifice" (Matthew 9:13). Sacrifice here means "offering up," "cutting out," "burning away," or "killing." We shouldn't do that with our lust and anger. It simply won't work. But we can be merciful toward our own noisy selves and turn these enemies into friends.

It won't work because lust and anger are both rooted in our God-imaging: lust is the perversion of desire. Rather, perhaps it is a radical egocentrising of desire [I wrote something more about desire a few days back in relation to Buddhism]. Anger was exhibited by Christ in the gospels on a few occasions, rightly directed it is an expression of love faced with the marring of the beloved releasing energy to right wrongs. Turning them into friends, I think, is about reconnecting them with the wellsprings of life in Christ: that we may desire what will enlarge our hearts and our joy in othering; that we may be angry in the cause of righting.

Colour Fields Colr Pickr

You may be getting the idea that I'm getting into art a bit. You'd be right. And this looks really helpful; finding images by clicking on colours ... nice.
Color Fields Colr Pickr
Filed in: colour, art, interactive, flickr

Spell with flickr

This looks fun. Spell the word and have the letters come up with flickr images.

Spell with flickr
You have to cut and paste the code, but that's hardly difficult, is it?
Filed in: art, flickr, spell, fun

Bodily Resurrection and the Dialectic of Spirit and Matter

This is a dense article and quite hard to concentrate on, but I think that it is ultimately helpful in integrating into philosophical theology the implications of contemporary science for mind-body issues and an understanding of resurrection. Assuming that I have understood it correctly, and without endorsing the views taken of Whitehead and Peirce [which I'm not able to comment on through ignorance at the moment], it seems to pretty much mirror the kind of take that I have developed in my own thinking in the last few years. Here's a sample of a perspective that I think is helpful.

with respect to the mind-body problem, it seems clear that the ontological dualism implicit in the classical understanding of mind and body could thereby be finally laid to rest. For, mind and body are then not two different realities, as Descartes proposed following the lead of Plato.23 Nor are they to be understood as form and matter as Aquinas suggested following the lead of Aristotle. Rather, they are two dialectically related dimensions of one and the same physical reality at all levels of existence and activity within Nature. Thus the higher forms of mental activity should logically be emergent out of matter when the latter is properly conditioned to sustain that degree of interaction. As William Hasker suggests, this is where more recent discussion of the mind-body problem seems to be headed but what is still lacking is a better understanding of what is meant by “emergence.”

Metanexus Institute:
Filed in: Metanexus Whitehead matter process philosophy synechism mind spirit body emergence resurrection

Home Office can’t do its sums

the Home Office budget is £13 billion a year. This is roughly twice the Home Office’s claimed startup costs of the National Identity scheme. Since the Home Office is claiming the scheme won’t cost anyone else anything extra, one has to ask, which half of the Home Office’s current activities will be cut during the start up of the scheme? Or will this cost (which the LSE estimates to be closer to two times the Home Office annual budget) be swept under the carpet with more incompetant accounting?

NO2ID NewsBlog� Blog Archive � Official: Home Office can’t do its sums:
Filed in: ID_cards, costs, UK

My name's George and I'm a petroholic

I will be more convinced though when I see him putting the USA through a suitable 12-step programme...
1 We admitted we were powerless over petroholism -- that our lives had become unmanageable. Really there yet?
2 Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Church state separation issue?
3 Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. ditto
4 Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. The rest of the world can give some helpful hints here [some of us can even not be too smug about it having been there and still there]
5 Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6 Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. See 2
7 Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings. ditto
8 Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. That'd be interesting: let me see ...
9 Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10 Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11 Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12 Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other petroleum addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
Nah, Bush can't have been in AA mode.

President George Bush has admitted the US is "addicted to oil"

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | America must break its addiction to oil, says Bush:
Filed in: oil, USA, environment, policy

religious hatred reprieve

Amazingly [providentially?] the governments proposals were defeated:

someone charged with an offence would have to be shown to have used "threatening" language - rather than "threatening, insulting and abusive" the test in race cases. It will also mean that the prosecution will have to show "intention" to foment such hatred by the accused rather than intention or "recklessness"

Which, I think, means that my concerns and those of people like Rowan Atkinson, the Evangelical Alliance, the National Secular Society and so on [interesting 'coalition', eh?] seem to have been met by the prime minister not turning up to vote. Basically the governmen whips seem to have miscalculated and the rebels plus opposition carried the amendments. Who'd 'a' thunk it?
Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Government suffers chaotic double defeat over bill to combat religious hatred:
Filed in: legislation, UK, religion, hatred