The Complex Christ

Emerging Church Critique | David Byrne & Jesus Camp

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

Eight.
White.
Men.

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

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

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

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

Let There Be (Solid State) Light

Let There Be (Solid State) Light

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

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

Technorati Tags: Environment, Technology

Democracy

From Malanda, via Barry Taylor

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

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

The 3rd Economy: Gift, Market and Plunder [1] | Christian Leadership and the Leisure Class

As some of you may know, I've been working on a novel for the past few months, playing with themes, among others, of the links between identity and consumption. One of the books I've picked up to feed the furnace has been Thorstein Veblen's 1899 satire Conspicuous Consumption (an excerpt from his longer work The Theory of the Leisure Class, available as part of the lovely Penguin 'Great Ideas' series), and I'm glad I did, as it's nudged me to re-thinking some of the ideas on gift within The Complex Christ. These are unrefined thoughts, but I wanted to set out a few posts on what I've mulled over.

Firstly, an outline of Veblen's ideas.

His thesis begins with an examination of what he calls the 'leisure class' which 'is found in its best development at the higher stages of the barbarian culture; as, for instance, in feudal Europe or Japan. This leisure class is basically what we might now call the aristocracy, but his labeling is quite deliberate and, I think, rather contemporary. What obviously separates them - and Veblen gets us to think about this in more ancient cultures, rather than just in terms of stately homes etc. - is their employment:

'The upper (leisure) classes are by custom exempt from industrial occupations, and are reserved for certain employments to which a certain degree of honour attaches. Chief among the honourable employments in any feudal community is warfare; and priestly service is commonly second to warfare.'

Actually, Veblen continues to list four main lines of activity for the leisure class: government, warfare, religious observance and sports. And, as World Cup fever truly grips (perhaps for only 4 more hours as England face Ecuador at 1600) it is interesting to note our continued fascination with the leisure class - we might call them celebrities now I suppose - who play for £120000 a week.

I want to explore the links Veblen identifies between warfare, consumption and leisure in another post. What interests me briefly here is whether Christian leadership is still seen as part of the 'leisure class' -  a get out from real work, an escape of some sort.

Perhaps I'll do no more than present the question; what I would like to add is this fascinating quote from a letter a great friend and critic of Thomas Merton wrote to him. It talks of 'the monastic', but made me think on the insularity of some full-time Christian work:

"The point of being a Christian in the city is to try to humanize modern technology and modern society, and you [Merton] are trying to escape this. Let us admit that at the outset I am radically out of sympathy with the monastic project. […] All monasticism rests on a mistaken confusion of creation with this world, and so they suppose that by withdrawing in some symbolic fashion from creation they are leaving the world. But creation is precisely not the world, but its antithesis, and so what they do is essentially the opposite of salvation. They withdraw from creation into the desert taking ‘this world’ with them and then they dwell apart from creation, but in a newly erected kingdom of the prince of this world. You have not withdrawn from this world into heaven, you have withdrawn from creation into hell."

Rosemary Ruether writing to Merton. In Merton: A Biography, Monica Furlong, p 287

Technorati Tags: Books, Consumption, Leisure, Merton, Ministry, Ordination, Religion, Veblen, Work

The Last Post...

...is due. According to the Financial Times.

"...which brings us to the spectre haunting the blogosphere - tedium. If the pornography of opinion doesn't leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium"

"For Marx and Engels, journalism was trivial - an impediment to serious, memorable and above all influential work. “Mere potboiling,” wrote Engels of the more than 500 articles he and Marx wrote for The New York Daily Tribune, “It doesn’t matter if they are never read again.”

And that, in the end, is the dismal fate of blogging: it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism; yoked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts - a choric song of the word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news."

[Thanks to JR for the link. He so needs a blog it hurts.]

Clearly the writer hasn't read (sic) ;-) or my post on the subject [here] where I paraphrase Ed Murrow in Goodnight and Goodluck:

"Given that blogs are so popular a medium (ok, this one excepted ;-) we need to make sure that they are more than 'merely wires and lights in a box.' 'If they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.' 'Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information.'"

Technorati Tags: Blogging

Forget Flushing - Use Less

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

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

Technorati Tags: London, Environment, Sustainable Growth

Solition | Endings | Merton

Just spent the weekend with Si and Gareth over in Northern Ireland. Good to see Pete Rollins too (his book is going to go ballistic). They also had the guys over from The Bridge in Ventura for a few days, and it was excellent to spend time hanging out, doing some Guinness, and doing the Celtic Solition day on the Saturday. It was a great time, but hung with sadness as we heard of the death of someone from The Bridge. It's been a painful year for them.

Some of the conversations turned to why we had stopped Vaux, and it's still something I/we think about a lot. I might do some posts of reflections about this over the next few weeks, but talking got me thinking, and my thoughts turned to this passage from Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation.

"All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered.... I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could become visible when something visible covered its surface. But there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed. I am objectified in them. When they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am my own mistake."

I think in a funny way we at Vaux had grown worried about the false self that we were projecting. We'd wound a lot of bandages, and it was time for a bit of naked truth. This is, for Merton, the essence of contemplation. To put down the fantasy self and "pass through the centre of our own nothingness [...] and awake as our true selves." "We become contemplatives when God discovers Godself in us."

I'm glad we left the building. The stones were heavy. Perhaps you'll find us in a tent somewhere, someday.

Technorati Tags: Fantasy, Merton, Religion, Spirituality

Studying Religion

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

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

Technorati Tags: Emerging Church, Science, Religion, Theology

"Wires and Lights in a Box" | Good Night and Good Blogging

This is doubtless old news for those Stateside, but Good Night and Good Luck has just been released here, and I have to say, I was very impressed.

As my wife and I left the cinema many people were, like us, asking "so what did you make of that then?" A film that has no incidental music (though some fabulous jazz numbers), is shot almost entirely within one building and includes some long inserts of original footage of Congressional committees. What did we make of it? Dry. Verbose. And if you can't sit through incredibly important cinema without jingles and fx to keep you interested, you've suckled too much at the Cathode Ray Nipple.

For those who don't know, the film, directed by George Clooney, is about Ed Murrow and his news team, who took on Senator McCarthy and his communist witch-hunt in the early 1950's. They won the war (McCarthy was investigated himself) but lost the peace (they were effectively fired).

Nodding heavily to the current situation in Guantanamo and Iraq, the film is a serious and challenging piece about the supine nature of the media, and their seeming spinelessness in the face of chilling government action, and is framed by Murrows' speech to the Radio-Television News Directors Association.

Technorati Tags: cinema, film, Media, Politics

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

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

Thoughts?

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

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

Technorati Tags: Art, Creativity