The Complex Christ

Off to Soliton | Nomadic Faith | Spiritual Cartography | Vx 'Suicide'

Off tomorrow to Ventura, CA, for the Solition Sessions. Big thanks to the generous guys there for offering to fly me over. What with being off there and other recent trips, it's felt like a bit of a busy, travelling summer. But it was great to catch up properly with Nic the other night.

One of the things we got talking about was Ben Edson's post about rites of passage and the 'Vaux Suicide'. He had rightly picked up on research linking high levels of adolescent male suicide with the lack of rites of passage. Denied any well-trodden paths into adulthood, they struggled to find their own way. Ben had then suggested that this might have some bearing on the lack of longevity in alt.worship groups, and that the Vaux suicide was a good case in point.

It's a great thought, and may well hold some truth, but Nic and I both agreed that a better understanding would actually be to see our ending of Vaux as precisely such a rite of passage: to hold on to that manifestation would be to remain adolescent. This reminded me of the video I'd created for the very end of the last service before our ending meal - a piece that I suppose stands as a suicide note. Part of the text:

Technorati Tags: Art, Bede, Cartography, Merton, Mofokeng, Race, Soliton, suicide

When Web2.0 Doesn't Work | Blogging 2.0

Perhaps I'm being professionally defensive here, but having looked at RateMyTeachers.co.uk I was left wondering whether this was actually a project that had any use. Part of the beauty of the 'ratings' section of sites like Amazon and Flickr is that they actually allow you to make decisions - which seller is reliable, which photos are 'interesting'. But there appears to be no end use for rating teachers. Children cannot decide who is going to teach them, and parents' choice about which schools they send their children to is often very limited.

There are also other problems. For ratings sites to work there needs to be an element of trust in the rating. Having messed about with RateMyTeachers (ie putting stupid comments and shockingly bad ratings about other teacher friends ;^) it appears to be a total free-for-all. No questions are asked to prove you were actually taught by the person, nor could any proof be given. Sites also rely on the number of 'negative' users being outweighed by the number of 'positive' ones. And as [ this ] article in the Telegraph recently showed, there are naturally a lot of mischievous kids out there looking to have a bit of fun. Who wouldn't. (Then again, when a parent logs on and writes that a teacher is 'evil' there is perhaps something more worrying.)

Connectly, I had a very interesting conversation with a guy (a psychologist by trade) who works in the web research department of the Open University. He was saying that the stuff they are working on is 'Blogging 2.0'. What he meant by that was, how to create a system that goes beyond tagging and comments and actually allows interesting posts to come to the fore more easily - using some kind of distributed rating system. I think this connects very well to the previous posts [here and here] on the problems the blogging is facing: the massive volume of posts, and the enormous task of sifting through to find the good conversations. They are currently running initial experiments, but I look forward to the final product.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Blogs, Complexity, Education, Technology, Web 2.0

Ascension

Ascension Day
"He rose from the dead and ascended into heaven"

Words full of vectors. Above and below.
Travelling on this great y-axis.
Cutting into the earth, and rising above it.
And disappearing from sight.

We've got too Cartesian in our theology
And want to co-ordinate
To assign vectors and fix positions
"He was here!"
"The kingdom is this way!"

But we can't know his velocity
Can determine neither distance
Or time to divide into speed

Only this truth:
That his disappearance into the infinity
Of all directions and all places at all times
Leaves us looking along the plane
Of our own axis, asking
Where is he now, here, near?

And going there to follow.

Technorati Tags: Ascension, Ascension Day, Poetry, Cartesian

SwarmSketch

"Collective sketching of the collective consciousness."

Via Wired.

Emergence-y question: will the sketches get better and better with time, or will they need chasing down from local peaks to properly improve?

Technorati Tags: Art, cartoons, Complexity, Emergence, Swarm, Technology

Steven Johnson | Fed-Ex Planes in Thunderstorms

If you've read The Complex Christ, you'll know that I'm a big fan of Steven Johnson's book 'Emergence - the connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software'. Turns out he has a blog, plus a new book launching in London this autumn.

The blog is well worth visiting if you're interested in emergence and complexity; on it he links to this amazing video - screenshot shown - of the paths of FedEx's planes landing at Memphis airport during a thunderstorm - watch them scatter when the storm hits! Like ants when you pour boiling water down their holes. Or shouldn't I admit doing that as a kid? ;-)

Technorati Tags: Blogs, Emergence, London, Steven Johnson, Technology

Leadership Day This Saturday

Looking forward to spending this Saturday discussing leadership issues at the first Blah... learning day, with Anna Draper, Jonny Baker and Paul Roberts. I'll be sharing some thoughts first published here.

Book [ here ]

Technorati Tags: Emerging Church, Ministry, Theology, Westminster

On Meaning [1] | Absolute Truth

A few weeks ago Nic and Jonathan and I had one of our occasional drinks at the Crown and Greyhound and ended up in a very politely heated debate on 'meaning', which we are planning to jointly thrash out here and over at Haunted Geographies (though not sure exactly when he'll be posting).

It had started innocently enough. Nic asked how Sigur Ros was, and I mentioned my thoughts about music being somehow 'beyond language'. He argued that without language there can be no meaning. And I want to try to explore why I disagree with that, and why I think that disagreement is important, rather than totally academic - which I'll probably get to in the next post. So bear with us.

My hunch that began the conversation was that there is a meaning behind language that we, very occasionally, get a glimpse of.

Technorati Tags: Absolute Truth, Emerging Church, Language, Meaning, Postmodernism, Post Modernism, Religion, Theology

The Judas I Never Knew

There has been some debate stirred over the discovery/translation of 'The Gospel of Judas'. For those of you who haven't read The Complex Christ (and why not?! Buy it here, now!), I wanted to outline some of my thoughts on Judas from the book.

We are often encouraged to meditate on characters from Scripture. To put ourselves in their place. To imagine we are Peter, by the fire, denying Christ, catching his eye, being re-instated. But Judas has traditionally been totally off limits. He is unredeemable. He betrayed Jesus. He is to be rubbished, spat on, despised, forgotten.

But I think he is closer to home than we might at first imagine. Judas was probably the most educated of the disciples. He was one of the few not from 'up North', and likely saw himself as a cut above, a bit special. He was the only one given a task: to take care of the money, and we can imagine he probably earned that by being more numerate. It is also thought he was likely to be a bit of a Zealot. He probably saw Jesus' mission - as most did - as a political one. Jesus would rise up against the Romans and chuck them out, restoring sovereignty to Israel.

Judas would doubtless have heard that the authorities were looking for a way to trap Jesus. They had also said that they didn't want him arrested over the festival, because they feared that after his triumphant entry to Jerusalem the people would riot. Perhaps Judas spots an opportunity. He will go to them, offer to betray Jesus, and persuade them that he can only do it now - over the festival. Perhaps he hopes this will cause a riot, and thus catalyze Jesus into his political takeover.

Judas attends the Last Supper. And when Jesus hands him a piece of bread - his 'body broken' - Judas leaves. Why did he leave then? Perhaps because he was the only one to understand the huge significance of what Jesus was doing in that first act of communion. If Jesus is going to die and become transcendent, he will slip through his political hands. The Complex Christ - dispersed, viral, networked - cannot be controlled. And he must stop this happening.

So he goes to the authorities. They convene hurriedly and agree to his plan. They go to find Jesus, and a crowd follow them - excellent! He approaches Jesus and kisses him. Perhaps he thinks Jesus will be pleased - he is offering him his golden opportunity on a plate to begin his political mission. Things start brilliantly: a fight breaks out, and swords are drawn... Then disaster - Jesus commands them all to stop. He submits, is led away, given a mock trial and killed, his followers dispersed. He has failed.

We know Judas was distraught. We know he threw the money back, and committed suicide. He repented.

So who is this Judas I never knew? It is me. It is you. Whenever we try to co-opt God into our own programmes, box God up and decide for God what God is going to do, when we kiss Christ, but more in lust for power than love of the Other, we are playing Judas, and betraying this complex Christ who will not be controlled.

So whenever we are offered bread and wine we must reflect on this choice that Judas had. To allow Christ this dangerous and free mission, or try to channel him into our own agenda. And as we take, eat and drink, we must commit to that holy freedom of God, and pray for the Judas in each of to be redeemed.

Technorati Tags: Easter, Eucharist, Good Friday, Judas, Religion, Theology

Self-Organizing Island Community informs Organizational Software

Article in Wired, here.

"If Friday's boat from St. Mary was cancelled, there might be six people in the village that needed to know. Armstrong found consistently they would all have that information within hours, even without a formal distribution system, and few uninterested people would be burdened with the knowledge."

Technorati Tags: Technology

President vs Archbishop | The End of Patriarchal Leadership?

A couple of recent posts I've read to link together:

In an excellent post here Will Samson explores the failings of the religious right in US politics.

"Beyond the public moral failures, however I believe that 2006 will be the beginning of significant political failures for the religious right. I believe we will begin to see an undoing of the last 30 years of political organization by this segment of the church."

And Jordan Cooper put me on to this post by Andrew Sullivan, which outlines the root belief of this 'political organization by this segment of the church':

"The key element that binds Christianism with Bush Republicanism is fealty to patriarchal leadership. That's the institutional structure of the churches that are now the Republican base; and it's only natural that the fundamentalist psyche, which is rooted in obedience and reverence for the inerrant pastor, should be transferred to the presidency. That's why I think Bush's ratings won't go much below 25 percent; because 25 percent is about the proportion of the electorate that is fundamentalist and supports Bush for religious rather than political reasons."

Finally, I noted a link on Sanctus 1's blog to this interview with Rowan Williams (Archbishop of Canterbury) in The Guardian in which he not only describes himself as 'comic vicar to the nation', but also replies to a question on whether an Archbishop should provide moral leadership by saying:

Technorati Tags: Anglicanism, Bush, Church, Democracy, Politics, Power, Theology