You will be distressed to learn that my mushroom-growing experiment failed. The fuzz progressed a little beyond where it had got to when I last reported in, but it grew very slowly, and stopped entirely after a while. I wonder if it were too wet, or if I suffocated the mushroom fibres by leaving the lid on too long. Either way, it’s all in the compost bin now. I aim to try again in a little while, when I can find some mycelium from oyster or shiitake mushrooms.
In other mushroom-related news, these wee things showed up suddenly in a formerly shady area of the garden that has recently been pruned back heavily. I haven’t tried eating them.
Inspired by Gunter Pauli (on ABC Big Ideas) and Paul Stamets (TED Talk), and following the Mad Bioneer’s directions, I’ve started an attempt to grow mushrooms on coffee grounds. After looking at mushrooms at Moore Wilsons and many times at Pak’N Save, I finally found some at the latter supermarket that had bits of mycelium attached. They are the most boring possible variety — white button / portobello / Agaricus bisporus — but it’ll still be fun if I can get them to grow and fruit. The hope is that the mycelium will colonise the grounds in the next couple of days; then I’ll keep adding grounds until the spooky stuff decides it’s ready to produce fruiting bodies, i.e. mushrooms.
Question [to Salman Khan]: Are you interested in turning www.khanacademy.org into a business? Maybe with some VC funding?
Answer: I’ve been approached several times, but it just didn’t feel right. When I’m 80, I want to feel that I helped give access to a world-class education to billions of students around the world. Sounds a lot better than starting a business that educates some subset of the developed world that can pay $19.95/month and eventually selling it to some text book company or something. I already have a beautiful wife, a hilarious son, two hondas and a decent house. What else does a man need? With that said, if you are a social venture capitalist and are looking to deploy capital with the highest possible social return per dollar invested, we should talk. I think you’ll find that there is no more measurable, scalable and high impact way to educate the world.
Having kids is not a ‘decision’, like buying a car. It’s a commitment to a whole life change: in attitude, in experience, in the meaning of love and commitment. For me, having kids has deepened my commitment to working out how the hell to live through this, and to finding out what can be saved and bettered, because it gives me a sense of being part of this world for generations to come, my decisions and impacts echoing on in others after I’m gone. Having kids has connected me more deeply to the world. It’s made me feel, and understand, how to teach the right values, and how to learn them. It forces me to answer questions I would otherwise never ask. It shows me what unconditional love is and it provides me with human beings I would unquestioningly die for if I had to, and with that I learn selflessness too, and all of these things make me better equipped for being in this world, even as it falls apart. All told, it shows me what life means, better than anything else ever has.
“When it comes time to take stock, the most painful wound is that of broken friendships; and there is nothing more foolish than to sacrifice a friendship to politics.” –Milan Kundera in Encounter
Te Whanau a Apanui oppose Petrobras’ deep sea oil prospecting and drilling for good reasons. Our ancestors didn’t instruct us to be selfish in the way that the Government is thinking, risking so much and thinking of so few. A longer term perspective shows that bringing up oil from under the deep sea floor to be burnt will cause harm to ourselves, our resources and the world around us.
“I wish you would write a poem in blank verse,” Coleridge wrote to Wordsworth, in 1799, “addressed to those who, in consequence of the complete failure of the French Revolution, have thrown up all hopes for the amelioration of mankind, and are sinking into an almost epicurean selfishness, disguising the same under the soft titles of domestic attachment and contempt for visionary philosophes.
[from The Making of the English Working Class, by EP Thomspon]
My Christmas Hamper of happiness!
I never married and my siblings and their families all live overseas.
They have helped me by making sure that the visits I get each week from my care-giver still meet my needs, and they also help me with visits to my various medical appointments, because they can be very confusing to me.
When I was younger I used to have a grand time celebrating Christmas with my friends and their families. We used to go off to church; sometimes midnight mass; open a few presents; and have a superb roast meal with all the trimmings. However, for the last few years this hasn’t happened, as I am now basically bedridden.
To my surprise, last year I received an amazing Christmas hamper from the mission, and I was overcome. It had treats in there that I would never have bought for myself. I enjoyed being able to offer my friends a piece of Christmas cake, and I managed to keep nibbling away at everything right through January too! I was able to take part in some of the Christmas cheer, and the Mission told me they only had these things to give away because of the people in Wellington who donated them. I hope you all know that thanks to you, I had the happiest Christmas in a long time. Thank you.
Today’s theme is ‘Christ the King’. I want to explore this idea with you today in the light of particularly our Gospel and Epistle readings. Kings, queens, monarchies – they’re old fashioned things; they don’t have much currency or relevance for us here now. Well, I say that, but of course this week many New Zealanders, including my own wife, seemed quite excited to learn that Prince William and Kate Middleton are now engaged, and eager to hear the exact circumstances of the proposal, and precisely how everyone felt before and after. But really, even if William at some future date is crowned King, New Zealand’s Head of State, and the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, it seems very unlikely to make a difference to any of our lives. And if the idea of kingship doesn’t really speak to us in our contemporary setting, what does that mean for the idea of the ‘kingdom of God’ that is so often talked about from this lectern by various preachers? (more…)
Jesus’ parables invite us to take up residence for a while in their imaginative world, and see things from a different point of view. But the parable in today’s gospel reading is at first glance a fairly unpleasant affair. It asks us to imagine ourselves as slaves. Slaves who are tempted to laziness and who risk a beating if they’re found shirking their tasks. It doesn’t sit comfortably. It’s a jarring metaphor, but I think appropriately so – because the whole thrust of the Gospel reading, and of the Hebrews passage, is to shake us out of our complacency, to literally take us out of our comfort zone. I’m going to return to the parable later, but for now let’s wind back to the start of the passage: (more…)
Tim Jones has a good if difficult post up today, responding to the idea that we should boycott BP in protest at that big oil spill(ing). He suggests we boycott all the oil companies – Shell for messing up Nigeria, Exxon Mobil for funding climate denial and Chevron (Caltex) for polluting here and there (and he could add funding the Burmese regime).
Their suggestions for reducing your own emissions:
fly less/take local holidays
turn down thermostats, insulate house (they obviously don’t rent our house)
swap in compact fluorescent for incandescent bulbs
walk and bus instead of driving
eat in-season fruit & veges and have one no-meat/no-dairy day a week
buy less, buy second hand, buy durable/repairable
don’t buy packaging-heavy stuff, recycle, compost
don’t waste food
or water (shower rather than bath), careful about lawn/garden watering, fill your washing machine up
feel happier (smugger?) because “It’s Dec 2010… you’re healthier for walking & cycling, you’ve made new friends from swapping stuff & car-pooling, you’ve saved a big chunk of cash… and you know that you’re part of the global e ffort to prevent castastrophic climate change…”
From Herman Daly & John Cobb’s excellent book For the Common Good (1989):
Power criticises the “economic base” models that treat production for export as the “base” or driving force of economic development, and production for the local market as derivative and dependent on export production. … The real economic base of a community is not exports, but rather, “consists of all those things that make it an attractive place to live, work, or to do business. That means the economic base includes the quality of the natural environment, the richness of local culture, the security and stability of the community, the quality of the public services and the public works infrastructure, and the quality of the workforce. None of these things are produced by the commercial economy or produced for export.”
The quote within the quote is from Thomas Power’s The Economic Pursuit of Quality (1988). It’s relevant to the mining question, to the idea of ‘catching up with Australia’, to the Greens’ beyond-GDP approach, and to the Transition movement.
Below are some currently operating mines (mostly coal, with one gold). I’d love to add any others you know of.
Stockton coal mine
Not sure I’ve got this right — is that whole area a mine? South of here there is a large area which might be the old Denniston mine.
Luke & Esther gave me a voucher for a gliding trip for my 30th birthday. I used it yesterday, at Gliding Wairarapa, which is at Papawai, a little east of Greytown. It was a good time. CFI Vern told me that it was in fact the ultimate thrill, and that I was to tell all my friends about it. Because CFI stands for Chief Flying Instructor I thought I ought to follow his instructions. It was a friendly, low key, very New Zild operation. (more…)
The assumption she challenges — or, rather, says we can do without — is that underlying it all is some foundation or nodal point or central truth or master procedure that, if identified, allows us to distinguish among ways of knowing and anoint one as the lodestar of inquiry. The desire, she explains, is to sift through the claims of those perspectives and methods that vie for “underneath-it-all status” (a wonderful phrase) and validate one of them so that we can proceed in the confidence that our measures, protocols, techniques and procedures are in harmony with the universe and perhaps with God.
What is the zeitgeist? What is it here in NZ? What are the best bits, the flames you would like to see fanned? Like in the 60s it was maybe folk music – that was the thing to be into, the good bleeding edge.
There are lots of waxeyes hanging around our feijoa tree. The tree is in flower, so I wonder — are they drinking the nectar and helping pollinate it? There is a family of bumblebees who live in a brick wall at our place, but I don’t recall seeing them hanging around the feijoa. Can birds assist pollination?
The flowers of the feijoa (Feijoa sellowiana) look a lot like pohutukawa (Metrosideros excelsa) flowers, though the leaves are quite different. Are they related?
In a non-evolutionary framework, is there any such concept as species being related to one another?
10:10 is a campaign to get individuals, businesses and organisations to commit to reducing their carbon emissions by 10% in 2010. It was started in the UK by the excellent director of The Age of Stupid, Franny Armstrong. Chris Laidlaw interviewed 10:10 manager Daniel Vockins a couple of Saturdays ago (download it here). 10:10 has had quite a bit of success in Britain, with about 50,000 committed so far, including celebrity-types, MPs and sports teams. Vockins said if 1,010 New Zealanders sign up on the 10:10 global website they’ll launch it here by Christmas. I have signed up, and I think you should to. If you sign up you’ll receive pointers on achieving the cuts. Although individual consumption choices dictate only a small percentage of total emissions (see graph below – as Alex Steffen says “the parts of our lives that actually fall within our direct control are the tips of systemic icebergs”), the campaign has the potential to build a movement that would show politicians and industry (who can actually make the necessary reductions), as well as the public itself, that there is widespread support for real change. There’s lots more guff about 10:10 on the Guardian website if you’re interested.
… which is on December 17 (every year – though this one is particularly special as I’m turning 30), I would like vegetable seedlings, a baby bike seat for my bike (like this), a helmet for Elke, a beard trimmer and some books from my Amazon wishlist (wow, dig the potential erudition in that list).
Today I’m going to concentrate on the Gospel reading. It’s difficult material on more than one level. There is a lot of strange stuff about the sun and moon going dark, the stars falling out of the sky, and the Son of Man coming in the clouds – what, if anything, does this have to do with us, sophisticated city-dwellers, university students and graduates in the 21st century? (more…)
The antibiotics didn’t work, but I have seen a humpback whale, two bottlenose dolphins, four dugite snakes (venomous but shy), some bluetounge and other lizards, hundreds of quokkas, pelicans, more than two ibises and many other birds besides.
We’re off to Perth for a holiday from Thursday. My workmate leant me Dirt Music for the trip. I got up at 5.20. I have been cutting my hair. It looks about 6/10. I’ve had some toothaches. The antibiotic I’m on for an abscess above a tooth is responsible (via use by vets) for wiping out India’s vultures, wikipedia tells me. Land comes in huge tracts. Vegetation comes in vast swathes. Eliza found a large mirror in good condition in a skip.
I was thinking about the idea of ‘being true to myself’. I will grant for the sake of this exploration that my self is accessible to me and can give me useful guidance. But there are still forces acting on my self that are at more or less beyond my control or even awareness. These include my upbringing, physiology, class, and perhaps especially the ideas-environment my society (mediated by e.g. friends, church, the internet, ads, books, tv) provides me. My self is at least partly formed by these things, and perhaps is the sum of all these influences. So if I consult it, I’m not necessarily hearing from a more authentic or reliable guide than e.g. 3 News. (more…)
You can make Google Gears work with Firefox 3.5.2 by adding browsing to about:config and changing extensions.checkCompatibility to false (or adding it if it doesn’t already exist). Presumably Google will release a new version of Gears soon. I missed my offline Gmail. More info here
From Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which I recommend:
It was an ancient custom in the funerals, as well as in the triumphs, of the Romans, that the voice of praise should be corrected by that of satire and ridicule; and, that in the midst of the splendid pageants, which displayed the glory of the living or of the dead, their imperfections should not be concealed from the eyes of the world. This custom was practised in the funeral of Julian [the Apostate]. (more…)
Despite the Returning Officer Robert Peden’s words “Voting in the referendum is easy”, I am conflicted about how and whether to vote. Smacking is not necessarily abuse, and the current law is bad law. But New Zealand’s problem with violence against children is shameful, and the law is likely to have a good effect: gradually changing the culture so that physical abuse becomes less acceptable. So I don’t want to see the bad law overturned, and therefore I don’t want to vote No. But Jesus’ command to tell the truth (e.g. Matthew 5:37) means I ought not to vote Yes either.
In correlation with our sense of impossibility we tend to think of “apocalyptic” promises as pointing “off the map” of human experience, off the scale of time, in that they announce an end to history….Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom was unacceptable to most of his listeners not because they thought it could not happen but because they feared it might, and that it would bring down judgment on them.
John Howard Yoder’s book The Original Revolution arrived in the mail a few days ago, care of (the apparently a bit neglected & imho foolishly volunteer-staffed) goodbooks. Treat. Here’s a cracker quote from chapter 2, The Political Axioms of the Sermon on the Mount:
As the parallel statements in verse 45 and in Luke 6 make clear, we are asked to “resemble God” just at this one point: not in His omnipotence or His eternity or His impeccability, but simply in the undiscriminating or unconditional character of His love. This is not a fruit of long growth and maturation; it is not inconceivable or impossible. We can do it tomorrow if we believe. We can stop loving only the lovable, lending only to the reliable, giving only to the grateful, as soon as we grasp and are grasped by the unconditionality of the benevolence of God.
First impressions report: Great meeting. Enthusiastic participation from heaps of speakers. There was a disconnect between the audience who appeared to overwhelmingly support a 40% emissions cut by 2020 (a la signon), and Nick Smith, who in response to a useful question from D (why can’t we have some shorter-term goals, say 2% per year?), said it will be hard enough to stop NZ emissions from further rising, let alone achieving the required substantial cuts. Smith wanted us to truthfully present to people what 40% would mean for our society. It’s not a tweak; it’s a shake-up. What’s needed now, I think, is some visioning (ick — for want of a better word): some sketching out of pathways to a low-carbon future. What do agriculture, transport and electricity generation look like in a 40%-reduced-CO2e NZ? Also needed is of course leadership at all levels, from John Key down. On the way home Eliza talked about Key’s needing to give some World War II-esq speeches — this is a massive challenge, we will need to pull together, sacrifice our comforts for a noble cause, etc. I admit that is hard to imagine. Here is what was on John Key’s mind this past week (the weather, sporting events, a feel-good trip around the Pacific):
Money is a system of magical talismans that are used ritualistically. A lot of things around money are ritualistic — signing a cheque is a ritual. What makes that slip of paper powerful? You have to use a ritual to make it powerful. Rituals in any society are what a society uses to perpetuate its stories. The story of the people, and many subsidiary stories. And these stories are what assign roles to people, and focus human activity.
After some weeks of to-tooing around the other gospels for Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity and Te Pouhere Sundays, today we are back to the Gospel of Mark – back to the ‘ordinary Sundays’. Such a funny Church phrase. We’re in ‘ordinary time’; it’s ordinary Sunday #12, if I’m not mistaken. Be that as it may, today’s readings are about the extraordinary, about disrupted time. (more…)
Firstly, I would like to appreciate your Social Responsibility. And I thank you for bringing this to our notice. We respect you valuable feedback and would definitely take it to the concerned department.
I once again thank you for being a valuable and an honest customer with HP.
Please provide the exact problem description and any other information that can help HP assist you:
Nothing wrong with the laptop – I’m very happy with it in fact, and I’ve bought HP laptops on behalf of friends & family members as well. I came across this report last week, though, which is concerning me: ‘High Tech Misery in China: The Dehumanization of Young Workers Producing Our Computer Keyboards‘. It alleges that some keyboards used in HP (among many other companies) computers have been produced by people working in very poor conditions for very low pay. Is the report accurate? Am I supporting awful injustice by buying HP computers?
The first is that for the last three or four weeks there has been a notice in the parish newsletter asking people to contribute meals, which would be frozen and distributed as needed to old, sick and or pregnant people. The second is that the freezer is now full.
This mulled wine recipe worked well for me. I used two bottles of $8 Timara Cabernet Merlot, lemons rather than oranges, and a bit more sugar than the recipe calls for. The cinnamon quills are pretty expensive – about $6 worth – but apparently reusable.
This Al Jazeera item on anti-Indian racism trouble in Melbourne lists Australia’s top three export earners: coal, iron ore, and international students. Who knew?
Interviewer: Being a Christian in the army… Doesn’t Jesus tell us to turn the other cheek? How do you match those two things up?
Jim Wallace: It’s a question I’m asked often, you know, and I personally have no problem with it. One, because I actually became a Christian in my first year in the army, and certainly as Christians we believe you stay where God calls you, where he’s called you to himself, unless he calls you out of that. And he didn’t call me out of it for 32 years, very clearly. But the other thing was, I had a friend of mine, actually, who was a Christian, and became a Christian about the same time I did, in Duntroon. (more…)
Reckless love of neighbour. We (church) have forgotten who we are. Contrast society. cf Amish & the shooting. Embezzlement – the sin of the contemporary church. Alternative to insurance: communities of redistribution. Bear each others burdens. Not ‘how can we accumulate more?’ but ‘how can we live off less?’. Reconciliation must start in our homes. Whole-heartedness. Creation care. Personalism. Living on US$150/month. All having just part-time jobs so that there’s time for non-economic work.
Postnaturalism is not about recycling your garbage, it is about making something good out of grandpa’s garbage and leaving the very best garbage for your grandchildren.
Let me try to sum up. On the one hand, we have a large number of true but commonplace ideas, especially about how simple rules can lead to complex outcomes, and about the virtues of toy models. On the other hand, we have a large mass of dubious speculations (many of them also unoriginal). We have, finally, a single new result of mathematical importance, which is not actually the author’s. Everything is presented as the inspired fruit of a lonely genius, delivering startling insights in isolation from a blinkered and philistine scientific community. We have been this way before.
I’m a bad egg for starting to read reviews before finishing the book. Perhaps Wolfy will be vindicated when Alpha goes live… perhaps.
US Soldiers Accused of Proselytizing in Afghanistan
Al Jazeera has revealed US soldiers are being encouraged to spread the message of their Christian faith among Afghanistan’s predominantly Muslim population. Soldiers have been filmed with Bibles printed in Afghanistan’s main Pashto and Dari languages. In one recorded sermon, Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, is seen telling soldiers that as followers of Jesus Christ, they all have a responsibility “to be witnesses for him.”
Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley: “The special forces guys, they hunt men, basically. We do the same things as Christians: we hunt people for Jesus. We do. We hunt them down, get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into kingdom. Right? That’s what we do. That’s our business.”
The mass of the fossil fuels consumed by “the average British person” is about 16 kg per day (4 kg of coal, 4 kg of oil, and 8 kg of gas). That means that every single day, an amount of fossil fuels with the same weight as 28 pints of milk is extracted from a hole in the ground, transported, processed, and burned somewhere on your behalf. The average Brit’s fossil fuel habit creates 11 tons per year of waste carbon dioxide; that’s 30 kg per day. In the previous chapter we raised the idea of capturing waste carbon dioxide, compressing it into solid or liquid form, and transporting it somewhere for disposal. Imagine that one person was responsible for capturing and dealing with all their own carbon dioxide waste. 30 kg per day of carbon dioxide is a substantial rucksack-full every day – the same weight as 53 pints of milk!
In contrast, the amount of natural uranium required to provide the same amount of energy as 16 kg of fossil fuels, in a standard fission reactor,
is 2 grams; and the resulting waste weighs one quarter of a gram. (This 2g of uranium is not as small as one millionth of 16 kg per day, by the way, because today’s reactors burn up less than 1% of the uranium.) To deliver 2 grams of uranium per day, the miners at the uranium mine would have to deal with perhaps 200 g of ore per day.
So the material streams flowing into and out of nuclear reactors are small, relative to fossil-fuel streams. “Small is beautiful,” but the fact that
the nuclear waste stream is small doesn’t mean that it’s not a problem; it’s just a “beautifully small” problem.
I’m reading Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science. I’m about one-fifth the way through this 1200-page tome. He has studied cellular automata and found that complexity can be generated by very simple rules — complexity that appears to ‘come from nowhere’. It feel consonant with Simon Conway Morris talking at the Faraday Institute about convergence in evolution. Convergence is evolution finding similar solutions to design problems in disparate organisms. Sonar in bats and dolphins, for instance, evolved independently (there is no common ancestor with sonar), but their implementations share many features. SCM says that that shouldn’t really be surprising – for any given design problem there may be only so many solutions. There are only a few different ways two-legged creatures could possibly walk, for instance. So he thinks that if you were to ‘rerun the tape’ of evolution, you’d get similar creatures emerging. One interesting implication of convergence is that it suggests there is a sort of structure built into the universe. To someone like me who grew up with six-day creationism, but has let it fall away, that is helpful — that structure, combined with the mysterious fecundity of the universe (its propensity to complexity, life, intelligence, self-awareness) hint at, suggest, or allude to a God ‘behind’ everything-that-is.
We’ve established that the UK’s present lifestyle can’t be sustained on the UK’s own renewables (except with the industrialization of country-sized areas of land and sea). So, what are our options, if we wish to get off fossil fuels and live sustainably? We can balance the energy budget either by reducing demand, or by increasing supply, or, of course, by doing both.
Have no illusions. To achieve our goal of getting off fossil fuels, these reductions in demand and increases in supply must be big. Don’t be distracted by the myth that “every little helps.” If everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little. We must do a lot. What’s required are big changes in demand and in supply. (more…)
The vertical coordinate shows the energy consumed in kWh per net ton-km, (that is, the energy per t-km of freight moved, not including the weight of the vehicle).
He’s trying to get people to think (and talk) rationally, rather than emotionally, about energy consumption & production. He gives lots of useful rules of thumb for figuring out the possible contribution of various forms of energy generation. He’s fighting against the ‘every little bit counts’ mentality that is careful about turning off cellphone chargers but has nothing to say about (say) urban form. He’s trying to provide the mental tools for people to get a handle on their own consumption, the bigger context (in the UK at least), and confidence to decide between conflicting and confusing claims like these: “The UK has the best wind resources in Europe” (Sustainable Development Commission). “Wind farms will devastate the countryside pointlessly” (James Lovelock).
One kilowatt-hour per day is roughly the power you could get from one human servant. The number of kilowatt-hours per day you use is thus the effective number of servants you have working for you.
If the Australian government simply shared its $6 billion car industry bailout among the affected car workers, these workers could pay off their mortgages or perhaps start small businesses. At least that way the money wouldn’t be wasted. As things stand, the government’s $6 billion is simply paying the bills for a few multinational corporations, while doing nothing to solve the underlying problems.
Last Sunday, after the evening service, Substance, I gave everyone who came a short questionnaire with three questions to answer: 1. Do you think Jesus physically rose from the dead? 2. Why do you think that? 3. What does the resurrection mean? The Substance service is made up of mostly university students and recent graduates. Their answers are flicking through on the slideshow here, between the artworks. I found the responses very interesting, perhaps you will too. Most interesting perhaps is the diversity in the responses to the question of what the resurrection means. (more…)
Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible ‘expert’ advice for their retirement. Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control).
It will raise the level of scientific things that the average person can do. People will find that the world is more predictable than they might have expected. Just as running Google is like having a reference librarian to help you, running Wolfram|Alpha will be like having a house scientist to consult for you.
Slide [13] To keep evil at bay, Americans require money. In an economic collapse, there is usually hyperinflation, which wipes out savings. There is also rampant unemployment, which wipes out incomes. The result is a population that is largely penniless. In the Soviet Union, very little could be obtained for money. It was treated as tokens rather than as wealth, and was shared among friends. Many things – housing and transportation among them – were either free or almost free.
Social network[ing sites] don’t grow because they provide utility to their users: they grow because they keep pushing the social stimulus button. And any utility they provide is incidental to that function.
New Zealand is under pressure to donate some of our SAS special forces to the US military ‘surge’ in Afghanistan. … New Zealand currently has about 200 troops doing reconstruction work in Bamiyan province, an Afghan backwater far from the fighting raging elsewhere in the country. If the SAS is to offered up to the Americans, [Murray] McCully should spell out what the goal of their deployment would be. We would deserve an explanation. After all, raising the stakes and the visibility of our military contribution to Obama’s war in Afghanistan would make New Zealand a more likely target for terrorism. That risk should be balanced against clear, achievable goals. Would we be there for the limited military purpose of eliminating any threat still posed to the outside world by al Qaeda? Or would our goal in Afghanistan be seen as a domestic one, to help turn that country into a viable, self sustaining democracy?
The first page of my (gmail) inbox shows the most recent twenty-five unarchived emails. This usually means email received up to three to six days ago. So if you haven’t received a reply from me for over a week, you might want to gently re-email. Actually that sounds like a counter-productive strategy — maybe post a letter. Or put a sticky note on a bottle of wine. Yes, that would work. Hmm… I’m 29. This is going to be chronic by the time I’m e.g. 35.
A new round of little tax cuts came into force today. If you feel so moved, it would be great if you’d do something interesting with the extra cash and write about it on giveitup.org.nz.
Money is toxic. It’s obvious. Jesus, Gandhi and the GFC. Your new job is to try and get by with less and less of it. Grow more, swap more, walk more, make more, borrow more, give more. Try and convince your kids to support you in your retirement (what other choice do you have?). Wes Jackson says that high energy destroys information. Money keeps you from loving your neighbours and from receiving their love. Your salary is your exposure. Give it up!
As mentioned recently, I bought and planted a few rocket seedlings. I planted them in the same planter box that last year’s crop were in, and the seem to be doing well. Imagine my mingled surprise, delight and mild chagrin to find that last year’s crop has self-seeded (as my mum actually mentioned it might), and circa 100 tiny rocket plants have germinated among the handful of larger seedlings. So now I have rocket plants to spare if anyone would like any.
You will be thrilled to learn that this blog now supports OpenID. All going well, soon it will support RPX too, so that you’d be able to use your Google, Facebook, etc. account to log in here.
I received a new old Compaq 6715b laptop via TradeMe today. It has a problem which I haven’t yet solved: the mouse cursor freezes. Sometimes when the computer first starts both the trackpad and USB-connected optical mouse work fine, then after a short time either or both will respond jerkily, and then stop moving altogether. Even after the cursor has stopped moving, the trackpad buttons still work. I’ve updated the video driver (ATI Radeon Mobility x1250) and uninstalled mouse drivers from Device Manager, but to no avail. Suggestions welcome.
Global Recession; An opportunity to create a more sustainable and desirable future
13 March 2009
Robert Costanza
Jeanette Fitzsimons:
[lots of claps]
300 respondees on a Friday night – pretty good.
[Very warm feeling]
Bob Costanza:
My and Jeanette’s ideas are very close. The idea of using the current crisis to move green is getting some mainstream currency. Don’t want to get back on the same track we were on. Opportunity to rethink entire agenda. Anthropocene now, not Holocene. Human activities changing major global cycles. Full world. When our economic ideas were being formed, natural capital was abundant, built capital was scarce. ‘The folly of growth’ NewScientist. Oil peak. Net energy production even worse curve than gross. Oil reserves concentrated in unstable parts of the world. Climate disruption – rather than ‘climate change’, or ‘global warming’. (more…)
Fun question from Sue Bradford to the Minister of Housing: “Does he see any opportunity to simultaneously deal with the job losses in the housing construction sector and assist the nearly 10,000 people on the Housing New Zealand waiting list?”
Paul Graham: “The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid-seventies. … When Microsoft and Apple were founded.”
Dear Mr. President, you are presiding over an epochal contraction, not a pause in the growth epic. Your assignment is to manage that contraction in a way that does not lead to world war, civil disorder or both.
CLARE CURRAN to the Minister of Commerce: Does he intend to respond to public concerns expressed about the implementation of section 92A of the Copyright Act, which comes into force next week; if so, what will be his response?
South African dock workers are refusing to unload Israeli ships. Israeli Foreign Ministry says “If these people think that by refusing to unload a ship they are advancing peace in any way they should go back to school, since they clearly have no understanding of the situation in the Middle East.”
I love HP, but their subsidiary EDS provides the Israeli Ministry of Defence with a ‘biometric access control system’ which vets Palestinians crossing into Israel to work. The system matches data from smart cards the workers carry to the shape of their hands and heads. More here. Creepy evil oppressive shits! This I found out from the relevant page at Who Profits?, a database of firms involved in the Gaza occupation maintained by an Israeli organisation, The Coalition of Women for Peace.
Perhaps this will be of interest. Since May last year I’ve been keeping a history file, which I add to when I learn some new historical factoid. Of course it is an eternal work in progress. I suppose that most of the value in it is in manipulating it and adding new items, rather than just reading it. Here it is.
I recommend Doubt (the movie, not necessarily the state of mind). Philip Seymour Hoffman and Merryl Streep. You think you’ve seen sufficient movies about possibly paedophile priests, but you really haven’t.
If you find copying large numbers of files in Windows frustrating (because a 5GB copy will stop on a single file error, and you won’t know exactly how far you got; because you can’t queue up a batch of files to copy sequentially rather than ‘simultaneously’; because you can’t pause; or because you can’t overwrite only older files), I recommend TeraCopy. I’m even (gasp) thinking about shelling out for the Pro version.
Unless you are my mother or mother-in-law, the best way to find out what is happening with the baby is to follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/mhjb That will save me having to send n-1 text messages. You may wish to pass on that link to interested older people.
If the straights were not “prone to hostility” before that experience, they might well be so after it, because they’ve got a new host of excellent reasons. The sheer galling come-down of watching the Bottom Line, the Almighty Dollar, revealed as a papier-mache pinata. It’s like somebody burned their church. (more…)
We’re moving house this weekend. I’m looking forward to Aro Valley, but I think I’ll miss this house. It’s always warm, our room is very sunny, it has a high stud, nice bricks and an airy feeling. But our new house has a deck, a garden and a compost bin. Lots of kind people have volunteered to help us shift, and we’ve got commercial movers coming for heavy stuff too. I hope once we’ve moved in that we’ll have a chance to chillax a bit for a few weeks, because when the baby comes I imagine things will get hectic for a while. I’m waiting to find out if I’ve been successful getting a three or four month-long design contract. It will be great if I do get it, because it will be lucrative work that is unlikely to require much brain power – both very baby-friendly attributes. When baby busyness settles down I’d like to get more involved with the Aro Transition Towns group. Transition Towns being exactly the most hopeful thing I’ve come across this year.
It’s been a full year. I got married. We got pregnant. I helped make some books, booklets and book covers, magazines, flyers, and posters; delivered some sermons; went to Melbourne to see Steenhofs and Sigur Rós; helped start giveitup.org.nz; procrastinated less than last year; stayed in Central Otago for the first time; remained convinced about pacifism, environmentalism and some sort of Christian socialism; went to weekly workers’ prayers about as often as not; rode two horses and got some of my teeth repaired. I enjoyed Midlake, Gillian Welch, Sigur Rós, Bon Iver and Nina Nistasia (i.e. not much new). But enough about you.
We live in an apartment and don’t have our own back yard. We have been putting a lot of organic waste into the ($1.85 each) council rubbish bags. Peelings, coffee grounds, teabags, old flowers, that sort of thing. That’s been grating on me, so now I’ve got a bucket and arranged to empty it every few days into the compost bin of a friend who lives down the road. It took a while to find a suitable bucket. Neither Mitre 10 nor The Warehouse sold plastic buckets with tight-fitting lids. I ended up getting one that used to have yoghurt in it from a cafe that another friend works at. They usually throw them out and gave it to me for free.
From the National & Act confidence and supply agreement:
National agrees to a review by a special select committee of Parliament of the current Emissions Trading Scheme legislation and any amendments or alternatives to it, including carbon taxes, in the light of current economic circumstances and steps now being undertaken by similar nations.
National further agrees to pass forthwith an amendment to the ETS legislation delaying its implementation, repealing the thermal generation ban and making any other necessary interim adjustments until the select committee review is completed.
There is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy. I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they’re contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That’s just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.
… I doubt that history will assess the Clark-Cullen Labour governments as dismissively as their critics do now. Labour’s real achievements – net government debt reduced from 20 billion to two billion before the current crisis; unemployment down to levels many people didn’t think possible; a huge drop in the number of welfare beneficiaries, especially per capita; real wage growth; GDP growth that outstripped the OECD for years; a historic turnaround of trends in poverty; the repair of a public sector that was in dire straits by the end of the 90s; a serious attempt to address our savings problem via KiwiSaver and the Superannuation Fund; and a degree of stability that we now all take for granted – outweigh any counterfactual.
In 20 years’ time, those achievements will be regarded as prodigious and defining of an era. The fact that Helen Clark signed a painting for charity, or that her car once went really fast with a police escort on an open road; or the absurd mythology constructed around the departure of an under-performing police commissioner; none of these will be thought of as anything important.
Two more, this time from Voice for Life, who care about abortion; and Value Your Vote, who care about prostitution, civil unions, marriage, abortion, euthanasia, definition of ‘family’, Easter trading, smacking, the drinking age, and the EFA.
New column added, this time from Vote for the Environment. Issues important to them include climate change, water quality, ocean management and conservation. If you know of any other folks ranking parties, please send them in; I’d love to include them.
The top 20 arms-producing companies (excluding China) for 2006, with total after-tax company profit in US dollars: Boeing (USA) $2.2b, Lockheed Martin (USA) $2.5b, BAE Systems (UK) $1.2b, Northrop Grummane (USA) $1.5b, Raytheon (USA) $1.3b, General Dynamics (USA) $1.9b, EADS (W. Eur.) $124m
BAE Systems Inc. (USA & UK) ?, L-3 Communications (USA) $526m, Finmeccanica (Italy) $1.3b, Thales (France) $487m, United Technologies (USA) $3.7b, Halliburtong (USA) $2.3b, KBR (Halliburton) (USA) $168m, Computer Sciences Corp. (USA) ?, SAICh (USA) $391m, Honeywell (USA) $2.1b, MBDA (W. Eur.) ?, Rolls-Royce (UK) $1.8b, SAFRAN (France) $222m. Other well-known companies that are further down the list include General Electric, Saab, Goodrich, Kawasaki, Mitsubishi, Samsung, NEC. This list doesn’t include suppliers of oil, electricity, office computers or uniforms. Lots more here, if you’re interested [120KB PDF, via Jolyon at Justice.net.nz].
As we discover ourselves to be a much poorer nation, one of my correspondents put it: “the bogus risk-swapping economy must be replaced by a net value-added economy.” That means actually making things, growing things, and rebuilding things, and that can only begin to happen if we do not stupidly sucker ourselves into a war with other nations who are liable to be extremely ticked off at us for destroying the global economy, but also competing with us for a dwindling supply of resources that are not equitably distributed around the world.
… (more…)
Yesterday I did a couple of hours of garden work, for the first time in years. It was at Castle Semeloff, and it was very good fun. Shane and I dug a garden. I sawed planks for low walls around it. While digging I accidentally killed one or two enormous worms, thick as my index finger. I think they were native worms. They were milky white, with faint tigerish markings. White fluid came out of them when they died, and they had a sort of smaller worm inside them that looked like an umbilical cord. We covered the garden in soil from their old compost bin. It is amazing how coffee grounds and old veges and fish heads turn into nice brown soil in just a couple of years.
O happy day, the first of the party rankings is in! Last time around was fun. This ranking (best to worst) is from SAFE and comes via Frogblog. I do not know what SAFE stands for, but they are ‘the voice for all animals’.
I sat on the roof for a while (about here), having gotten a little bored of staring at my computer. There were pigeons flitting about from rooftop to rooftop, and it made me want to know the city like a pigeon knows the city. I wonder if a small transmitting camera could be attached to one. Someone has made a faux-pigeon cam, but it is stuck to the ground. I want to see the crooks and nannies you can only get to from above.
How many hectares per person of publicly-owned land are there in Aotearoa?
How many people are involved in the NGO/non-profit sector in New Zealand? (James K knows.) If they were somehow organised into a big meta-organisation, could they agree on anything (such as a set of government or business policy demands)?
Maxim Institute on Give It Up
… and in the Herald, and on Radio NZ news [streaming audio; I start around 13 minutes in. "Matthew Bartlett says he hopes that discussions over tax cuts won't dominate the election" – ha! brilliant]
I’ve tweaked wellingtoncalendar.co.nz (or by RSS feed). Previously I was displaying a month at a time, but now there are too many things each day to show more than a week at a time. One day I should promote this properly, because it seems like a useful thing to have all these cheap + hopeful Wellington happenings listed in one place. I am always impressed at how much lovely stuff is bubbling along around here. Good work team. If you’d like to be able to add your own events, send me a note.
newsreader or e-reader + facebook’s “we’re related” app could tell you if you knew the kids of the people mentioned in the news or in biographies. Just saying.
No one ever stopped. Except the Highway Patrol arriving promptly fifteen minutes late, radioing the report of an explicable billboard fire to a casually scornful dispatcher at headquarters, then ejecting self from vehicle, extinguisher in gloved hand, to ply the flames for a while with little limp gushes of liquid sodium hydrochloride (“wetter than water” because it adheres better, like soapsuds) to the pyre. Futile if gallant efforts. Dehydrated by months, sometimes years of desert winds and thirsty desert air, the pine and paper of the noblest most magnificent of billboards yearned in every molecule for quick combustion, wrapped itself in fire with the mad lust, the rapt intensity, of lovers fecundating. All-cleansing fire, all-purifying flame, before which the asbestos-hearted plutonic pyromaniac can only genuflect and pray.
We have a nice big room available for rent in our lovely apartment on Cuba Street. It’s $160 per week. It will be available from the end of next week. If you can think of anyone who might like to live with Eliza and I (and a small baby from January), please ask them to contact me. Thanks 1 million.
My church is fun. I talked to some people there. One person I talked to is currently reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Genesis concurrently. Another is a probation officer who cares about restorative justice. Someone else spends their time studying Southern Baptists. D and I have kicked around the idea of having a series of brown bag sessions. The idea would be for parishioners who’re working on interesting things, or reading interesting things, to give short presentations followed by general discussion. This would be a. interesting, b. improve community connections and c. counter the fractured nature of our lives.
I recall Walsh and Keesmaat said you can learn more about a person’s ‘worldview’ by poring through their rubbish than by perusing the books on their shelves. But either way: 30cm of floss. Lemon husk. Old takeaway container (#5 plastic). Old takeaway container (#2 – recycled). Broken wine glass and paper wrapping. Paper bag that a muffin came in. Tea bag. Pear core. Toothpick. A4 x4 (recycled). Carrot ends. Beer bottle (recycled). Library receipt (recycled).
Four pages of A4, stapled (Schlabach article on Yoder). Lemon husk. Banana peel. Pear core. Mandarin peels. Sandwich wrapping. Broccoli end. Sushi packages (7pcs, mostly plastic). Wine bottle (recycled). Courier envelope (recyclable (type 4) but not in Wellington). Used tea bags. Dead leaves from potplants.
It was a good day today. In the morning I continued to learn to edit. The book I’m working on is quite hard going and full of academia-speak. At lunchtime I went out with a happy little crew and a mini-DV camera. We recorded a couple of dozen vox pops, asking people what they’d do if they were given $60 a week to make the world a better place. I think we got a lot of good footage. This is for giveitup.org.nz, which ought to be live by the start of September. In the evening, Eliza and Isis and I went to Drinking Liberally to hear Trevor Mallard speak. He made a good impression on us (at least on Eliza and I — Isis wasn’t paying a lot of attention). He was down to earth. He wasn’t always on message. He wants to do what’s right for New Zealand workers. He thought the carbon tax would have been a better solution than the ETS, but that politically its moment had passed. My mabo: he is a good person to have in parliament.
Finally I have a lady hero: Amy Goodman. She hosts Democracy Now! (which if I ever get off my bum I’ll try and get syndicated on HumanFM), and spoke at Google with her brother David [YT vid – watch, mark and inwardly digest] in April this year.
From 42collective: you can now recycle number 5 plastics (like yoghurt containers). Wash them, remove the labels and take them to Common Sense Organics, Wellington. Cyclops (the yoghurt-making outfit) will take them to Auckland to be recycled.
Interesting questions from recently-returned missionaries to Tanzania at church tonight: 1. What are things that encourage you about the church in NZ? 2. What are the challenges? 3. How can you contribute to meeting the challenges?
1. How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.
2. For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.
3. What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy.
4. In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.
5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.
Wendell Berry said, “We’re members of each other, everything, all of us. And the difference is not in who is and who ain’t, but who knows it and who don’t.”
I recommend John Pilger’s documentary The War on Democracy. It’s about the adventures of the US in Latin America. The basic idea is that the US has done whatever it feels it needs to do to further its ‘national interests’, including supporting coups of democratically-elected leaders. Pilger is a little simplistic, too easily concluding that the enemy of my enemy is my friend (Chavez, Castro), but he’s still mostly spot on.
The depressing thing is that even though National have said absolutely nothing of interest in the election campaign to date (please correct me if I am wrong), they are still likely to be running the show by the end of the year.
Christian faith is inescapably rooted in biblical tradition. But the Bible isn’t a series of knock-down propositions. It is a set of living, dynamic, troubling, inspiring and disturbing accounts of the ways of God among wayward people across the centuries. For Christians its interpretative core is the Gospels. They are, by their nature, diverse rather than singular. They speak of a God of unutterable grace who, in Jesus, turns upside-down every expectation of the conventionally religious. In Christ nothing we thought we knew about God, the world or ourselves remains untransformed. But, (more…)
I admit it, TVNZ7 makes me want to watch TV. I am watching the Kingmaker debate at the moment. It’s got a stupid structure — following the results of some bullshit poll or other — but I still feel like I’m getting a good feeling for what the minor parties stand for. Rodney Hyde is more thoughtful than I expected, but in the end doesn’t really have much of interest to say. Peter Dunne is trim milk. Pita Sharples makes me interested in the Maori party’s consultation process. Mr Anderton is completely worth keeping in parliament. Jeanette Fitzsimons is really thoroughly great.
I’m so glad we’ve got MMP. It’s good for politics (in the sense of public deliberation about public goods).
Translation of the title page of The Starry Messenger that appears in Edward Tufte’s (best) book (of all time), Envisioning Information:
Unfolding great and surpassingly wondrous sights, and offering everyone, but especially philosophers and astronomers, the phenomena observed by Galileo Galilei, a Gentleman of Florence, Professor of Mathematics in the University of Padua, with the aid of a telescope, lately invented by him, on the surface of the moon, an innumerable number of fixed stars, the Milky Way, and Nebulous Stars, and above all in four planets swiftly revolving around the planet Jupiter and at different distances and periods, and known to no one before this day, the author recently discovered them and decided to call them The Medicean Stars. Venice. Published by Thomas Baglionus. 1610. With permission and approval of superiors.
We saw Black Watch. It was not shite. There was nice singing and dancing and jumping around lots of clever and beautiful stage tricks and loud noises and bright lights. But “the structure was muddled and unsatisfying” (EA) and the point of the play is in my view a weak and one: the Black Watch used to fight in good wars but now they’re hired bullies. There was some reflection on what it does to soldiers to have killed people, but no hint that we should all give up the whole shooting match.
from second episode of the best documentary in the world, The Century of the Self:
My argument with so much of psychoanalysis, is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness. When in fact possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people’s suffering. The problem is not to undo suffering, or to wipe it off the face of the earth, but to make it inform our lives, instead of trying to ‘cure’ ourselves of it constantly, and avoid it, and avoid anything but that lobotomized sense of what they call ‘happiness’. There’s too much of an attempt, it seems to me, to think in terms of controlling man, rather than freeing him – of defining him, rather than letting him go. It’s part of the whole ideology of this age, which is power-mad.
My goal in The Caveman Mystique is to encourage the average non-academic person to question the authority of science, particularly the “scientific” claims of evolutionary psychologists talking about human behavior and sexual desire and especially such claims discussed in the popular press. We must understand that those claims are loaded with values and are far from neutral and objective.
Trust me I’ve been doing it for ages. Economy is going well. Achievements: Kiwisaver, Working for Families, big investments in education, health, policing, infrastructure. Sustainability! Sustainability! Things have to be built to last. In economics, environment, society and culture. We want to kick the carbon habit. Those who denied climate change look silly now (don’t vote National). NZ has to work to maintain clean green image, position ourselves for overseas ethical consumers. Balance is needed (don’t vote Green). The current social ills are due to Ruth Richardson’s 1991 Budget, and we’re working on fixing them. We’ve done lots for business, education (from early childhood up). We want to keep under-18s in school or training. We have no hidden agendas, we’re experienced, we’re stable, we work for the whole community, not just a part.
Sorry it’s a bit longer – but then, she had more to say.
NZers used to be rich. We’re slipping way behind. Labour’s fault. Groceries, gas, and houses are getting expensive. Australians have better wages and tax cuts. Carbon emissions are going up. The underclass continues to grow. National will be tough. Many youth are in trouble. Many on welfare, many idle, many violent. We’ll make sure they’re all in training or work. We’ll give the Youth Court more power, and fund ‘fresh start programmes’. National is positive & pragmatic. We face facts. We have high expectations. We’ll move on from the tired debates of the past. NZers deserve better.
[There is] a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.
Wendell Berry said:
I think that human dignity … depends on not knowing everything. I think that you and I have a measure of dignity and are granted a measure of dignity because just anybody cannot presume to understand us entirely, and that dignity, that mystery, seems to me to be infinitely worth protecting.
Thanks for coming to the engagement party. We had a ten out of ten time.
When talent emerges it is a sin not to cup your hands around it and help it on. That’s about all I think one learns from the study of history, or the decline of cultures: somebody needed to help somebody a little more.
Stanley Hauerwas quoted his friend Enda McDonagh as saying “I am neither a pacifist nor a just war theorist, but a disciple of Jesus.” This is good because it is less abstract than the two alternatives, it stops one separating ‘convictions’ from practice, and it helps one think in terms of attempts and process rather than achievements, engendering humility.
Robert Pirsig, in Lila: “Nature tells us only what our culture predisposes us to hear.”
Wes Jackson, speaking at Duke Divinity School, in conversation with Wendell Berry, quoting Ben W Smith: “We need wilderness as the standard against which to judge our agricultural practices.”
From Ralph Waldo Emerson’s journals (via Kim Stanley Robinperson):
Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
I have ventured to place before India the ancient law of self-sacrifice, the law of suffering. The Rishis who discovered the law of non-violence in the midst of violence were greater geniuses than Newton, greater warriors than Wellington. Having themselves known the use of arms they realized their uselessness and taught a weary world that salvation lay not through violence but through nonviolence… The religion of non-violence is not meant merely for the Rishis and saints. It is meant for the common people as well. Non-violence is the law of our species as violence is the law of the brute. The dignity of man requires obedience to a higher law – to the strength of the spirit… I want India to practice non-violence being conscious of her strength and power…
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is –
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
I ought to be writing or at least researching for a sermon I have to deliver in three days. Instead I’m reading an excellent new interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. A quotelet:
… the word sustainability is now code for: let’s make capitalism work over the long haul, without ever getting rid of the hierarchy between rich and poor and without establishing social justice.
…the gospel [is not] that war is sin. That also is true, but alone it would not be the gospel. The gospel is that the war is over. Not merely that you ought to love your enemy. Not merely that if you have a ‘born again experience’, some of your hateful feelings will go away and you maybe can love. Not merely that if you deal with your enemies lovingly enough, some of them will become friendly. All of that is true, but it is not the gospel. The gospel is that everyone being loved by God must be my beloved too, even if they consider me their enemy, even if their interests clash with mine.
I read in the DomPost today that Transmission Gully is supposed to cost $955m. If my calculations (based on the NLTP) are correct, that’s about eight times more than the entire government spending on public transport planned for Wellington next year. Which is stupid. We could write to Fran Wilde about it.
From a review of The Bourgeois Virtues by Deirdre McCloskey:
For the last generation, we’ve been admonished to lock “utopia” in the attic of historical nightmares and dwell within the cheerfully commercial boundaries of the capitalist imagination. It’s been busy and entertaining and, until recently, it’s been safe. The poor were forgotten or chastised, the critics were stifled or bribed, and the billions in the slums of globalization’s wake were silenced with promises and missiles. But as Mike Davis puts it in Planet of Slums with grim and austere eloquence, “the gods of chaos are on their side.”
Said Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America:
There is no philosopher of so great parts in the world, but that he believes a million of things on the faith of other people, and supposes a great many more truths than he demonstrates. … It is true, that whoever receives an opinion on the word of another, does so far enslave his mind; but its a salutary servitude which allows him to make a good use of freedom.
I went to a presentation on Simply Good Food, a community-supported agriculture scheme. I was impressed by their food, methods and philosophy. I wasn’t impressed that their membership fee is $500. That would be fine if I was buying into a co-op with that money, and getting a share of ownership in the operation, but that’s not how they roll. My $500 would help them cover the risk of starting a new venture, and only buy me the right to buy organic produce directly from SGF. So I hope some other group comes along and imitates their production and delivery scheme, but in a co-op structure.
When National has stopped making political hay from the bill – no earlier than the next election, I guess – and when Labour has stopped settling old scores, they might both like to return the debate over election funding to its fundamental aims. At the same time they should find a significant role for the people who actually own the electoral system, rather than use the power of incumbency to tilt the electoral landscape their way every three years.
OK, a blog update. Thank your lucky guitars. I’m in Leipzig, in the former GDR. It’s 20:41. I’m in the hostel closest to the Hauptbahnhof, the main train station. It’s the biggest train station in Europe. I came here from Weimar on an ICE, an Inter-city Express. They’re fast: as we were slowing coming into the station I noticed a speedo on the wall reading 133km/h. Weimar was all civilised squares holding the people in and the greenery out. I had a beer in a cafe in Marktplatz (Market Square) opposite a chemist that was 440 jahren alt. Later at Buchenwald concentration camp I saw a photo of Hitler addressing a mass gathering in the same square. Such a feeling of forboding on the bus trip out from Weimar, up through gentle autumn forests all yellow and orange and green. It’s an awful place, incomprehensible. You might say the doctrine of original sin means that all of us should acknowledge our unlimited capacity for evil, but most of us, even if we assent to it, tuck that thought away and out of sight. But that’s not possible in Weimar, where the last stop on bus route 6 will always be Buchenwald. The German friend I was staying with last week said that what he loves about Germans is that Germans don’t love Germany — apart from fringe loonies with shaved heads, there’s no nationalism here anymore. I’ve digressed, entschuldigung. I’m in my hostel. I’m trying to decide whether to ask my silent laptopping dorm-mates if any of them want to go for a beer, or whether I should just slip out into the night alone instead, and see what I can see. I’m here for five days. Is it going to be museums, tourist traps and aimless wandering, or is something going to come from out of the blue?
Wellington brethren & sistren, who are you going to vote for? Voting closes midday on Saturday October 13. I am quite clueless, too busy to research, and I need some guidance. Here are my thoughts so far: Kerry Prendegast is no good because she is in league with the devil (property developers), so is unlikely to work for the common good. I’m not sure in detail why she’s no good. Ray Ahipene-Mercer is good because he was endorsed by Sue Kedgley in a previous election. John McGrath is very no good because his advertisements are utterly vacuous, his brother doesn’t want his company Mojo associated with him, and he’s a property developer. Paul Bailey is good because Cam & James heard him talk and were impressed.
A Wendell Berry quote:
Charity is a theological virtue and is prompted, no doubt, by a theological emotion, but it is also a practical virtue because it must be practiced. The requirements of this complex charity cannot be fulfilled by smiling in abstract beneficence on our neighbors and on the scenery. It must come to acts, which must come from skills. Real charity calls for the study of agriculture, soil husbandry, engineering, architecture, mining, manufacturing, transportation, the making of monuments and pictures, songs and stories. It calls not just for skills but for the study and criticism of skills, because in all of them a choice must be made: they can be used either charitably or uncharitably.
If the weather is clement we will have a picnic this Sunday at noon in the Botanic Gardens, say in the Dell, a happy little fairtheewell, before I travel further than I have travelled. You are most welcome to join us.
The three great American vices seem to be efficiency, punctuality and the desire for achievement and success. They are the things that make the Americans so unhappy and nervous. They steal them of their inalienable right of loafing and cheat them out of many a good, idle and beautiful afternoon.
Pope Benedict, when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, said
The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the Church has produced, and the art which has grown in her womb. Better witness is borne to the Lord by the splendor of holiness and art which have arisen in the community of believers than by the clever excuses which apologetics has come up with to justify the dark sides which, sadly, are so frequent in the Church’s human history.
You may be interested to learn that another 900,000 km2 of ice melted since last time I mentioned it a month ago. For comparison, New Zealand is about 270,000 km2. The ice cover got down to 4.1 million km2, and seems to have reached its minimum for the season, and has broken the previous record minimum by 1.2 million km2.
Arctic ice extent at 16 Sept 2007 (left),
and the previous minimum – 21 Sept 2005 (right)
I haven’t forgotten about the boycott ANZ/National banks business. I’m waiting for the Greens to reply to me about whether the banks are still bad. Their campaign website is getting stale.
I lay out Pacific Ecologist magazine for the Pacific Institute of Resource Management. The next issue is due to be done in October. I’m probably not going to able to finish before going overseas. Do you know anyone with InDesign skills who might help us out? It’s not a volunteer job, but it will be at a discount rate.
Today I learnt that the United Nations Security Council (members: United States, Russia, Great Britain, France and China) supplied 86.7% of the world’s arms (guns not limbs) in 2004. I also learnt that between 1998 and 2001, the US, Great Britain and France earned more from selling arms than they gave in aid. I’m not sure what to do with these wonderful learnings. (Source: Richard F Grimmett, “CRS Report for Congress: Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 1997–2004″, via Hope in Troubled Times by Bob Goudzwaard et al)
The natural or normal course of human growing up must begin with some sort of rebellion against one’s parents, for it is clearly impossible to grow up if one remains a child. But the child, in the process of rebellion and of achieving the emotional and economic independence that rebellion ought to lead to, finally comes to understand the parents as fellow humans and fellow sufferers, and in some manner returns to them as their friend, forgiven and forgiving the inevitable wrongs of family life. That is the old norm.
The new norm, according to which the child leaves home as a student and never lives at home again, interrupts the old course of coming of age at the point of rebellion, so that the child is apt to remain stalled in adolescence, never achieving any kind of reconciliation or friendship with the parents. Of course, such a return and reconciliation cannot be achieved without the recognition of mutual practical need. In the present economy, however, where individual dependences are so much exterior to both household and community, family members often have no practical need or use for one another. Hence the frequent futility of attempts at a purely psychological or emotional reconciliation.
Questions for evaluating those who govern or seek to govern
Are they in fact punishing evildoers?
Are they defending the poor and weak, or are they siding with the wealthy and powerful?
Are they acknowledging their limits as God’s instruments who are subject to God’s judgement, or are they claiming an authority that does not properly belong to them?
Questions we often do ask but for which there is no basis in the NT
Are these rulers promoting our economic self-interest?
Are they fostering our national security?
Are they living exemplary personal lives?
Questions we should ask ourselves
To what extent are our political leanings and commitments motivated by self-interest?
Are we living sacrificially for the sake of others?
Are we (the church) living as a visible alternative community? How is God’s kingdom being made manifest in us in such a way that the world can see that this is a community that is living in expectation of God’s coming order of justice peace and righteousness?
Hot tip: In Adobe Acrobat Pro 7, I was getting the error message “You do not have permission to write to this file” when enabling commenting in Acrobat Reader. The solution was to rename the original file, removing all punctuation.
Well, I didn’t write any letters yesterday, but I did visit ANZ Lambton Quay today, and I brought along a printout of the Greens’ petition. I said I was considering following the Greens’ advice and quitting ANZ unless they quit investment in evil logging companies. The receptionist didn’t appear at first to have heard about the issue, but when I explained further said “we’ve been told that ANZ don’t have anything to do with them”, but that she didn’t know anything more than that. I asked her if there was anyone around who did know and she went away for ten minutes but couldn’t find anyone. I’m not sure what she was doing for the ten minutes, but I’d like to think that this is at least now on the radar of a bunch of people down there. Someone is going to give me a ring “to answer any further queries you may have”. So that’s nice.
Jonathan Boston showed us this more or less terrifying image during his presentation on Saturday. The white area is the extent of sea ice over the Arctic as at Tuesday last week. The pink line shows where the ice usually is at at this time of year (or more accurately, the median extent for Augusts from 1979–2000):
A poster I designed, in collaboration with Kathy, Esha and Erin:
If you want to understand the Scripture, go find your worst enemy, and try and figure out what it would meant to forgive them. then you will be in a position to start reading the New Testament. You won’t get it from ‘the text’, you’ve got to be part of a community of forgiveness to even know what it would mean to understand this text as Scripture.
[The demons] struggle to have you as their slaves and servants … they get hold of all who do not struggle to their utmost for their own salvation—as we do who, after being persuaded by the Word, renounced them. Specifically in the baptismal renunciation of the devil and all his works. and now follow the only unbegotten God through his Son. Those who once rejoiced in fornication now delight in continence alone; those who made use of magic arts have dedicated themselves to the good and unbegotten God; we who once took most pleasure in the means of increasing our wealth and property now bring what we have into a common fund and share with everyone in need; we who hated and killed one another and would not associate with men of different tribes because of [their different] customs, now after the manifestation of Christ live together and pray for our enemies and try to persuade those who unjustly hate us, so that they, living according to the fair commands of Christ, may share with us the good hope of receiving the same things … The teachings of Christ were short and concise, for he was no sophist, but his word was the power of God. [via tSJCotACiANZaP]
2nd-century rabbinic riff on creation feat. speaking letters (“The light of the first day was of a sort that would have enabled man to see the world at a glance from one end to the other … It takes five hundred years to walk from the earth to the heavens. … There are also five different kinds of fire in hell.”)
From Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue [via], by which I make sense of my life:
In what does the unity of an individual life consist? The answer is that its unity is the unity of a narrative embodied in a single life. To ask ‘What is the good for me?’ is to ask how best I might live out that unity and bring it to completion. To ask ‘What is the good for man?’ is to ask what all answers to the former question must have in common. But now it is important to emphasize that it is the systematic asking of these two questions and the attempt to answer them in deed as well as in word which provide the moral life with its unity. The unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest. Quests sometimes fail, are frustrated, abandoned or dissipated into distractions; and human lives may in all these ways also fail. But the only criteria for success or failure in a human life as a whole are the criteria of success or failure in a narrated or to-be-narrated quest … A quest is always an education both as to the character of that which is sought and in self-knowledge.
It is making decisions with insufficient data and trying not to flee the results.
Here is a Wendell Berry quote, from The Unsettling of America:
The question of human limits, of the proper definition and place of human beings within the order of Creation, finally rests upon our attitude toward our biological existence, the life of the body in this world. What value and respect do we give to our bodies? What uses do we have for them? What relation do we see, if any, between body and mind, or body and soul? What connections or responsibilities do we maintain between our bodies and the earth. These are religious questions, obviously, for our bodies are part of the Creation, and they involve us in all the issues of mystery. But the questions are also agricultural, for no matter how urban our life, our bodies live by farming; we come from the earth and return to it, and so we live in agriculture as we live in flesh. While we live our bodies are moving particles of the earth, joined inextricably both to the soil and to the bodies of other living creatures. It is hardly surprising, then, that there should be some profound resemblances between our treatment of our bodies and our treatment of the earth.
So last night I was jaded having had one too many Gamay Noirs after work (it was a good day at work, I finally made a cover for a book I’ve been stalling on for eversolong, we had a class trip to Satay Kampong (recommended) and then to PARAMOVNT for Helvetica. Great film, could have been edited down a bit, was a fun way into thinking about modernism and reactions to it. Made me think about how the big temptation for design is to be about what it is always about: surfaces, surfaces, beautiful lies – but what we are all hanging out for is the truth. Helvetica caught a wave because it pretends to be neutral, an empty vessel, timeless, no history, no attachments; and we all want to forget our pasts.), so though I’d said I’d go to town with Kathy & co., I was very much not in the mood for that. But in this shifty-sand world every kept promise is a good brick, so we went out, found the French man at Hope Bros and it was all go, we were up for it clubbers, I bumped into old friends and we made some new ones, and it was all very good.
Best graph ever, from the Pew Global Attitudes Survey [2.5MB PDF, via D the Great]. It appears the Latinos are doing something right:
Kathy complains I don’t write here anymore, just post links. That’s fair, that’s fair. But what links! · I like hanging out with open people, it’s demanding, it makes me lift my game, feel awake, up and at them. · More cars were sold in 2006 than in any previous year. · On Friday I skied by myself a lot, sometimes in whiteout, waiting for other skiers and boarders to pass, letting them map for me by their movements the bumps and dips. · That’s all I’ve got.
Today the force of the term ‘agnosticism’ has been lost. It has come to legitimate an avoidance of the existential questions posed by birth and death. Just as the modern agnostic tradition has tended to lose its confidence and lapse into scepticism, so has Buddhism tended to lose its critical edge and lapse into religiosity. What each has lost, however, the other may be able to help restore. In its encounter with secular culture, the Dharma may recover its agnostic imperative, while agnosticism may be helped to recover its soul.
This is Walsh & Keesmaat’s remix of Colossians 1:15-20:
In an image-saturated world
a world of ubiquitous corporate logos
permeating your consciousness
a world of dehydrated and captive imaginations
in which we are too numbed, satiated and co-opted
to be able to dream of life otherwise
a world in which the empire of global economic affluence
has achieved the monopoly of our imaginations
in this world
Christ is the image of the invisible God (more…)
I think shoes and clothes are important to skaters. I think freedom probably is even more so. It’s hard (impossible?) to find e.g. skate shoes not made in China, Korea, Thailand or Vietnam, and no way of knowing what the conditions are like for the people who make them, and good reasons to believe they are having a pretty shitty time. This is the same for all our clothes, but I have this feeling that because skating is about freedom and independence and not being controlled they might be able to be mobilised on fair trade issues. What do you think?
There is no combination of purchasing decisions which will make the current affluent American lifestyle sustainable. You can’t shop your way to sustainability, as I’ve put it before. On a planet running up against so severe a set of deadlines – global warming, the extinction crisis, the poverty crisis, etc. – prosperity as currently delivered is frankly immoral, even when purchased with an eco-chic package.
That doesn’t mean that I think prosperity itself is wrong. Quite the opposite. Nor do I think we could talk people out of wanting prosperity if we tried – heck, I hope for a generous amount of prosperity myself, one day. But we need to redesign prosperity, using innovation, new thinking and new technologies to render it sustainable.
And here’s the essential break between lite green and bright green thinking: the reality is that the changes we must make are systemic changes. They involve large-scale transformations in the ways we plan our cities, manufacture goods, grow food, transport ourselves, and generate energy. They involve new international regulatory regimes, corporate strategies, industrial standards, tax systems and trading markets. If we want to change the world, we need to forge ourselves into the kinds of citizens who can effectively demand such things.
Dire practicality demands that we reject the privatization of responsibility. None of us can make this great transformation happen alone, and it removes pressure from our leaders to take needed steps when some suggest that the changes that need to be made in the world start with our personal choices. They don’t.
Last night’s Angela Davis talk. The atmosphere was worshipful, ceremonial. I wondered what it would be like if Jesus turned up to give a lecture, maybe in the Hunter Chambers or the Town Hall. 200 people had been turned away at the door, even after an overflow room with a video link had been filled up. It was like she wasn’t there, like an icon of her was there instead. She said it herself in fact – many people when they meet her feel they’re encountering their youth. She was the instantiation of an idea, or a hope, or maybe a vibe. She could have said anything, we would have clapped and cheered. We weren’t there for her, we were there for us. Well they were: I didn’t really belong; I didn’t fight the good fight, I don’t believe. What she did say was more of less this: notes from this evening’s Angela Davis lecture [45K PDF]
mhjb.co.nz seeks assistance: does anyone know where I can find a long recording of outdoorsy dusky nature sounds? Cicadas, birds, frogs, that sort of thing.
Of course there are more reasons than I can say or know, but the first one that comes to mind is that I have someone to be thankful to for e.g. mandarins, books, all flowers everywhere, girls in buses, cycling, freecycling, Leonard Cohen, the cabbage trees and soggy flats around Lake Wairarapa, the sun spilling down the Hutt valley into the harbour, the front-marking cloud to the west that looks as solid as a mountain range, the gaps between languages, having been launched into the world with loads of food within arm’s reach and some good work to do, and having more people than I can count who I love and who seem to be reasonably fond of me. For many of those things there is someone to whom I can be more immediately thankful, like the mandarin tree or my parents or the universe, but it seems wonderful to me that there is some one person ‘behind’ all those, who is presumably not less than all of them, and who might be pleased that someone is grateful.
Speaking of Buddhism, that cheap Chinese kicked me in the guts one-two, and after a day and a half of striving for emptiness on the humble white throne would you believe the thing that finally did the trick was some ginger-heavy delight at Ban Mai Thai, Vivian Street. By the beard of Zeus!
I watched V for vendetta last night. It’s probably been said before & my head is in the sand, but it was interesting to me that the movie makes you sympathise with someone who blows up a big symbolic building (presumably killing quite a few people, though it could have been evacuated) and feel that some good has been achieved in that, that a hegemonic power has been decisively cracked. Which is all reminiscent of the world trade centre building business.
I’ve just finished Lesslie Newbigin’s Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture. Great book. A quote from the last chapter, in which he gives seven conditions upon which the recovery of the western church depends:
The sixth requirement I would suggest for a missionary encounter with our culture is simply the courage to hold and to proclaim a belief that cannot be proved to be true in terms of the axioms of our society. … The gospel is not a set of beliefs that arise, or could arise, from empirical observation of the whole human experience. It is the announcement of a name and a fact that offer the starting point for a new and life-long enterprise of understanding and coping with experience. It is a new starting point. To accept it means a new beginning, a radical conversion.
Heavenly Burlesque review: 6.5 out of 10. Very funny. Some sweet skills in evidence, particularly with the hula hoops, acrobatics and the shopping trolley of desire. But it was way too short, only about an hour long ($0.45/minute) and the ‘afterparty’ deserves those scare quotes and featured Batucada Sound Machine. BSM are a ‘band’ with too much percussion and two few skills and are about as burlesque as Radiohead. Kathy and I left to avoid having to kill ourselves, but not before having our photos taken by a woman with nice eyes for Capital Times. Keep your eyes peeled, if we make it, we’ll be the wiggly and colour-coordinated ones.
UPDATE: I’m informed I wrongly identified the post-HB band: It wasn’t Batucada Sound Machine. So I hope they can forgive me for that. Apparently it was The Beat Squad. Anyway, I didn’t like them, though others at the function did. BSM, I apologise for tarnishing your good name. Please send me a CD so that I can confirm that you do not, in fact, suck.
Poetry at 128 last night, very good times, red wine doing the trick for once, and that girl whose face makes me fall over, and all my friends pairing off, I better pair off quick or I’ll be stuck for things to fill the weekend. Not really, but you know Todd. Next time I better have something to read out dammit. We were told Olmecha Supreme were playing at Valve so we hightailed it out of there (o to have a tail) just before the end, but they weren’t; it’s tonight (come along, they’re a blast man, Imon Star is the best and worst rapper in the world and Saturday before last was just the best dance for a long time, since Womad at least, though my paired off friends dropped away leaving me alone and faithful, because OS took so long to go on, and I was shy for a start sitting on a school seat and getting really jumpy before getting into it properly, sweet wiggly girls yeah). I hope we can make it, it’s going to be a busy evening, what with Hawthorne and Heavenly Burlesque (circus? vaudeville? strip show?) and all.
To reduce the spam-induced load on the server mhjb.co.nz lives on I’ve changed the blog’s settings so that you have to register to post a comment. Email me if you have trouble. Goodluck & godspeed.
Maybe we are The Fragrance. I don’t know. But especially in the first hour there were some sustained beautiful times, Iggy going both hands and feet at the faux-hammond/pan flute and the happiest spaciest new-steel-guitar-sounds coming out of RDB’s corner, and that’s when you get possessed by the unholy angels and couldn’t stop beating those drums to within an inch of their lives, even if you tried. I hope we can rein it in, pin it down.
When he heard my croaky voice on Sunday, a hardworking fifty-year-old man of Indian extraction gave me this advice, which he said was the best health advice I’d ever get: when you get to forty you should eat less, and then when you get to fifty eat still less. If you have four bits of toast for breakfast now, he said, have three when you’re forty. And when you’re fifty have two? I said. O no, probably about two and a half, he said.
Daniel came (welcome to Wellingtown) and we had rolled roast beef with garlic, sage, thyme and salt, and roast kumara, potatoes and carrots with pesto and chilli jam, and beans, and later there was chocolate fudge pudding fluffy and delicious with whipped cream and also cabernet from Chile, thanks Chile. It was a good time and there was tantrix (offline) to finish.
#2 in the Christianity & Psychology in Dialogue X-Nous (Christian mind) series is on tonight at 5.30 at Ramsey House, 8 Kelburn Parade. Last week’s was pretty good and this one is likely to be even better. It’ll be ‘simulcast’ on 88.1 Human FM. Flash eh?
Day 1 of the month of no caffeine: grumpy & useless.
Day 2: headache but productive.
Thanks for your suggestions re. the DVD issue, but this one seems un-unlockable. It’s a Matshita UJ-805s, which according to the forums has no new firmware, doesn’t work with any of the software hacks, and puts the ‘shit’ into ‘Matshita’. Which is a pity. Zones, man; them media companies are going to pay.
We use about 800 million plastic supermarket bags every year in New Zealand. That’s lame, they’re all made of oil, 90% are imported, and they’re hard to recycle. Bad stewardship! Happily, a solution is at hand. Ireland had the same problem and put a €0.15 (NZ$0.30) levy on each bag in 2002 and now use about 10% of the bags they used to. The levy goes towards other waste management efforts. (This is an example of Paul Hawken’s ‘tax the bads, not the goods’ idea.) If you’re into it, you can find out more at the BagsNOT site, or read the short Zero Waste report, and then do what I did and write a letter to your MP. BagsNot have a convenient list of MPs’ electorates and email addresses.
Perhaps I have two axes: sad–happy and quiet–excited. So I could plot myself in a box with corners sad/quiet, happy/quiet, happy/excited and sad/excited. I’ve been ranking how I feel out of ten quite a lot lately, and trying to get other people too as well, but that’s probably inadequate. Better would be “rate yourself out of 33 in base-4, why not?” Then 00 is sad/quiet, 21 is pretty gently chuffed, 33 is shouting happy.
“The Failure of Syntax”, from Friedman’s Fables, Edwin H. Friedman:
The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. Communication does not depend on syntax or eloquence or rhetoric or articulation, but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them. Even the choicest words lose their power when they are used to overpower. Attitudes are the real figures of speech.
More Yoder, from “Civil Religion in America”, from The Priestly Kingdom:
… If the God-reference of civil religion is inward or upward, it provides no effective leverage for critique or transformation. The God-language of the Bible does not point inward to the renewed heart alone, nor upward to the “higher power”, nor forward to the “hereafter”, but backward to the salvation story, outward to the claims of the rest of the world, the enemies to love and the slaves to free, and forward to a city not of our own making. (more…)
Mr Vonnegut is gone. “… his goal in writing novels was to ‘catch people before they become generals and Senators and Presidents’ and ‘poison their minds with humanity. Encourage them to make a better world.’ ” KV on The Daily Show [via Russell Brown]
I’m gunna go play trombone in a hard rock band. Hey I just thought of a name for it: “the music of the spheres”.
Today I found a plugin for InDesign, Teacup TableStyles & CellStyles Pro, that will let you link Excel spreadsheets to InDesign documents so that when you make a change to the spreadsheet it updates the associated table in InDesign, and preserves its formatting. Which is good because I have a big project on where I have to put together a document for printing which will at the last minute have loads of figures revised. Not bad for a Friday.
Listen to Midlake (“did you ever want to run around with bandits, to see many places and hide in ditches?”), they channel Bread and the Eagles and my theory is mum played David Gates when I was fetal and I’m now powerless to resist. Thanks John & Simon. Also Sarah Blasko.
John Howard Yoder’s The Priestly Kingdom is blowing my mind like it blew Cam’s before. Here is a quote:
Worship is the communal cultivation of an alternative construction of society and of history. That alternative construction of history is celebrated by telling the stories of Abraham (and Sarah and Isaac and Ishmael), of Mary and Joseph and Jesus and Mary, of Cross and Resurrection and Peter and Paul, of Peter of Cheltchitz and his Brothers, of George Fox and his Friends. How pointedly, and at what points, this celebrated construction will set us at odds with our neighbors, will of course depend on the neighbors.
(What would I tell you about if I made the time? Maybe about that perhaps-window on what-is-god, maybe the weather washing over the house like we were at the bottom of the sea last night, or the books I’ve read recently and the way they make me feel about being here, or that Inuit word that KSR says means “unusually intense pleasure in being alive”, or having the friends back in town, or a list of reasons to care about a species (maybe a very small bird) we’ve never heard about going extinct (little (genetic, instinctive) library on a locale, red light (we best slow down), precious to god), or good work done now, though apparently defeated, being the seed of the future.)
One by one, our heads were jerked back from the rear, and pepper was sprayed directly into each eye. It was very professional. Like hair spray from a stylist. Sssst. Sssst.
…
What makes life worthy and allows civilizations to endure are all the things that have “bad” payback under commercial rules: infrastructure, universities, temples, poetry, choirs, literature, language, museums, terraced fields, long marriages, line dancing, and art. Most everything we hold valuable is slow to develop, slow to learn, and slow to change. Commerce requires the governance of politics, art, culture, and nature, to slow it down, to make it heedful, to make it pay attention to people and place. It has never done this on its own. The extirpation of languages, cultures, forests, and fisheries is occurring worldwide in the name of speeding up business.
Paul Hawken’s list: Adrian Rich, Alice Walker, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, David James Duncan, Emerson, Thoreau, Pankaj Mishra, Kenny Ausubel, Nina Simons, WS Merwin, Janine Benyus, Gandhi, Van Jones.
Sometimes I get trapped in a flickr slideshow, and tonight I was, looking at billboards, trying to find out what we want, and this is what I found: happiness, independence, speed/freedom, fitness, style, control in a mess, cleanliness in a dump, respect, sex with hot people, self-expression, escape, a peaceful mind, transcendence, simplicity, cool friends, sophistication, understanding of things most don’t get, passive or unconsciously alluring women, confidence, seduction (ours or theirs), amusement, and lots and lots of holy Objects. And then of a sudden I thought about the stars, the saints who most perfectly realise our desires, and I suppose that is why icons of Brangelina are everywhere.
From Kathy: It doesn’t seem that long ago it was Summer Solstice but here we go again… we are having a party to celebrate the Autumn Equinox next Wednesday 21st March. It’s a pot luck sort of affair, with some kind of outdoor fire and maybe some mulled wine and magic. It’ll start late afternoon and finish late evening, bring yourselves and some food/drink to share x x
16 Russell Tce Newtown (that’s the #23 bus)
RSVP if you feel like it, otherwise just hope for good weather and show up.
Mr Scruff. Dancing to Mr Scruff, in the rain, with siblings, friends and ladies. Running into people. Clean toilets. Warm rain. Huun Huur Tu throat singers’ Siberian forest animal noises. Gotan Project’s old and new tango. Staying dry in the station wagon. Don McGlashan’s Miracle Sun.
I wanted to suggest that there is a spiritual aspect to science, that it is a kind of religion in some senses, that the world it investigates is constantly revealed as miraculous through and through, and that the practice of science could be seen as a kind of worship or devotion, and that this is a good thing. I was also interested in the ways Buddhism could be said to be scientific, or science said to be similar to Buddhism, in basic philosophical ways. I wanted the two to collide and illuminate each other, maybe to become one larger thing.
They’re not about spiritual potential, human decency, small is beautiful, peace, justice or anything else unattainable. [They're] about stuff people want, such as health, sex, glamour, hot products, awesome bandwidth, tech innovation and tons of money.
GIVEAWAY: To celebrate this day of apparently infinite potential, mhjb.co.nz/blog offers the first interested commentor one 14-watt (75-watt incandescent equivalent) Philips longlife energy saver bulb, made in China, valued at around $5.65. The catch: it’s a screw-in rather than the bayonet fitting which this house needs.
An idea: A general-purpose Wellington events calendar, why not? If it gets unwieldy we can break it down into smaller geographic or interest-based segments. Email me if you’d like to be able to add events.
Poetry events coming up: Newtown Spoken Word this Friday at the N-town Community Centre, co-hosted by Wellington’s own Bel; and Howltearoa next Monday at Southern Cross Bar.
Summary of Sir Harry Kroto’s talk Science, Society and Sustainability, given this past Thursday at the St James: “religion is very bad, philosophy is useless, politicians are evil, science is good, scientists are very good, scientists with a faith (except Buddhism) are schizophrenic, reason is good, doubt is good, we’re running out of oil, climate change might be anthropogenic, more and better science will solve our problems.”
Isaiah 2:2–5 is part of the Saturday morning service in the NZPB. It’s the swords & plowshears bit. Reading it I thought the church is the people who are walking in the light of the peacemaking god who let us kill him so that we wouldn’t have to kill each other any more.
In Educating for a Sustainable Future [55MB mp3], David Orr says: “we ought to begin pricing non-renewable fuels at the same rate as the cheapest renewable substitute.”
Natural capitalism means businesses a. using resources heaps more productively and eliminating waste, b. altering production methods to imitate nature (e.g. spider make stronger-than-kevlar webs at room temperature sans vats of sulphuric acid), c. become restorative rather than extractive of natural capital. Yeah!
Just before I head up to Te Awamutu to attend Jackson & Freida’s wedding, here are some paragraphs which struck me, from Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere:
On the other side of Monroe Muffler, heading deeper into town on South Broadway, is a small realtor’s office ensconced in what appears to be a minature New England church, complete with steeple. The whole structure is about the size of a detached garage. It is a holdover from the period between the two World Wars when it was the fashion to put roadside businesses in cartoon-like buildings: gas stations that looked like mosques and log cabins, motels like windmills, lunchrooms shaped like hot dogs, hats, bulldogs, igloos. (more…)
OK, I might have found a candidate to stand for mayor to beat Kerry Prendegast. What we need now are some policies. What would you like to see the mayor focus on?
UPDATE: My candidate suggests there may already a suitable candidate: Ray Ahipene-Mercer
& while we’re getting polictical, try theyworkforyou.co.nz, developed by Rob McKinnon, who was talking at Russell Brown’s Great Blend thing tonight.
Allah be praised: Higher Taste, the Hare Krishna restaurant and home away from home that used to be above Unity Bookshop in Wellington, is reopening 12 February in the lower level of the Old Bank Arcade.
Welcome to the first instantation of my NYR to summarise all the worthy nonfiction I read, in the hope that more of it will stick, not wash over me like knowledge off a duck’s back. Can you feel it? The personal development vibes are palpable! It’s the chapter “‘Sleeping giants’: surprises in the climate and Earth system” by Will Steffen, from Confronting Climate Change: Critical Issues for New Zealand, edited by Ralph Chapman, Jonathan Boston and Margot Schwass. So:
Science done since the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report in 2001 shows that global warming is likely to be in the upper range of IPCC estimates. Three areas contribute to this likelihood:
Climate sensitivity: The effect of aerosol masking in the troposphere (the lowest part of the earth’s atmosphere) is uncertain. Aerosols include industrial polutants and smoke from wood fires, and work to some extent against global warming. We want to remove aerosols, as they are a health hazard, and as they’re removed their masking effect will go too, there may be a corresponding surge in warming global warming. (more…)
Helen Clark, to NZ Labour Party conference in Rotorua, 28 October 2006:
Why shouldn’t New Zealand aim to be the first country which is truly sustainable – not by sacrificing our living standards, but by being smart and determined? We can now move to develop more renewable energy, biofuels, public transport alternatives, and minimise, if not eliminate, waste to landfills. We could aim to be carbon neutral. I believe sustainability will be a core value in 21st century social democracy. I want New Zealand to be in the vanguard of making it happen – for our own sakes, and for the sake of our planet. I want sustainability to be central to New Zealand’s unique national identity.
O, what a good start to the year: Four nights at Onaero with Cam, Bel and Simon. Sun, early morning cold and late afternoon warm swims, driftwood bonfires (one featuring an exploding can of baked beans), envied food, good and bad poetry, Ex Machina graphic novels and lots of other bookish adventures, and no music, ’cept what was sung on the way back home. Air-punchingly good, like literally.
With four others I’m travelling tomorrow to somewhere called Onaero, in Taranaki, for a holiday. I’ll be back Sunday evening. There might be a beach. I might learn to play cards, write in my journal, codify some NYRs, get some clarity.
song A Perfect Circle/Gravity album Gillian Welch/Revival books John Howard Yoder/The Politics of Jesus, Kim Stanley Robinson/Antarctica and 50 Degrees Below, Lovins & Hawkens/Natural Capitalism, Marylinne Robinson/Housekeeping, Alasdair Macintyre/After Virtue, GK Chesterton/St Francis, Kurt Vonnegut/Cat’s Cradle, The Hauerwas Reader moviesBatman Begins, Children of Men, them Linklater ones lectures most at longnow.org thinkers Hauerwas, Dan Janzen, Stephen Lansing highlights Living with Europe (Beranger, Elodie, Tors), leaving the country for the first time, producing Sea Devil, fuelsaver.govt.nz, The Life of Christ by Chinese Artists, St Francis, Blah blah blah nights, Whakapapa with Simon, longboards w/Si & Rich in Perth, Flinn reception, new old bike, that lady (!) lowlights Well, I’d rather walk everyday through hills and trees down to town and see the sea through said trees, and it’d be nice if my three best boys still lived in Wellingtown, and to have a steelier will and to be at all times a radiant peace-beast, but you know I remain thankful for 9 out of 10 of the passing moments, and it’s an adventure that continues to exceed expectations (or would if I had some), and on the whole, universe, Jesus, your beat is correct.
EVENT: BBQ at our house, 16 Russell Terrace, this Thursday. Summer solstice / solace and me birthday (yes, that’s right girls, I’m going to be 9,868 days old!) celebration. BYO drink, BBQ-ables and harsh but fair character evaluations of yours truly. All welcome. All I want for Christmas is for you to read my book recommendations.
When he called his society together, Jesus gave its members a new way of life to live. He gave them a new way to deal with offenders: by forgiving them. He gave them a new way to deal with violence: by suffering. He gave them a new way to deal with money: by sharing it. He gave them a new way to deal with a corrupt society: by building a new order, not smashing the old. He gave them a new pattern of relationship between men and women, between parent and child, between master and slave, and which was made concrete – a radical vision of what it means to be a human person. He gave them a new attitude toward the state and toward the enemy nation.
More:
The most extraordinary thing that early Christians did that distinguished them from the Jews was that you didn’t have to marry. … You may think that was because they had negative attitudes about sex – (more…)
And another: Kiva.org – “Kiva lets you lend to a specific entrepreneur in the developing world, empowering them to lift themselves out of poverty.” I’ll do it when my cheque comes in and tell you how it goes. By the way, who’s got my Banker to the Poor book?
Paul Hawken told me [50min realaudio lecture] that the weight of all the hormones in all the people in all the world is about 11 tonnes. Which is pretty funny; like you could fit that on the back of a big trailer and looking at it one way they like run the world.
Lord, Holy Spirit
You blow like the wind in a thousand paddocks
Inside and outside the fences
You blow where you wish to blow
Lord, Holy Spirit
You are the sun who shines on the little plant
You warm him gently, you give him life
You raise him up to become a tree with many leaves
Lord, Holy Spirit
You are the mother eagle with her young
Holding them in peace under your feathers
On the highest mountain you have built your nest
Above the valley, above the storms of the world
Where no hunter ever comes
Lord, Holy Spirit
You are the bright cloud in whom we hide
In whom we know already that the battle has been won
You bring us to our Brother Jesus
To rest our heads upon his shoulder
Lord, Holy Spirit
You are the kind fire who does not cease to burn
Consuming us with flames of love and peace
Driving us out like sparks to set the world on fire
Lord, Holy Spirit
In the love of friends you are building a new house,
Heaven is with us when you are with us
You are singing your song in the hearts of the poor
Guide us, wound us, heal us. Bring us to the Father
Today is International Volunteer Day. If it’s good enough for Che Guevera, it’s good enough for you. If you’re around here, Volunteer Wellington’s search page is a good place to start.
EVENT: Fernanda y Rafael de Cuba are giving a salsa performance 10pm Saturday at the St James Jimmy Bar
EVENT: Public lecture by Chris Marshall, 7pm Thursday 30 November at St John’s. Blurb: “One of the most troubling features of the Bible is the extent to which it implicates God in horrific violence. Christians have long found it difficult to reconcile this with the example of Jesus. This lecture looks to the apostle Paul for help in thinking through this important problem.”
Stephen Lansing lecture on complex adaptive systems, water politics/religion among 1000-year-stable rice farmers in Bali, pests mediating human cooperation, the Green revolution and the Asia Bank, dying coral, El Niño and Borneo hardwood (non) reproduction, the long hard work of learning to live well in one place. [14MB mp3, more formats available down the page]
Hubble took a million-second exposure of a small bit of the night sky (one tenth of the moon’s diameter) that appears uttlerly black/empty to earth-based telescopes, and found about 10,000 flash new galaxies. [via Digg]
GIVEAWAY: mhjb.co.nz/blog offers the first interested commentor a SPECIAL PRIZE, to wit, Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1994 novel Antarctica. Some say it’s epic, but it’s not really, it’s just big, almost 700 pages. Big and good. Like lots of his books it makes me want to work hard and collaborate and start/join a co-op and be a scientist or bureaucrat and do (more/better) drugs. There’s this underground party at the south pole which is by itself worth the price of the book ($12 at Arty Bees). The prize has a catch though: you have to agree to give away the book (with or without the tootling of trumpets) when you finish it.
One Malachi Ritscher burnt himself to death Friday before last in Chigaco in protest at the US’s actions in Iraq. Here’s his mission statement and bio. Mainstream media over there reporting his death don’t mention the war.
Joel says:
The name has to be more accessible for people. A name like Stay Human might be fine with those of us who have some understanding of the angchap/social justice/counter-cultural/Judeo-Christian world view etc etc, but I feel a name like that isolates us too much from the outset. The name is crucial because it’s our brand, it is the first point of contact that someone makes with the station and it is a reference point which takes on meaning once that person starts to discover what the station is all about. Stay Human is a fantastic name for a radio show, maybe one dealing with counter-cultural ideas and issues, yet as a name, a brand, it doesn’t work.
My own concerns about that particular name are these. Firstly I feel it is trying to say too much. I understand that in terms of the humanizing goal of the station the name fit’s perfectly, however I would rather let the programming do the talking than have a grand name which can also peg us into a hole. The name has to be much more subtle.
One name which Geoff and I came up with a while back was ‘The Funnel’. could also work as Funnel FM. One reason for this is that it works well visually as it is also the shape of a loud-hailer or speaker. And it carries connotations of channeling stuff into a specific point… a concentration of information, ideas etc. What do you guys think??
Chaplain Tim McKenzie says “David Newton is adamant that the name must reflect the values contained on the chaplaincy website, and therefore have a slightly subversive tang. At the moment, he thinks “Stay Human FM” is the best name by a country 1500m, and will take a lot of convincing otherwise. But he is open to other names, provided that they reflect the values of the chaplaincy etc.”
I don’t think you can predict the future at all except in the most trivial sense, even tomorrow, but i do … it’s a question of what the carrying capacity of the earth is, and we’re in the midst of a kind of global environmental crisis. We think science, or at least it’s commonly held, that science or technology will work our way through this or get us out of it, but we can’t make topsoil. (more…)
Resonding to a comment by Lynton, here is a start at defining what ‘stewardliness’ means in the area of global warming. If one accepts the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) objective* of “the stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous** anthropogenic interference with the climate system”, and their figure of 2 degrees C as the maximum allowable global average temperature increase over pre-industrial levels, then stewardliness means working in whatever circles one has authority over or influence in to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We all at least have some authority over our own lives, and possibly also over a household, or business unit, or church etc etc.
My friend Hannah told me about this new word she learned the other week. Conglutinates. Some baby mussels are conglutinates, and they glob together in the shape and colour of wee fish, so that a real fish will come along and eat them up, so that the wee mussels can attach parasite-wise for a while to get a bit bigger and then get where they want to go. Which factoid perhaps leads one to ponder the very oddness of the world slash worldmaker.
‘Total depravity’ does not mean that people are as bad as possible, rather it means that even the good which a person may intend is faulty in its premise, false in its motive and weak in its implementation, and there is no mere refinement of natural capacities that can correct this condition.
Following Nielson: On this blog over the last three years, the top 10% of named commentors post about 84% of the comments. The top three commentors post about quarter of the comments. The top 10% of commentors (in order) were me, Tim, Aaron, David, Richard B, Dan W, Matthew Baird, Deb, Daniel McClelland, Hans, Jono, John, Sam, Rich F, Dennis, Sambo, Rudy, Bryan, Kathy, D, Ben, Ange, RU and Lynton. There is some confusion about which Matthew/Matt is which. Lots of boys in there, eh? It would be somewhat interesting to do the same analysis for the last few months, but this took me 45 minutes to produce and you know Todd.
UP-to-the-minute-DATE:
And you’ll be pleased to learn that the numbers on the last twelve months are: the top 10% of named commentors post about 48% of the comments. The top 10% of commentors were: me, Tim, Dennis, Sambo, Richard B, Aaron. Next few: Daniel McClelland, Matthew Baird, Hans, Rudy, D, Jono, Richface, a, Ben, Deb, Anabelle, Bel and James K. The curve is getting flatter, i.e. there’s less participation inequality than there used to be. Another blow for FREEDOM!!
Oioops, it’s time for some verbiage, this poor neglected telecommunion methodologically impure mechanism of pseudo-spewdo connexion?? Hale me hearties, I’m channelling Dick Cheney on yo ass! Couldn’t be angrier, more rhetorical, more rhegular (two times a day, most days, daies). I’m a one-man war or terrier! The only thing it’s more scared of than my guns (left and right) is, … – … FREEDOM!! Two exclamation marks, right upside the head.
War had broken out between Assisi and Perugia. It is now fashionable to say in a satirical spirit that such wars did not so much break out as to go on indefinitely between the city states of medieval Italy. It will be enough to say here that if one of those medieval wars had really gone on without stopping for a century, it might possibly have come within a remote distance of killing as many people as we kill in a year, in one of our great modern scientific wars between our great modern industrial empires. (more…)
Before Sunrise and Before Sunset: I saw them two evenings running respectively, reflectively. Richard Linklater, who I met first in Tape (which movie read me like a book), wrote the first and he and Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy wrote the second. Hawke and Delpy acted, talked mostly, they’re more or less two long conversations, the first wandering around Vienna, the second around Paris. Turns out I would quite like to go to both cities after all. One relationship whose life is in two bursts of a few hours and a book. Together they’re an argument about love. Is love other than or more than commitment, trust, friendship, companionship, responsibility? Is there The One? I tell myself it doesn’t matter, if we’re both caught up in some glorious gospel project, that sort of question will cease to be interesting. But I wonder.
EVENTS
The Middle East: a guide for Christians (and other perplexed people) continues 5.30pm Tuesday at Ramsey House, 8 Kelburn Parade. Graham Redding will talk about “Holy Land and Sacred Space”. I went to the first two sessions, with Peter Lineham and Vicky Mason, and they were hot (not like newspapers). Full details are available in the series flyer [110KB PDF].
Also coming up at Ramsey: there’ll be a screening of the doco Allie Eagle and me 5pm this Sunday. Briar March, the film’s director, is going to be there to talk about it, too. There’s potluck dinner beforehand and church up the road at S.Michael’s afterwards.
And I’m in bed, ill, writing on my blog. This is what it takes to get me to write some words not links. Perhaps I can generate some boring I mean interesting discussion by saying something controversial. The “is Peter Davis a homo” “issue” means that you shouldn’t watch TV or read the newspaper anymore. You know I haven’t really got anything to say. I’m supposed to be finishing Prism 4 layout, or formatting a forestry industry newsletter for the web, or producing some webstats, or quoting for a small WAP app, or starting a publishing company, but I think I’ll stay in bed instead. People who live with chronic pain, man, I can’t imagine it, God bless them. Goodnight.
A show where we teach people how the exegete the bible. We could point them to online resources, or tell them to come into AngChap. I think it will be well received by both Christians and non-Christians. The Church as a whole is fairly poor at doing this, and so it will plug a significant hole.
Esoteric Theology with Gavin Drew, featuring the Cosmic Pelvis
Music shows
James’ Smiths/Doves Hour
Lynton’s alt.music
Erin’s idiot’s guide to classical music
Father Kev’s jazz improv
some sort of justice show, looking at current humanitarian/ecological crises that no one cares about (i.e. West Papua independence) or looking at current events (such as Darfur) through a religious framework, instead of what we get fed through the media or the humanist (it’s all about economic/ historical/ sociological factors, but never religion) analysis we get from the UN.
Simulcasts/rebroadcasts of X-Nous seminars.
Rebroadcasts from e.g. Radio National AU programme on virtue ethics
That nameless band who might be called White Line East and which features Matt Freeman, Richard May and Jeff are gigging their first gig this coming Tuesday at 7.30pm at Blue Note.
Newest flatmate F started to teach B and me tango yesterday evening & it was some window on a different and good world, and I suppose it’s the expected thing but I want to be Latin and feisty and upright and moving lockstep with my opposite, the end of the rainbow for a hundred metaphors. But first I have to learn how to walk, she said, that is the important thing.
In a recent radio interview, Stanley Hauerwas said:
… the very idea that America has some kind of special understanding of ‘freedom’ that we want to share around the world, is just a capitalist set of presumptions that says freedom is walking in the Circuit City and trying to decide whether I’m going to by a Sony or a Panasonic. That’s not freedom – I mean that’s just as a matter of fact to be determined to be a consumer.
Nothing is more destructive to Christianity than simply saying it is all about love. Jesus was about creating an alternative to the social order – one that requires hospitality to the stranger and forgiveness for the offender. This Christianity is far from being safe. It is, in fact, dangerous.
Lunchtime
I walked on the opposite side of the road to the side I normally walk when I walk to Chummeez/Fujiyama cafe on Lambton Quay. I don’t know which it is, Chummeez or Fujiyama. I hope it’s Chummeez but Fujiyama is more likely. It was quite a different thing, walking on the other side. There was a little more rain. The train station seemed a lot closer than it normally does. But I crossed back into normalcy and into the restaurant. (more…)
A principle all Christian businesspeople ought to hold:
… work ought to be necessary; it ought to be good, it ought to be satisfying and dignifying to the people who do it, and genuinely useful and pleasing to the people for whom it is done.
A Mennonite poster Stanley Hauerwas mentions from time to time:
From a lecture at Yale [audio & video available], another Hauerwas quote:
… thinking that Christians are still in control, and so we need to have a third language where we can all get along because we’re still in control, and the Muslims and the Buddhists and the Atheists aren’t. Look! We lost! Christianity lost! Isn’t that terrific? We’re free. We don’t have to have theories about pluralism anymore. Hell – we just gotta get in there and mix it up. We’re free.
… the creation of religious studies departments can be understood as the ongoing development of universities to provide legitimating knowledges for state power. Indeed, I think that’s primarily what universities do today: make sure that the way things are is the way things have to be.
… pluralism is the ideology of people in power to comfort themselves with the presumption that they’re in control of the world in which they find themselves.
McDonald’s big mac combo could be seen as the sacrament of a popular religion. Perhaps Christians should only be happy to eat McDonald’s insofar as they are happy to share other religions’ sacred meals.
Jürgen Moltmann’s journey to faith [WMA audio] (more) – He fought in the Germany army in, among other places, the Netherlands. He was captured by the British and spent time in prison camps in the UK. In one camp someone had put up pictures of what was happening at for instance Auschwitz. Seeing them, he was brought to despair at the thought that that was what he had been fighting for.
EVENT The last of this semester’s Christian Mind series is on at 5.30pm today at Ramsey House 8 Kelburn Parade. It’s about Hell – indispensable doctrine at the core of orthodoxy, relic of the medievals, or something else? Perhaps some glorious third way is possible! The mighty Chris Marshall and the mighty Katharine Macaan will be resource persons. Also, the movie Divine Intervention is on at Ramsey tomorrow night.
There’s Abraham right. He’s the key. It’s Israel’s history. It’s all about Israel, what’s it here for? That first stuff in Genesis is the prolog, setting the scene, who is this god who calls? It’s working over stuff that maybe everyone knew, shaping it to make a point, to make some amazing points: the heavens are empty of deities save one, and humanity is not his slave or accidental effluvium but his deputy and a high point, and ordinary men and women all share in that, an identity independant of membership in a mighty human king; and the world is not the chaotic product of war, but good.
EVENT #4 in the current Christian Mind seminar series is on tonight at 5.30pm, at Ramsey House, 8 Kelburn Parade. Tim McKenzie & James King will talk about Creation, and try and find a third way between fundamentalism and liberalism.
Kunstler lo-fi video series on oil & the future [5× ~2MB WMV & QT]
… which makes me think perhaps this industrial story he talks about is the key one that the Israel/Jesus/Church story has to butt heads with. Like, it’s not about philosophy or religious experience.
EVENT
#3 in the current Christian Mind seminar series is on tonight at 5.30pm. Tim McKenzie will talk about the Environment & the End, and I will be ‘resource person’. It’s at Ramsey House, 8 Kelburn Parade.
“Are the gospels historical truth?”
“They are a set of faithful witnesses to the identity of Jesus as that identity was preserved in the early church’s memory and received and interpreted in the early church’s tradition.”
(said Richard Hays in a discussion about (among other things) The Da Vinci Code [mp3 audio])
220 years ago, Captain Cook’s botanist, Joseph Banks, wrote of these shores: “I was awak’d by the singing of the birds ashore from whence we are distant not a quarter of a mile. Their voices were certainly the most melodious wild music I have ever heard, almost imitating small bells but with the most tuneable silver sound imaginable … They begin to sing at about 1 to 2 in the morn and continue until sunrise.”
It’s raining out and I’m on the bus this morning and everyone’s all damp and with averting or closed eyes, and a man comes in with an I’d say one-and-a-half-year-old child sobbing slightly (the child that is) and I open my eyes and relinquish my relatively warm spot next to the relatively warm asian woman, and he sits her (the child that is) down where I was, and I know it’s not necessarily all that to be prodded at by an old greek lady testing the softness of your cheeks, and he (the man that is) has likely pretty much had enough of the attention and of our silent conjectures as to whether he has an arrangement with his ex for Fridays, but still it’s marvelous the way everyone’s bus faces fall off within thirty seconds, and everyone’s vying, trying to be the one to make her (the child that is) smile. And they have that power and they lose it pretty early on, except when you remember you can always give it back.
EVENT
Joel Carpenter’s first wine / poetry / acoustic music evening is on at 8pm, Wednesday 10 May. Features Stevie Starr, Cameron Hockly, Annabel Henderson-Morrell, Matthew Baird, among others. BYO wine. Ramsey House, 8 Kelburn Parade.
EVENT
#2 in the current Christian Mind seminar series is on 5.30pm, Tuesday 9 May, with “What about violence in the Bible?”, featuring Chris Marshall, at Ramsey House, 8 Kelburn Parade.
EVENT
New Christian Mind seminar series begins 5.30pm, Tuesday 2 May, with “What should Christians think about the authority of the Bible?” at Ramsey House, 8 Kelburn Parade.
What do we recognise as the maximum dispersion beyond which a community is no longer a ‘true’ community? I’m trying to get some clarity on the concepts of community and localness, and whether or not a church has to get all super-local before it can be faithfully missional. So:
The contentment of innumerable people can be destroyed in a generation by the withering touch of our civilisation; the local market is flooded by a production in quantity with which the responsible maker of art cannot complete; the vocational structure of society, with all its guild organisation and standards of workmanship, is undermined; the artist is robbed of his art and forced to find himself a “job”; until finally the ancient society is industrialised and reduced to the level of such societies as ours in which business takes precedence of life. Can one wonder that Western nations are feared and hated by other people, not alone for obvious political or economic reasons, but even more profoundly and instinctively for spiritual reasons?
I went up to Auckland with Damian, Marit & Richie this weekend. The Flinns kept feeding me food from heaven. We watched Batman Begins, best movie ever. I visited Anna and mum and Anna was hella well and let me eat lots of her Easter eggs. Marit has an old manual typewriter, a Brother, so nice to use. Tactile and it’s hard work and you only get one shot so you think before you speak. You guys missed out on some pretty insightful virtual blog posts (feat. comments) from that Brother, sorry.
Oh and rock and roll is opiate because you get all jumpy ragey worked up, feel like something big is happening, like you were protesting something or fighting in a militia, but then you just go home and sleep in before going back to work or school or whatever, just like always.
If you take love as the prescribed way of life, how do you make that an economic practice? That’s the crisis question. A lot of people who accept that gospel of love don’t think of economic practice as having any religious significance at all.
& I’m in Auckland this long weekend, so sing out, loyal Auckland readers, if you’d like to spend some time in the company of the greatest living x and y of our benighted times.
My sister is getting better quickly. I miss Malboro red softpacks tonight, or Lucky Strikes. I did my tax tonight (two kinds, one to go), and learned a bit about depreciation. I’m naturally self-depreciating. I’m a scream of conciousness. A vat of syruppy goodness. It’s all the rage. We have a new flatmate. He is from France. Yesterday in the early evening there were two big clouds (dry-looking said Richie) side by side, and once or twice a minute they’d flash lightning all in one go or a fork all inside.
“…to be able to have an argument at all is a significant moral achievement…” [source]
In After Christendom Stanley Hauerwas says:
“I cannot think of a more conformist and suicidal message in modernity than that we should encourage fellow Christians to make up their own minds. That is simply to ensure that they will be good conformist consumers in a capitalist economy by assuming now that ideas are but another product that one gets to choose on the basis of one’s arbitrary likes and dislikes. To encourage Christians to think for themselves is therefore a sure way to avoid any meaningful discourse…”
The last paragraph of Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue:
It is always dangerous to draw to precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined in the Dark Ages. None the less certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occured when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead – often not recognising fully what they were doing – was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. (more…)
I want a tenor horn again. A beat up cheap one with a good sound.
I recommend the national portrait competition exhibition on at Shed 11 on Customhouse Quay. I recommend going with seven Japanese girls. The best painting I saw is called ‘Bob’. I don’t recall the painter. Bob is I’d say fifty-five, sitting in front of one of those long low freezers, I guess out in his garage. I can’t tell if he’s Maori or an outdoors Pakeha like dad. If it’s true, as I’ve heard, that you have the face you deserve by the time you’re fifty, he is a good man.
I’m going to this David Suzuki doco tonight at 7pm at the film archive. Come along if you want.
I’m reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, recommended by Stanley Hauerwas. It’s nice:
I’d never have believed I’d see a wife of mine doting on a child of mine. It still amazes me every time I think of it. I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.
Should I try Ruby on Rails for my next web programming project?
I saw a hundred skinks today and baby crabs a millimetre across and the harbour 360 from the old concrete gun emplacements on top of Matiu/Somes.
I was trying to explain “Behold the lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world,” typeset attractively on a bookmark, to a Japanese girl. It was not easy, when I barely understand it myself. It’s not easy, if sin is (among other things) materialism, oppression, oil spills and homeless drunks. When does he take away the sin of the world?
Does anyone have a spare PC that I could buy for a few hundred? It needs to run Windows XP. I don’t need a monitor, keyboard or mouse.
Said Wendell Berry: “If you’re not economically free, if you don’t have economic choices, you’re not free.” (In a July 2004 interview with Sojourners.) Would you describe yourself as economically free?
I was at the tuwhare show last night (thank you Mr Steele) and I saw & heard Don McGlashan peform ‘Rain’. He was accompanied by a pianist and played a little euphonium. It was about the most beautiful thing I’ve seen & heard for eversolong.
Last weekend man, it was massive. Just a blast, a lenten blast. Portentious, the end or beginning of something. Three parties, one feat. v.good DJs; the Newtown festival where I saw half an hour of inspiring line dancing (“here’s Nora, she’s in her eighty-third year, she’s been coming to Line Dancing for six years now and has lost fifteen kilos!”), and The Little Bushmen, Warren Maxwell’s post-Trinity Roots band, a kindler gentler Mars Volta, maybe, and Salmonella Dub like a bolt from 2002, a surreal drop-in centre of a mosh pit. And on Sunday a man said some true words in church and it was all I could do to keep from weeping.
The threat to truth for Christians comes not from the difficulty of developing an unproblematic correspondence theory of truth, but rather from the lies that speak to us disguised as truth. Those are the lies Bonhoeffer rightly feared made possible the rise of Hitler and the ongoing lies necessary to sustain Hitler in power. The failure of the church to oppose Hitler was but the outcome of the failure of Christians to speak the truth to one another and to the world.
Net & phone are up here at new house, hurrah. I find it hard to run my life efficiently w/o internet at home. I can get work done in the evenings again, and pay bills, and find out which bus to catch.
(9,556 days old. I guess I’ve got about 17,000 left)
internet learning makes more obvious what was, presumably, always the case:
reading words resembles getting knowledge but
until it is tried out on the world
it’s a shadow or a puff of fog
I think you’re right. Living frugally, working hard and being honest in your work, sticking with your family and giving your children a head start in life (cash, property, education) is an ethic that can be derived from the Bible, and is likely to ease families up the social scale. Although that ethic can be derived from the Bible, I don’t think it takes into account the movement/directionality in the Bible. It doesn’t see the the whole in terms of the climactic sequence of Jesus’ life and death.
I’ve begun to sketch out that sequence, following the Gospel of Luke. The question I have in mind is What does this have to do with middle-class values? Anything at all? Here goes: (more…)
Tim asked “Matt, could you explain what you mean by the term ‘shaped’? How exactly could our lives be ‘shaped’ by the story of Israel?”
Good questions. I felt a bit of dissonance writing that sentence – too easy, too sweeping. That Ken Bailey article about oral traditions in a village context makes me think recent talk about ‘living/indwelling/inhabiting/being shaped by the story’ is pretty skin deep stuff. But still, there’s something in it. So I’ll have a go at answering: (more…)
Most church people’s lives are shaped by their economic class first, their ethnic group second and the story of Israel & Jesus last and least. (Mine too.)
In The Politics of Jesus, John Howard Yoder gives six reasons why Jesus is not the norm for mainstream Christian ethics today (well, in 1972, and probably particularly in America):
Jesus’ is an interim ethic because he though the end was nigh. So he paid no attention to societal structures or permanent institutions, which are passing away soon. “The rejection of violence, of self-defense, and of accumulating wealth for the sake of security, and the footlooseness of the prophet of the kingdom are not permanent and generalizable attitudes towards social values.” The world hasn’t ended, so Jesus is no help for long-term societal questions.
We have found a nice big house to rent in Newtown. It’s 16 Russell Terrace and has five bedrooms and is sunny and has a big deck and a back yard and a bath and a dishwasher and two bathrooms and gas cooking and friendly faces. It’s close to the zoo and the supermarket and everything else in Newtown. We have filled four of the rooms so there is one left. It’s a huge room, suitable for a single person or a person with a child or a couple or a couple with a child. It’s $130pw and available from 20/01/06. Hurray! If you’re interested give me a ring 027 211 3455 or an email.
Blue 8-port 10Mbs hub and AC adaptor free to a good home.
Achievable New Year’s resolution #1: I’m going to chew my food more before swallowing.
Night before last at the Flinn’s we watched The Godfather and it was great. It’s the first time I’ve seen it. Subtle and rich and morally interesting and good acting and another world and the girls were along for the ride.
Up north there in Waiheke the absolute highlight was phosphorescence in the water nighttimes at Palm Beach, blue white glow around churning legs or tiny star sparkles chasing and sticking to splayed hands on the sea surface.
bookThe Moral Vision of the New Testament by Richard Hays article Kenneth Bailey/Informal Controlled Oral Tradition and the Synoptic Gospels by Kenneth Bailey, runner-up Typology: Phenomenology of the Typewriter by Richard Polt song Bill Withers/Grandma’s Hands album Neil Finn/One Nil, runner-up Gillian Welch/Soul Journey, biggest disappointment Beck/Guero theologians (no girls again) Stanley Hauerwas, Wendell Berry, Richard Hays, Stephen Bachelor (atheologian, actually) movieGarden State, runner-up Sin City saddest day when Simon & Richie flew off to Pearth happiest day 17/12, when Simon & Tash got married failed project learning Russian highlights living with Isis, getting mentoresque figures in work & religion, self-employment, getting a lappy, producing Sue Wootton’s book Hourglass, doing some sermoning, the Elections, Newswatch, doing some gummint work
I got a bit sick with diarrhea and vomiting and stuff last night and today was a pretty feeble day, mostly in bed or sitting on the deck in the sun or watching TV in Richard’s room. Kathy and Richard had it before me, they had it worse, I like to think my powerful immune system is currently smiting that bug good.
In an address on why he does what he does [WM audio/video], and in answer to the question, “In the context of theological education, what does patience look like?” Stanley Hauerwas said:
It means that in a world as unjust as this one, when people are dying of starvation at this moment, when cruelty exists that is unimaginable, we think we can take the time to read books, in the hope that reading those books well will make us a people capable of standing against the hunger and the cruelty that exists. How to do that, without it becoming ideology and false conciousness… there is no guarantee to avoid that, other than having people call us to account.
The Eucharist is not the sacrifice we make to an eternally angry God to try to buy ourselves some time; rather, the Eucharist is the good news that God would have us included in Christ’s sacrifice for the world so that the world may have an alternative to pointless and endless sacrifice.
From Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins & L.Hunter Lovins:
A striking case study of the complexity of industrial metabolism is provided by James Womack and Daniel Jones in their book Lean Thinking, where they trace the origins and pathways of a can of English cola. The can itself is more costly and complicated to manufacture than the beverage. Bauxite is mined in Australia and trucked to a chemical reduction mill where a half-hour process purifies each ton of bauxite into a half ton of aluminium oxide. When enough of that is stockpiled, it is loaded on a giant ore carrier and sent to Sweden or Norway, where hydroelectric dams provide cheap electricity. After a monthlong journey across two oceans, it usually sits at the smelter for as long as two months. (more…)
I’m like an aesthete, or something. Not that I cultivate an appreciation for beauty more than other people (though maybe I do), but that for me the aesthetic aspect of experience often gets in the way. Like when I am confronted with some painful situation that a friend is in, my default setting is to ‘appreciate’ the situation, like I might appreciate a scene in a play. And reading theology or ecclesiology, or material on ecological issues, or listening to a lecture on Buddhism, or politics, or physics, or philosophy, I’m generally content to just enjoy the feeling of reading or listening, or the feeling of being on the cutting edge of something, or of being ‘challenged’. I don’t often move from that to action.
I wonder if some time soon metanational corporations will become the focus of terrorist attacks, rather than particular countries or cities. I mean, you can’t keep blaming say McDonalds on America forever.
Hermenutics of trust, man. Take anything seriously, no matter how tiny or twee or crapola the anything is, and it’ll open up and blossom and show you what you hadn’t seen before.
Not in war, not in wealth, not in tyranny, was there any happiness to be found for them—only in kindly peace, fruitful and free. The wreath was to be of wild olive, mark you:—the tree that grows carelessly, tufting the rocks with no vivid bloom, no verdure of branch; only with soft snow of blossom, and scarecely fulfilled fruit, mixed with grey leaf and thorn-set stem; no fastening of diadem for you but with such sharp embroidery! But this, such as it is, you may win, while yet you live; type of grey honour, and sweet rest. Free-heartedness, and graciousness, and undisturbed trust, and requited love, and the sight of the peace of others, and the ministry to their pain; these, and the blue sky above you, and the sweet waters and flowers of the earth beneath; and mysteries and presences, innumerable, of living things, — may yet be here your riches; untormenting and divine: serviceable for the life that now is; nor, it may be, without promise of that which is to come.
After long practice I can say all I know in eight minutes. Evenutally it’ll be a haiku. My starting point is the failure of the environmental movement to envision and promote a conserving, land-based economy. The movement has failed to forsee or envision a mean between the pristine and the utterly spoiled. There’s talk now, among biologists, of dividing the world 50-50 between nature preserves and industrial farming & forestry. But this abandons any hope of harmony between human life and the life of the world. Without which, neither can be preserved. (more…)
I do not know who put me in the world, nor what the world is, nor what I am myself. I am in a terrible ignorance about everything. I do not know what my body is, or my senses, or my soul, or even that part of me which thinks what I am saying, which reflects on itself and everything but knows itself no better than anything else. I see the terrifying spaces of the universe enclosing me, and I find myself attached to one corner of this expanse without knowing why I have been placed here rather than there, or why the life alloted me should be assigned to this moment [rather] than to another in all the eternity that preceded and will follow me. I see only infinity on every side, enclosing me like an atom or a shadow that vanishes in an instant.
…but I think the feeling dissolves in good company.
In short, the great problem of modernity for the church is how we are to survive as disciplined communities in democratic societies. For the fundamental presumption behind democratic societies is that the consciousness of something called the common citizen is privileged no matter what kind of formation it may or may not have had. It is that presumption that gives rise to the very idea of ethics as an identifiable discipline within the modern university curriculum. Both Kant and utilitarians assumed that the task of the ethicist was to explicate the presuppositions shared by anyone. Ethics is the attempt at the systemization of what we all perhaps only inchoately know or which we have perhaps failed to make sufficiently explicit.
Such a view of ethics can appear quite anticonventional, but even the anticonventional stance gains its power by appeal to what anyone would think upon reflection. This can be suitably illustrated in terms of the recent popular movie, Dead Poets Society. It is an entertaining, popular movie that appealed to our moral sensibilities. (more…)
I began summarising Chapter 14 – “Violence in Defense of Justice” of Richard Hays’ Moral Vision, but realised it would take hours to finish, so I’ve stopped after the first section. This beginning is still pretty helpful though, I reckon:
The Church has often accepted war as a practice that Christians may at times be required to pursue. But is it appropriate for followers of Jesus to take up lethal weapons against enemies? Is it ever God’s will for Christians to employ violence in defense of justice? NT at first glance seems to say ‘no’, but human experience presents us over and over again with situations that appear to require violent action to oppose evil.
The just war tradition was developed to limit the use of violence, but as Hay’s previous chapters’ survey of theological ethicists (Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth, John Howard Yoder, Stanley Haueras and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza) show, there are serious questions to be raised about whether this tradition can be justified on the basis of the NT’s teaching. What norms concerning the use of violence might be derived from the NT? First let’s look at the Sermon on the Mount: (more…)
Richard B Hays’ The Moral Vision of the New Testament is the most beautiful book I’ve read for a long time. It’s sharper than ye olde two-edged sword:
One reason that the world finds the New Testament’s message of peacemaking and love of enemies incredible is that the church is so massively faithless. On the question of violence, the church is deeply comprimised and committed to nationalism, violence, and idolatry. (By comparison, our problems with sexual sin are trivial.) This indictment applies alike to liberation theologies that jsutify violence against oppressors and to establishment Christianity that continues to play chaplain to the military-industrial complex, citing just war theory and advocating the defense of a particular nation as though that were somehow a Christian value.
Only when the Church renounces the way of violence will people see what the Gospel means, because then they will see the way of Jesus reenacted in the church. Whenever God’s people give up the predictable ways of violence and self-defense, they are forced to formulate imaginative new responses in particular historical settings, responses as startling as going the second mile to carry the burden of a soldier who had compelled the defenseless follower of Jesus to carry it one mile first. The exact character of these imaginative responses can be worked out only in the life of particular Christian communities; however, their common denominator will be conformity to the example of Jesus, whose own imaginative performance of enemy-love led him to the cross. If we live in obedience to Jesus’ command to renounce violence, the church will become the sphere where the future of God’s righteousness intersects – and challenges – the present tense of human existence. The meaning of the New Testament’s teaching on violence will become evident only in communities of Jesus’ followers who embody the costly way of peace.
Tomorrow evening at 7pm in room 632 in the Murphy Building at Vic Andrew Shepherd, Justin Duckworth and I will talk at the last of this year’s eco-justice seminars: “Enacted Theology: Christian Responses to the Environmental Crisis.” Download the flyer [210KB PDF]
I would suggest that the naturalistic view of the world, whether it emerges in historical positivism, philosophical deism, or atheistic empiricism, is just as mythical in the technical sense as is the Enuma Elish or the Ba‘al myth. It assumes that one way of looking at the physical world is the only way, and that one set of metaphors, and one language, is adequate. This ascension of the myth of naturalism and natural law has created the tension that most of us have experienced as we move from our modern world view to the world view of the Scriptures. While this modern myth of immutable natural law is being modified from the perspectives of quantum physics and the theory of random event, there is still a disposition, perhaps a need, to see the world in rational categories, in terms of stability and order. After all, that is a basic premise for most of the work done in the Natural Sciences.
Tonight because of Charles Ringma’s talk at Central Baptist where I saw none of you I was thinking: if a middle-class Christian like myself gives up ministering from a position of strength, providing services as from afar, from away up, down to the poor, the less fortunate, the lowly, and instead gives up what wealth, status and influence he has and identifies with the poor in their poverty, sharing that pain on the level, seeking justice because injustice would be a lived reality, not a word on TV, then he would find out whether the holy spirit is in fact there with him, whether Jesus’ name is in fact powerful – when stripped of all he now relies on, his only strength and advantage would be that name.
Yesterday at the Gospel of John study Kat said “the New Testament is the rubble left after an explosion.”
UPDATE: as in, Jesus, particularly in his resurrection is a category-shattering singularity, reorganising experience and thought in a way that is not necessarily orderly, but paradoxical (three in one, a divine human, 1st-century Jewish expectations being fulfilled in startling ways). The world being turned on its head.
This morning between seven and eight I dreamt about a tsunami but it wasn’t one of the good tsunami dreams I’ve enjoyed four or five times in the past where it’s a giant wave to surf and I can surf or bodysurf or fly over everything and it’s a very exhilarating time with no destruction or suffering and it’s nowhere in particular. Instead it was at Castlepoint and Island Bay mashed together and there was foreboding, suprise, and then a tide that wouldn’t stop, roiling and bits of wood and houses but no people apart from me and the owner of the house on the hill we could see it all from. The sea only lapped up to the doorway but I woke sad for the first time for the people in America, and sad realising that it’s not a happy or a safe world outside or inside the city.
The basic premise dominating my stories is that if I ever met an extraterrestrial intelligence (more commonly called a ‘creature from outer space’) I would find I had more to say to it than to my next-door neighbor. What the people on my block do is bring in their newspaper and mail and drive off in their cars. They have no other outdoor habits except mowing their lawns. I went next door one time to check into the indoor habits. They were watching TV. Could you, in writing a sf novel, postulate a culture on these premises? Surely such a society doesn’t exist, except maybe in my imagination.
Enjoy a quote from the epilogue of EF Schumacher’s book Small is Beautiful, written in the early 1970s:
In the excitement over the unfolding of his scientific and technical powers, modern man has built a system of production that ravishes nature and a type of society that mutilates man. If only there were more and more wealth, everything else, it is thought, would fall into place. Money is considered to be all-powerful; if it could not actually buy non-material values, such as justice, harmony, beauty or even health, it could circumvent the need for them or compensate for their loss. The development of production and the acquisition of wealth have thus becom ethe highest goals of the modern world in relation to which all other goals, no matter how much lip-service may still be paid to them, have come to take second place. The highest goals require no justification; all secondary goals have finally to justify themselves in terms of the service their attainment renders to the attainment of the highest.
This is the philosophy of materialism, and it is this philosophy – or metaphysic – which is now being challenged by events. There has never been a time, in any society in any part of the world, without its sages and teachers to challenge materialism and plead for a different order of priorities. The languages have differed, the symbols have varied, yet the message has always been the same: ‘seek ye first the kingdom of God, and these things (the material things which you also need) shall be added unto you.’ They shall be added, we are told, here on earth where we need them, not simply in an after-life beyond our imagination. Today, however, this message reaches us not solely from the sages and saints but from the actual course of physical events. It speaks to us in the language of terrorism, genocide, breakdown, pollution, ehaustion. We live, it seems in a unique period of convergence. It is becoming apparent that there is not only a promise but also a threat in those astonishing words about the kingdom of God – the threat that ‘unless you seek first the kingdom, these other things, which you also need, will cease to be available to you.’
Gavin ended his sermon tonight with this quote from a Hasidic rabbi:
Wisdom lives in the future, and from there it speaks to us. There is no such thing as wisdom of the past. Wisdom preceded the world and wisdom is its destiny. With each passing moment, wisdom becomes younger as we come closer to the time when it is born and breathes the air of day. Our ancient mothers and fathers, the sages, all those from whom we learn wisdom – they are not guardians of the past. They are messengers of the future.
Voice for Life care about prostitution, civil unions, parental notification, abortion and euthanasia.
Vote for the Environment care about biosecurity, climate & energy, education for sustainability, environmental management, freshwater, GE, high country parks, NZ’s global environmental stance, oceans in crisis, protecting nature on land, public access, clean up/prevention of toxic pollution.
Says James Skillen (in Public Justice & True Tolerance):
…the biblical view of justice for every earthly creature will mean instead that Christians will work politically for the achievement of governmental policies that will protect, encourage, and open up life for every person and community of people, whatever their religious confession; it is a community of public legal care for all people which must not favour or persecute any particular group or society.
The kingdom of heaven is like the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary.
…o y’know, it’s a wellspring (like Te Puna Karaiti). It’s a safe place in there. Special care in one particular place with benefits overflowing to the surrounds. Where I live in Brooklyn we’re like one or two hundred metres away from the fence. I guess the tui who hang around here daytimes go home there to sleep at night. It’s also a picture of way things ought to be, could be everywhere. I think it’s a flawed picture – humans there are visitors, not natives, we go home at night, but maybe that’s something addressed further down the track in the 500-year plan. This is a bit of a stretch, but like Micah 4, it’s also somewhere people make pilgrimage to, to learn how to live aright.
I read Stephen Batchelor’s account of his meeting with the 14th Dalai Lama and I’m sad and I think “a lost man in a lost world.” And there’s no group I know of that I’d exclude from membership in the lost world. There are I suppose glittery gems here and there. Part of me wants to say that’s OK, we can retreat from these troublesome groups and all just try and be the glitteriest gems we can be, but I feel that in giving up group identities we might be participating in the troublesomeness by ceding political power to anyone in a machiavellian mood.
Well, that is Matthew #2. Matthew #1 is still optimistic & cheerful & wishes to recruit workers for his infinitely helpful army bringing incremental improvement to every hurting sphere of existence. Sign up now!
The Post-Evangelical, Dave Tomlinson (lent by Cam H) What is a Family?, Edith Schaeffer (given by David H) Grigorii Rasputin, Alex de Jonge (stolen from Dad) The Lunchtime Runner Vols I & II, by Cam Hockly (bought from Cam at LR2′s launch last Saturday night)
An NIV & an NASB NT & Psalms Soul Shaper, Tony Jones (from the chaplaincy library) The NZ Prayer Book (lent by the chaplain)
O and in the lounge from memory there’s: The Act of Thinking by Derek Melser What Saint Paul Really Said by NT Wright
an unpublished handwritten manuscript of a novel about suicide Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson Ooooo….!!!! by Hone Tuwhare Penguin History of NZ by Michael King.
There are others but they’re slipping away.
um Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard (in fact I better read that again ASAP, dig this quote from last year) and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig really blew my mind. So did Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. EF Schumacher good. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy make me want to get up in the morning. Wendell Berry is changing me. They all change me. I’m climbing Schild’s ladder, I suppose.
I own maybe 100 books. I’d like to get rid of the stupid ones and get all the good ones in circulation; they’re pointless on (my (rented)) shelves.
I was thinking babies probably start off thinking in emotions (like the bear in That Hideous Strength), then later in poetry, and then when they start to speak, prose.
Tony Robbins says happiness comes from within. You set your own parameters for happiness. Like you might have decided, “I will allow myself to be happy if I succeed in this business venture” and then the condition is met (or not) and you’re happy (or not). So once you realise that, he says, you can change the conditions, and access the boundless resource of happiness which is your birthright. I’m happy now because it’s my 9,342nd day alive. And that’s fuckn amazing! Ha!
O yeah, and Richard and I are going to Fat Freddys Drop Friday the 22nd and we’d love you to come along too.
They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humanity; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountainhead.
Ivan Illich said:
Even if nonpolluting power were feasible and abundant, the use of energy on a massive scale acts on society like a drug that is physically harmless but psychically enslaving. A community can choose between Methadone and ‘cold turkey’ – between maintaining its addiction to alien energy and kicking it in painful cramps – but no society can have a population that is hooked on progressively larger numbers of energy slaves and whose members are also autonomously active.
I’m reading Soul Shaper by Tony Jones a chapter at a time. It’s about Christian spiritual disciplines, aimed particularly at people in youth ministry. It’s just been talking about the Divine Office – structuring the day, praying the hours (you know Lauds, Vespers, Compline). It suggests using this sort of thing at a youth camp. It came to me that that might be a good niche for Reformed youth camps. Seems to me we’re not very good at the hype-y praise and worship sort of thing, so something more silent, solid & rejuvenating might be the ticket.
The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil. It is very Christ-like in its passivity and beneficence, and in the penetrating energy that issues out of its peaceableness. It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it, not by ambition or aggressiveness. It is enriched by all things that die and enter into it. It keeps the past, not as history or as memory, but as richness, new possibility. Its fertility is always building up out of death into promise. Death is the bridge or the tunnel by which the past enters its future.
A friend told me that if Michael King was right in his dating of Maori arrival in NZ, Pakeha have just now been here half as long. Which feels about right, I reckon.
We watched the deleted scenes from the DVD last night. There are a couple of long dialogue scenes cut. In one, Andrew, Mark and Sam are with the couple who live in the ark above the infinite abyss, and Andrew confesses that he used to worry that if he didn’t save something, or discover something, or acheive something massive with his life he would have somehow wasted his time here, and whatever force that created us would resent him. The husband, a geologist who was exploring the abyss at nights against the will of his employers who want to build a new mall on it, said that he thought that force would probably rather remind him that breathing is all it takes to be a miracle.
I watched Garden State tonight with Richard. It’s good, I recommend it. It’s about coming off the medication. It’s quite zen, very killing the Buddha. It’s finding a path in a newly trackless land. To me it was a step on the way back to the joie de vivre I’ve been missing.
Perhaps oil is running out. Perhaps we’ll be the last middle-class youngsters who get to go on OEs. And you know perhaps the icecaps are melting. Perhaps the sea will rise and all the world’s big cities will be flooded. Perhaps mum’s coming round to put it back the way it oughta be. I dunno.
At first was neither Being nor Nonbeing.
There was not air nor yet sky beyond.
What was its wrapping? Where? In whose protection?
Was Water there, unfathomable and deep?
There was no death then, nor yet deathlessness;
of night or day there was not any sign.
The One breathed without breath, by its own impulse.
Other than that was nothing else at all.
Darkness was there, all wrapped around by darkness,
and all was Water indiscriminate. Then
that which was hidden by the Void, that One, emerging,
stirring, through power of Ardor, came to be.
In the beginning Love arose,
which was the primal germ cell of the mind.
The Seers, searching in their hearts with wisdom,
discovered the connection of Being in Nonbeing.
A crosswise line cut Being from Nonbeing.
What was described above it, what below?
Bearers of seed there were and mighty forces,
thrust from below and forward move above.
Who really knows? Who can presume to tell it?
Whence was it born? Whence issued this creation?
Even the Gods came after its emergence.
Then who can tell from whence it came to be?
That out of which creation has arisen,
whether it held it firm or it did not,
He who surveys it in the highest heaven,
He surely knows or maybe He does not!
I finished Man Alone by John Mulgan today. What a great title. I read it because so far I’ve not read much of what I suppose you’d call the New Zealand canon, and I want to get up to speed. Now that I’ve finished I say it was worth the read. Part Two really changed the feel of the book for me. When I’d only read Part One it felt like a bit of a ramble, a meaningless meander – and in a sense it is, that’s the point, it’s a life of a man bouncing around groundless, pragmatic and reacting, but not crushed. It’s about the principalities and powers.
A prescription for dysentery, from Bald’s Leechbook, written in the tenth century:
Take a bramble of which both ends are in the earth, take the newer root, dig it up, and cut nine chips on your left hand, then sing three times: Misere mei deus [Psalm 56] and nine times the Our Father. Take then mugwort and everlasting and boil these three in several kinds of milk until they become red. Let him then sup a good bowl full of it, fasting at night, sometime before he takes other food. Make him rest in a soft bed and wrap him up warm. If more is necessary, do so again; if you still need it then, do so a third time. It will not be necessary to do so more often.
[from The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey & Danny Danziger]
This long weekend I learnt some boardgames, broke an axe handle, made some new friends and saw god’s fingers touch Kapiti. Tonight I made dinner by myself for the first time in a long time and watched the abominable, reprehensible, incoherant and garish Return of the Sith.
Three people this week have told me how very normal I am. Which is odd because in my head I vacillate between thinking I’m superawesome and thinking I’m slightly subawesome.
Dr Bill Romanowksi from Calvin College is speaking at Wellington Central Baptist this coming Thursday (02/06/05) at 2-5pm and 7-9:30pm. The cost for each session is $20. Email Becky to register.
From the blurb:
Popular art and culture shapes the way we think about ourselves, about others, and about our place in society. It cannot be avoided. We are swimming in it. Movies, television, advertising, music… All of them are expressing ideas and beliefs about God, humanity, evil, and redemption. They offer a stream of attitudes and values regarding power, relationships, gender, sex, violence, and materialism. And the Christian response? There is everything from soap-box condemnation to uncritical acceptance, with so much of it ineffective and unsatisfying.
Christians can be poor at identifying the positive redemptive aspects of popular culture. This then impairs both their participation in that culture and their constructive critique of it. So, in calling his book Eyes Wide Open he deliberately plays off the title of the Stanley Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut. His point is that Christians need to have their eyes open when they take in this popular culture. There will be good things to preserve, bad things to improve, and ugly things to delete. And so they need to have a worldview that allows them to see, as Paul expresses it in Ephesians, with the ‘eyes of the heart’ – or, from the perspective of faith. Bill takes issue with Christians who draw lines between religious and non-religious aspects of life, an attitude that ultimately confines faith to the merely personal and private. This will not do and this visit to NZ by Bill will explore an alternative way forward.
I’ma listening to Air/Talkie Walkie. It’s a keeper. I’ve had it for a few months now, and tonight I’m listening to it on headphones for the first time. It’s full of neat tunes, crazy frenglish lyrics (“Holy girl/don’t get up/for running. Stay with me/I feel sad/when you run”), good songs that would work on AM radio, but if you can listen to it like this, there are textures, crazy noises, a new beat vocabulary, beautiful little details like sonic serifs and the nicest production, the elements laid out so carefully and seamlessly across the left-right spectrum. And the very last track ‘Alone in Kyoto’ is still for me the emotional distillation of that movie.
I was talking with somebody earlier today about the tsunami and all of that, and I have to say, the scene in the Garden of Gethsemane is as close as we get in the New Testament, I think, to understandinging – if we can understand – what on earth is going on with the strange purposes of God in the world. Because you know we are taught as Christians to pray for things, we are taught to pray in faith, we are taught to pray in the name of Jesus and again and again in Scripture – not least in John’s Gospel – we’re told that what we ask for in faith we will receive, if we really believe it. And the strange thing is that in the Garden of Gethsemane the incarnate son of God said to his father, “Please isn’t there another way?” and the answer was “No.” And if you can understand what is going on there, good luck to you because I can’t. It’s deep and it’s dark and it’s mysterious and it’s divine. And it tells us something about the darkness which is at the heart of the cosmos, and about the fact that God did not come into the world to give us a theory about why it would be so, so that we could sit back in our philosophers’ armchairs and think, “O, that’s alright then.” Because it isn’t alright then! The world is still full of pain and sorrow and anguish, and evil, radical evil. And the message of the gospel is not that God has given us a theory by which we can understand it. But God has given us himself in the person of his son to be plunged down in the middle of it. To drown under the waters of evil. He says in the garden, “This is your hour;” the power of darkness. He knew he was going into the middle of that darkness.
Many Jews of Jesus’ day had talked about a time of great suffering which would come upon Israel. They talked about it as a period of great testing, great tribulation, great trial and torture and sorrow. Some of them saw it as happening to lots of Jewish people, some just a few. Jesus believed that it was coming, and that he had to go out front and take it on himself, solo. What did he say in the garden? He said to his friends, “Watch and pray so that you may not enter into the testing.” Many translations of the Bible call that ‘enter into temptation’, as though Jesus was just saying, “say your prayers lest Satan tempt you to do some trivial sin or other.” No, Jesus is seeing the tidal wave of evil rushing towards him. The tidal wave called the testing, the tribulation, which so many of the prophets and other Jewish writers had spoken about. And Jesus realises that this is going to engulf all of them. And he realises that the only way for them to avoid that is for him to go and stand with his arms outstretched and take it, draw it onto himself, so that the others may escape.
I’ve read two books this week: Slowness by Milan Kundera, and Sweet Dreams by Michael Frayn. They were both a good ride while they lasted. To varying extents they both I felt pinned me, like J Alfred Prufrock, forumlated, sprawling on a pin, wriggling on the wall. In fact Slowness lept out of my hands and slapped me across the face more than once. I turned the other cheek, but you probably shouldn’t read it if you don’t like the word ‘asshole’. Frayn’s book, like The Office is a sort of via negativa on the good life. It does get a bit lost towards the end.
Americans, meanwhile, are so confused about religion that we have just been through an election in which ‘religious values’ were defined as key, but precisely in ways that kept the war out of the discussion.
I lost my cellphone on Friday night. So forgive me when I don’t answer your text messages. If you call it you’ll be diverted to my home phone until I find it or get a new one.
In The Gospel, Art and Aesthetic Theory, Duncan L Roper says:
The calling of art may be considered as offering strong and good parables concerning the Coming of the Kingdom in a Fallen World. Art that is characterised by such a Biblical contextual perspective will expose what is wrong in the world, but it will do so in a way that shows the humble triumph of grace and mercy. It will evoke the presence of God in all his transcendent glory, but will never vaunt piousness as a virtue. It will show a great breadth of perspective — one that recognises the depth of our human relation to the non-human environment, but in a way that never looks to it as a source of power or wisdom, for they lie with God alone. It will show joy in the midst of a sadness for the stains of sin and rebellion on the world. In this way it will be a parable of the coming of the Kingdom of God, and a testimony to the New Age to be inaugurated in its fulness with the return of Christ, the purifying of the earth and the resurrection of the dead.
I was ready as ready to be really disappointed, but so far, I’m really impressed with Fat Freddys Drop’s new album Based on a True Story.
I bought Nick Drake Five Leaves Left and The Delgados Hate today. As RDB said, vocally Nick Drake is a one trick pony, but it’s a pretty neat trick. Hate is a slowburner (I hope).
As we enter a new society, work cannot be considered the dark side of life but rather the opposite. Our educational task in the coming years is to transform work into a moral necessity, an internal necessity. We have to rid ourselves of the erroneous view—appropriate only to a society based on exploitation—that work is a disagreeable human necessity. We have to bring out work’s other aspect, as a human necessity within each individual.
Whenever one uses the phrase ‘social question’, one recognizes, in the most general sense, that serious doubt has arisen about the soundness of the social structure in which we live. One thereby acknowledges that public opinion is at war over the foundation on which a more appropriate—and therefore more livable—social order may be built. Merely to raise the question in no way implies that it has to be answered in a socialistic manner. The solution one reaches can be of a totally different kind. Only one thing is necessary if the social question is to exist for you: you must realize the untenability of the present state of affairs, and you must account for this untenability not by incidental causes but by a fault in the very foundation of our society’s organization. If you do not acknowledge this and think that social evil can be exorcised through an increase in piety, or through friendlier treatment or more generous charity, then you may believe we face a religious question or possibly a philanthropic question, but you will not recognize the social question. This question does not exist for you until you exercise an architectonic critique of human society, which leads to the desire for a different arrangement of the social order.
In A Generous Orthodoxy, which my friend Fred lent me, Brian McLaren said:
Some people I know once found a snapping turtle crossing the road in New Jersey. Snapping turtles are normally ugly: gray, often sporting a slimy coating of green algae, trailing a long, serrated, gator-like tail and fronted by massive and sharp jaws that can damage if not sever a careless finger or two. This turtle was uglier than most: it was grossly deformed due to a plastic bottle top, a ring about an inch and a half in diameter that it had accidentally acquired as a hatchling when it, too, was about an inch and a half in diameter. The ring had fit around its midsection like a belt back then, but now, nearly a foot long, weighing about nine pounds, the animal was corseted by the ring so it looked like a figure eight.
My friends realised that if they left the turtle in its current state, it would die. The deformity was survivable at nine pounds, but a full-grown snapper can weigh 30. At that size the constriction would not be survivable. So, they snipped the ring. And nothing happened. Nothing.
Except for one thing: at that moment the turtle had a future. It was rescued. It was saved. It would take years for the animal to grow into more normal proportions, maybe decades. Perhaps even in old age it would still be somewhat guitar-shaped. But it would survive.
A ring of selfishness, greed, lust, injustice, fear, prejudice, arrogance, apathy, chauvinism, and ignorance has similarly deformed our species. When I say that Jesus is Saviour, I believe he snipped the ring by judging, forgiving, suffering, dying, rising and more. And he’s still working to restore us, to lead us, to heal us. Jesus is still in the process of saving us. Because I have confidence in Jesus as Saviour, I’m seeking to be part of his ongoing saving work, sharing his saving love for our world.
Recent talk about the coming world oil production peak makes me think that perhaps for those nations like ours whose way of life is largely dependant on oil the axe is already at the root of the tree.
The one-room (+ bathroom/laundry) flat next to our house is vacant at the moment. It’s tidy, with harbour views and a deck. Rent is $150/week. If you’d like to live next to Bartletts, give me a yell before Wednesday.
I was sad yesterday early on because I broke the email at work and it took hours to fix and even when it was fixed it was still half broke and it was in my mind underneath all day or pressing down in the way but then I walked up to Kelburn and helped out at Newswatch and the lady from China and the man from Indonesia and the girl from Japan were happy to see me and I was happy to see them though sometimes I still speak too fast & mumbly for even Mum to understand.
I have not bummed across America
with only a dollar to spare, one pair
of busted Levi’s and a bowie knife.
I have lived with thieves in Manchester.
I have not padded through the Taj Mahal,
barefoot, listening to the space between
each footfall picking up and putting down
its print against the marble floor. But I
skimmed flat stones across Black Moss on a day
so still I could hear each set of ripples
as they crossed. I felt each stone’s inertia
spend itself against the water; then sink.
I have not toyed with a parachute cord
while perched on the lip of a light-aircraft;
but I held the wobbly head of a boy
at the day centre, and stroked his fat hands.
And I guess that the tightness in the throat
and the tiny cascading sensation
somewhere inside us are both part of that
sense of something else. That feeling, I mean.
I came across a quote today which might interest those of you who participated in the recent discussion on interest and lending. It’s from Muhammad Yunus’ book Banker to the poor, which one of you fine humans bought me for my birthday last year.
Many Islamic scholars have told us that the Shariah ban on the charging of interest cannot apply to Grameen, since the Grameen borrower is also an owner of the bank. The purpose of the religious injuction against interest it to protect the poor from usury, but where the poor own their own bank, the interest is in effect paid to the company they own, and therefore to themselves.
I recommend the book. It is inspiring. Muhammad Yunus appears to be someone who knows how to get things done, and I like the things he chooses to get done.
Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar’s gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart throught the world. There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul.
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If you’re going to get Chuck Taylors anyway, why not get No Sweat brand sneakers from Trade Aid? I got some for $80 this afternoon and they’re swell (and they don’t appear to be soaked in blood or tears like my other shoes).
That we now find ourselves required to discuss and investigate care specifically, and can no longer get by simply speaking of the more general prophetic call, can only mean that care (And thus also Christianity) has already become something other than what it should be. This is why we should try very hard not to talk of care, or at least not care in and of itself.
Whew! Let me try to unpack all this a little better with an example. A friend of imine who is Maori recently noted that many pakeha Christians now seem constantly to talk about community, whereas Maori rarely do. Without wanting to take this too far, it would seem that for many Maori community is pretty much self-evident, or presumed, and thus doesn’t require much discussion. In contrast, for most pakeha Christians community is talked about constantly, but is rarely actually apparent. This act of speaking about community, then, this invocation of the latent promise within language, is an attempt to speak into being something that is absent. Language here becomes an attempt to come to terms with something that remains elusive, remain difficult even to conceptualise and formulate. Given all this it might be useful to consider the amount we must speak as a measure of how we we are actually doing, or, more precisely, the extent to which we have actually internalised the spoken, whether it be community or care. When we need to discuss something specificaly, in order to try and bring it into being, then there is an acknowledgment of its absence. Moreover, the act of speaking of something also puts it forward as only an option. So long as we speak specifically about community or care, soa s to bring them into being, we also acknowledge the absence, and therefore their contingent or optional character …
[from Mike Mawson's article "Why I try not to care (and I don't want to talk about it)” in the August 2003 edition of Stimulus]
This has been my week of wheat. I thought it might be a good idea to try it out again just to make sure I haven’t been fooling myself. I’ve had foccacia, croissants, pasta, noodles, Weetbix, ficelle, hot chocolate roll, apple turnover, olive cheese & spinach roll, and (the crowning glory) a steak & cheese pie in the rain while waiting for a bus. But, I have one to two fewer hours of wakefulness every day, and I get up every morning with what feels like a hangover, so it’s back to No Wheat Land for me. Thanks for listening.
I am trying to learn Russian by translating Anna Karenina. I have the cyrillic alphabet almost internalised. I came across the word ????????? which transliterated is ekonomkoy. It means housekeeper, which reminds me of Wendell Berry’s idea of the economy as we normally talk about it being an extension of families’ household economies.
As a prophet, Jesus staked his reputation on his prediction of the temple’s fall within a generation; if and when it fell, he would thereby be vindicated. As the kingdom-bearer, he had constantly been acting … In a way which invited the conclusion that he thought he had the right to do and be what the temple was and did, thereby implicitly making the temple redundant. The story he had been telling, and by which he had ordered his life, demanded a particular ending. If, then, the temple remained for ever, and his movement fizzled out (as Gamaliel thought it might), he would be shown to have been a charlatan, a false prophet, maybe even a blasphemer.
But if the temple was to be destroyed and the sacrifices stopped; if the pagan hordes were to tear it down stone by stone; and if his followers did escape from the conflagration unharmed, in a re-enactment of Israel’s escape from their exile in doomed Babylon-why, then he would be vindicated, not only as a prophet, but as Israel’s representative, as (in some sense) the “son of man”.
I spent this morning with my Substance compatriots walking the new stations of the cross. There was silence about. In the selections from the Gospel of St Mark I found evil, weakness, weakness sliding into evil, mob evil, evil for hire. It was a lot to carry. I was moving too slowly early on to spend any time in front of the empty tomb at the end. Perhaps if I had I would have a better idea of what difference it makes.
I am off, with David and Joel, to Auckland for Sybrand & Karina’s wedding. We’re driving up in David & Angela’s Humber, and I think it is going to be a very good trip. I’m very much looking forward to staying at the Flinns’.
Yesterday evening at Substance we read Psalm 15 together. The line about not lending money at interest struck me. I wonder how all the Christian and Jewish bankers have got around that.
Being means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!
Last night before the parade I was sitting outside Hoyts on Manners Street, waiting for my friends to come out of the bathroom. A clump of about eight girls were hanging about, sharing around the bladder of a cask of wine. They were between twelve and sixteen. The older ones were encouraging the younger ones to drink up. One staggered over to sit next to me. She was crying a bit but seemed fairly happy. She showed me a bag full of clothes she’d bought earlier in the day. She said, “Three hundred bucks worth from Supre. In life you gotta stand on your own two feet, aye?” I couldn’t think of anything to say.
O Holy Ghost, whose temple I
Am, but of mud walls, and condensèd dust,
And being sacrilegiously
Half wasted with youth’s fires of pride and lust,
Must with new storms be weather-beat,
Double in my heart Thy flame,
Which let devout sad tears intend, and let—
Though this glass lanthorn, flesh, do suffer maim—
Fire, sacrifice, priest, altar be the same.
Today I bought Nick Drake’s 1972 album Pink Moon and I really like it. It’s my first inedible treat for months and months. My next three planned treats: a fishing rod, a laptop and an mp3 player.
Lately spending one third of every day sleeping seems like a waste. Every night I fall asleep impatient for morning. I really like being a freelance web developer. I really love learning the book publishing ropes.
Kora are playing at 4.30pm tomorrw at the Cuba St Carnival. And the rest is all shite apart from that. Actually it’s probably mostly grand, I don’t know half the bands listed, I just wanted to say ‘shite.’
On Wrightsaid, Rance D recently quoted his friend Peter thusly:
I am no historian of Jesus. I see a diminishing value in the endeavor. So there is where I might be parting company from Rance. I am a biblical studies person whose goal is to understand what biblical texts are communicating. One of the major principles of narrative exegesis is to interpret words, not events. That’s significant in view of the discussion on inerrancy also taking place on this “network.” I believe the Bible’s words are inspired, not its events. So why do so many people spend their time retelling events through their own ideological lenses so that, lo and behold, the Bible story says what they started out to make it say in the first place?
I think questions analyzing what Jesus DID or what Jesus SAID in history are misplaced. How and why something happened are historians’ issues. Bible interpreters should not address them as though that’s what the Bible is doing. Rather, the only question we as Bible interpreters can answer with any sense of certainty is “Why are we being told this?” The only reliable data we have are the words of the Bible themselves. Bible interpreters should not aim to be historians in their interpretations. They should aim to be literary analysts. In the process some of our whys and hows will be answered, but most important, we will be learning what the writings’ words are trying to convey.
That does not mean they should discount the historical credibility of the Bible’s stories. Neither should they ignore relevant historical backgrounds. It does mean they should exegete Bible passages so as to derive the messages the stories are designed to convey with their words.
What does this have to do with Pharisees? With regard to Gospels, we should spend less time talking about Pharisees and Sadducees in history and more time talking about what role they play in the Gospel writers’ portraits of Jesus. In view of that, we should recognize that immediately, no matter which Gospel, they are antagonists. Why? Each Gospel shows in some way that they were jealous of the authority that they perceived Jesus stealing from them. Neither Pharisaism nor Sadducaism are directly under attack per se (though Jesus in all 3 synoptics does take a swipe at Sadducean denial of bodily resurrection, a denial corroborated by outside contemporary sources as well). Rather, their resistance to Jesus as God’s Messiah is. When we see Pharisees, as characters, appealing to their understanding of the law in their various confrontations with Jesus, we should be most interested in their resistance to Jesus and how it is met.
That falls more in line with the literary purposes of Gospel as Greco-Roman “life” (i.e. biography). To try to see Jesus attacking Pharisaism as legalistic is to read into the text an idea foreign both to the words of the text and the world it is describing.
Also, by the way, Paul never repents from being a Pharisee. In his letters he voices ho problems with Pharisaism. Paul does show repentence from being a persecutor of the church. He does say that being a Pharisee is nothing worth bragging about compared to knowing Christ.
To understand ‘the chief end of man’ we cannot use philosophy but must make a theological decision and commitment of belief (though philosophy can enrich our view once we have made that decision). I reject the Westminster Confession statement (“the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever”) on the basis of Gen. 1:26-8 linked with Ezek 34, Eph 1:10, Col 1:20, Heb 1:2, Rom 8:19-23.
From these, the chief end of man is to represent God to the rest of the creation, so that when it experiences humanity it will be not unlike it experiencing God (i.e. joy that leads to seas roaring and trees clapping their hands; “vegetables may be said to experience the sort of joy” said CS Lewis, “that a vegetable would feel”). A joyful whole-creation is to be what Christ will inherit and what will be complete in him. And we are part of that whole-creation. Our specialness within the creation is not for our sake but for the sake of the rest of creation so that Christ’s inheritance and its own joy and completion may be furthered.
By contrast, Westminster sees the specialness of humanity is for the sake of humanity and in order to serve God, with no mention of the rest of creation. The Westminster view is not false, so much as a limited subset of the Christo- and cosmo-centric view that I now adhere to.
The age of lust is giving birth, and both the parents ask
the nurse to tell them fairy tales on both sides of the glass.
And now the infant with his cord is hauled in like a kite,
and one eye filled with blueprints, one eye filled with night.
O come with me my little one, we will find that farm
and grow us grass and apples there and keep all the animals warm.
And if by chance I wake at night and I ask you who I am,
O take me to the slaughterhouse, I will wait there with the lamb.
With one hand on the hexagram and one hand on the girl
I balance on a wishing well that all men call the world.
We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky,
and lost among the subway crowds I try to catch your eye.
— from Leonard Cohen’s song ‘Stories of the Street’
A suggestion for this year’s Lenten fast has come to me this evening, sparked by a friend asking what would actually hurt to do without. I could forswear books & articles for these forty days. That would be something.
The nature of religion springs from our dependence upon God the Creator and the Lover of persons. But man has himself interposed so many “middle men” or middle things between God and man that the essential dependence is mostly not felt and quite forgotten. The dependence he experiences today is a dependence upon machinery and markets, upon “production” rather than upon living growth. For this reason it has been rightly said that modern industrialized man is not so much a materialist, for he shows no respect for the material universe, but rather is impious in the true sense of the word, having turned away from the Father with a sweeping act of impiety. He has no god but himself, and the graven images he has made of metal and plastic.
sleep, breathe out, fall into sorrow
or stare into blackness postponing tomorrow
rising tide rising behind broken eyes
squeeze out, out from under hot blue falling skies
Angela and Lucy took me to see The Motorcycle Diaries this afternoon. I want to know about Che Guevera now.
Brooklyn the suburb is beautiful because the houses have been here for a while so they and the trees and the hils have gotten used to each other. It was settled before the advent of cars and public transport (at one stage there were three bootmakers here), so there are lots of good walking tracks and the footpaths often diverge from the roadside to take an easier route.
An historian of Wellington told me a story about the family who lived in this house at the beginning of last century. Some of the children who lived here (who were around ten years old) would catch rabbits in the hills and sell them to housewives around about. If they had too many to sell in Brooklyn, their mother would send them on foot to Karori to sell the rest. (On this map you can see Karori in the center, and Brooklyn way down there in the southeast corner). When I heard that I resolved to take the bus only as a last resort.
Walking cloud-shrouded home these past two days puts one in a solipsistic mood.
The ‘protestant’ search backwards for ‘simplicity’ and directness — which, of course, though it contains some good or at least intelligible motives, is mistaken and indeed vain. Because ‘primitive Christianity’ is now and in spite of all ‘research’ will ever remain largely unknown; because ‘primitiveness’ is no guarantee of value, and is and was in great part a reflection of ignorance. Grave abuses were as much an element in Christian ‘liturgical’ behaviour from the beginning as now. (St. Paul’s strictures on eucharistic behaviour are sufficient to show this!) Still more because ‘my church’ was not intended by Our Lord to be static or remain in perpetual childhood; but to be a living organism (likened to a plant), which develops and changes in externals by the interaction of its bequeathed divine life and history — the particular circumstances of the world into which it is set. There is no resemblance between the ‘mustard-seed’ and the full-grown tree. For those living in the days of it branching growth the Tree is the thing, for the history of a living thing is part of its life, and the history of a divine thing is sacred. The wise may know that it began with a seed, but it is vain to try and dig it up, for it no longer exists, and the virtue and powers that it had now reside in the Tree. Very good: but in husbandry the authorities, the keepers of the Tree, must look after it, according to such wisdom as they possess, prune it, remove cankers, rid it of parasites, and so forth. (With trepidation, knowing how little their knowledge of growth is!) But they will certainly do harm, if they are obsessed with the desire of going back to the seed or even to the first youth of the plant when it was (as they imagine) pretty and unafflicted by evils.
Crystal drowning, dead-eye Dick
save us from thy hammerthwick.
Lighter on and lighter’s vee
join me slowly
grote a-bromely
handsome rool and heartily.
Worthing forth o frostie dreams
teat unfaithful under-screams.
Go before your pips are cried:
“Drearly sloughing,
mildew-coughing
hanker ween but thunderspied!”
Andrew Basden
Jeremy Begbie
Wendell Berry
W Rance Darity
James Jordan
Hundertwasser
Brian McLaren
John Patrick
Eugene Peterson
Kim Stanley Robinson
Read Mercer Schuchardt
E F Schumacher
Neil Vaney
Brian J Walsh
N T Wright
There are some songs that have taken over my life for a month or a year, or had a life of their own and forced me to listen to them over and over again. As I remember them, I jot them down. Here are the ones I’ve recollected so far, listed in reverse chronological order, 2004 to ~1989.
Muttonbirds/A Thing Well Made
Bill Withers/Grandma’s hands
Neil Finn/Into the Sunset — In the middle it falls asleep and breaks in two like Cam’s poem.
Doves/Sulphur Man
Weta/Calling On
Avril Lavigne/I’m With You
Turin Brakes/Painkiller
Tool/Schism
Belle & Sebastian/There’s Too Much Love…
Grant Lee Buffalo/It’s the Life
Beth Orton/Couldn’t Cause Me Harm
Dodgy/One of Those Rivers
Leonard Cohen/Ballad of the Absent Mare
Incubus/The Warmth
Ride/Rolling Thunder
Blur/This is a Low
Supergrass/It’s Not Me
Seven Mary Three/Cumbersome
Soundgarden/Black Hole Sun
Live/All Over You
Live/Lightning Crashes
The Police/Don’t Stand So Close to Me
Coolio/Gansta’s Paradise
Genesis/Fading lights
REM/Find the River
Toad the Wet Sprocket/Walk on the Water
Scorpions/Wind of Change
Australian Crawl/Reckless
Boston/More Than a Feeling
Dire Straits/Brothers in Arms
Sting/Russians
Phil Collins/Who Said I Would?
I’m trying to figure out the Gospel of Matthew at the moment. One thing I’m doing is trying to understand how St Matthew uses the quotations from Moses & the prophets. Here is what I have for the ‘as it was written’ quotations in the first four chapters:
“Behold, a virgin shall be with child …” — the child was a sign that Israel’s enemies were about to be defeated, though no thanks to Israel itself (Isaiah 7)
“And thou Bethlehem … art not the least … for out of thee shall come a Governor, that shall rule my people Israel” — enemies surround what’s left of Israel, but this one will come and the scattered of Israel will return. He will bring peace. (Micah 5)
“Out of Egypt have I called my son” — Jesus is equated with Israel (Hosea 11)
“Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted …” — who knows? (Jeremiah 31)
“He shall be called a Nazarene” — who knows? I can’t even find the reference.
“The voice of one crying in the wilderness …” — peace & pardon are coming, God the shepherd & creator, is returning. (Isaiah 40)
“Man shall not live by bread alone …” — Jesus is being Israel in the wilderness. (Deuteronomy 8)
“Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” — Israel demanded water at Massah, rather than trusting that God would provide. Jesus passes the test Israel failed. (Deuteronomy 6)
“Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.” — when Israel gets rich, it must remember where it came from, and not turn away from God. (Deuteronomy 6)
“The people which sat in darkness saw great light …” — a child comes to bring peace & justice, break the back of oppression. (Isaiah 9)
I think paying attention to the background texts like this pins down the interpretation of the book, like putting rocks on the corners of a tarpaulin to stop it blowing away.
In his article Christ and Nothing — an epic, panoptic and magisterial survey of the West before, during and after Christianity — David B Hart writes:
It is worth asking ourselves what this tableau, viewed from the vantage of pagan antiquity, would have meant. A man of noble birth, representing the power of Rome, endowed with authority over life and death, confronted by a barbarous colonial of no name or estate, a slave of the empire, beaten, robed in purple, crowned with thorns, insanely invoking an otherworldly kingdom and some esoteric truth, unaware of either his absurdity or his judge’s eminence. Who could have doubted where, between these two, the truth of things was to be found? But the Gospel is written in the light of the resurrection, which reverses the meaning of this scene entirely. If God’s truth is in fact to be found where Christ stands, the mockery visited on him redounds instead upon the emperor, all of whose regal finery, when set beside the majesty of the servile shape in which God reveals Himself, shows itself to be just so many rags and briars.
In Heaven is not my home, Paul Marshall quotes John Calvin:
The law of God given through Moses is not dishonored when it is abrogated and new laws are preferred to it … for the Lord … did not give that law to be proclaimed among all nations and to be in force everywhere. Rather we must make our laws with regard to the condition of times, place and nation. … How malicious and hateful toward public welfare would be a man who is offended by such diversity.
Richard asked, “Why should a gospel substantially founded on the concept of humans being sinful be rendered “implausible” by evidence that human beings are sinful?”
I think it is something to do with what comes next, that is, now that we know everyone is sinful & flawed & broken etc., how does that affect how we’ll operate as a community? One possibility: Christian community could be a place where in a sense it’s OK to be a bad person, we don’t have to pretend to be perfect and happy and having-it-all-together all the time, because we know none of us are. Andrew Basden has good things to say on this topic.
The way things are now, I think we all have our masks on pretty securely most of the time, and aren’t very well equipped to deal with messiness & brokenness. I don’t know how we can change this, I’m the worst offender.
I’ve just finished Walsh & Keesmaat’s Colossians Remixed. It’s explosive and life-changing stuff. If I’d looked through the bibliography before I started, I could have guaranteed I’d love it. They reference Wendell Berry, John Caputo, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Kalle Lasn (Adbusters editor), Neil Postman, Calvin Seerveld, NT Wright & Annie Dillard. All the goodies, in other words. Now, if I can figure out some way of getting you all to read it …
Today I read the Families’ Commission Statement of Intent [1MB PDF]. Up till this point I had heard only bad things about the Commission. Mostly that their definition of a family includes non-nuclear families. I was really impressed with the document. I particularly liked their set of expectations for families:
In the Commission’s view, all families should be able to exercise a capacity to:
love, protect and nurture children to help them reach their full potential
protect and care for elderly, disabled and sick family members
share resources, wisdom, knowledge, and time
participate in education, society, and the economy
plan for today and tomorrow, for retirement, and for future generations
protect family wealth, land, taonga, and history
transmit values, lifestyles, ethics, and culture
I read in the same document that around 7500 children were assessed as abused or neglected during 2003 in New Zealand.
Walsh & Keesmaat in Colossians Remixed told me the Greek word blasphemia means ‘hurt the reputation of someone’ which interested me because that provides a link between the third and ninth commandments: Don’t slander God or his representatives.
From Brian Walsh & Syliva Keesmaat’s Colossians Remixed:
Imaginary interlocuter: When you put it that way, I can begin to see your point. Of the friends of mine who have abandoned Christian faith, very few of them stopped believing in Christ because of intellectual problems with the Bible or because they were seduced by some other worldview or belief system. Rather, they tend to abandon Christian faith because of the irrelevance, judgmentalism, internal dissension and lack of compassion they experience within the Christian community. Rather than finding the church to be the community that most deeply encouraged them in their struggles, they lost heart in their discouragement and lost their faith in the process. Rather than experiencing the church as the site of the most profound hospitality, love and acceptance, they felt excluded because of their doubts and struggles.
Walsh & Keesmaat: This is our point. What makes the argument that is alternative to the gospel plausible? Is it the internal consistency of the argument? Is it its scientific verifiability? Its political and economic power? No, what makes an argument that is alternative to the gospel plausible is the implausibility of the Christian community itself.
When the church fails to be a listening community, attentive to the cries of the poor, then the gospel is implausible and alternative social philosophies take on an air of plausibility. When the church becomes a site of bitter enmity while the world is spinning ever more quickly into war and violence, then the gospel is not only implausible, it is an embarrassment. In the face of such failures to be a community that embodies the truth that came to save the world, it is no wonder that alternative visions become more plausible to us.
We are … committed to a more complex task than bringing our comfortably isolated category to the NT and asking what this book has to say about it. We are bound to re-enter the rough-and-tumble world of the Middle East … in the first century and try to see, in the writings of the early Christians, what categories emerge to handle what we think of as the relation between Christian belief and practice and political allegiance and obligation. And, since this involves unthinking a good deal of our normal ideas on the subject, we must then engage in the complex hermeneutical task: how to get from the first century back into the twentieth. We are not first-century Jews, living under the pax Romana. We live in a world where a great deal has already been done for good and ill in the name of Christ, the world of crusades and inquisitions as well as the world of William Wilberforce, Mother Theresa and St Francis. We cannot naïvely pretend that we are innocent of all that, and go back to a ‘pure’ Christian faith unsullied by social involvement, under the impression that following the NT means living as though the last 2,000 years had not happened. History, then, and hermeneutics: these are the tasks; exegesis must be the tool they use, and theology the air they breathe.
When I hear news reports of events in far-off lands, I never know whether or not I can trust them. I get these little bursts of infotainment and they feed my apathetic tendencies. I don’t want to be apathetic. I want to know if I can help. Regularly I get the strong impression that in topical conversations we’re all just pooling our ignorance.
Today I had an idea (not dissimilar to some suggestions from Calvin Seerveld): each of us could choose one pet region or country or people-group and learn about it as a long-term project. This way when that country comes up in the news there’ll be one person near whose opinion will be worth hearing.
While reading Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it suddenly occured to me that the process he describes of the scientific community shifting from one paradigm to another is very similar to William James’ description (Lecture IX in The Varieties of Religious Experience) of the process of religious conversion in a single person.
I’m unimpressed with Doves’ new single “Black & White Town”. It lacks imagination, features a half-hearted slow & soft segment and a really average guitar solo. I hope it’s the one filler track of a killer album. It’s about as good as Radiohead’s “Morning Bell/Amnesiac” on Amnesiac, i.e. not very.
One quick example about theology: I spend about half my time in main-line churches and half my time in evangelical circles and I think a lot of main-line folks have no idea how pervasive a lot of the old thinking is, until they hear about polling numbers for elections, or until one day the radio doesn’t work right and they listen to all those stations they normally avoid. But just to give an example of how much theology does matter in this: I think probably most of you are somewhat familiar with the issues of global warming. I was at a meeting recently that I discovered was a meeting that was staged in a sense to help the Southern Baptists become part of a discussion about whether global warming might be real. What I was told by scientists in England was something like this: “All of us involved with this issue know that if the United States doesn’t get involved and care about this, everybody else’s efforts are reduced by 30%. If the Republicans are in power we know that they will not change their opinion on global warning unless the Religious Right tells them to. But we also know that the Religious Right won’t go any further than the Southern Baptists will go. For scientists in many places of the world it looks like the environment of the planet belongs to the Southern Baptists and it’s being held hostage.” And I find that when I speak about environmental issues, there’re an awful lot of people who say, “Why do you worry about that? The world’s going to end within the next ten years, it’s going to burn up anyway.” And there are a lot of us who live with that theology and see it, and it’s very pervasive.
Church shows world what Jesus is like, therefore what God is like. Jesus is the “image of the invisible God,” perhaps most especially on the cross, in self-sacrificial suffering. I think the church can behave like that in a small way, and in doing that show God to the world. NTW has an idea that “as Jesus to Israel, so the Church to the World.”
Church is picture of new humanity, showing the world what life could be like for them if they turned to God, away from chasing things like money & power.
Church shows what life in true community is like, families helping each other out wherever they can, learning to look after the bit of creation they’ve been entrusted with, sharing food grown & things made (which incidentally would happily reduce dependence on supermarket system), where people get to be listened to, contribute & feel valued.
Church is a place that welcomes broken people, specialises in helping out people who’s lives aren’t sorted out (like solo mums, stoners, lonely people), perhaps instead of specialising in assuaging the religious longings of reasonably-well-off middle-NZers.
Particular Christians and Christian families find their own vocations within the larger vocation of the church.
bookPilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard song Belle & Sebastian/I’m a Cuckoo, runners-up Beck/Round the Bend and Neil Finn/Into the Sunset album Tool/Lateralus tied with Belle & Sebastian/Dear Catastrophe Waitress movieLost in Translation, runner-up Donnie Darko (Director’s Cut) gig Turin Brakes @ Indigo (thanks Simon) articleSix Degrees of Lois Weisberg (thanks Kathy)
It is a matter of which story is shaping our lives? Some story will shape our lives. When the Bible is broken up into little bits — theological, devotional, spiritual, moral bits — then these bits can be nicely absorbed into the reigning cultural story with all its idols! One can be theologically orthodox, devotionally pious, and morally upright and yet be significantly shaped by the idolatrous Western story.
In Understanding our Cultural Context [1.7MB PDF] Goheen gives two alternatives to the Apostle’s Creed to attempt to illustrate the faith commitments of Modernity:
I believe in Man. I believe in the ability of man apart from God to solve the problems of our world and build a better one.
I believe in Science Almighty. I believe in the power of human reason disciplined by the scientific method to understand, control, and change our world.
I believe in Technology and a Rational Society, its only begotten sons which have the power to redeem our world.
I believe in the spirit of Progress. I believe that a science based technology and rationally organised society will enable me to realise my ultimate human goal — freedom, happiness, justice, and the comforts of material abundance. To this I commit myself with all my resources, time and money. Amen.
and Postmodernity:
I don’t believe there is one story of the world that is true for everyone. I don’t believe science gives us the truth. I believe that all ‘truth’ is relative to the culture and time period. I believe there are many stories none of which are true for everyone. I believe in tolerance in which no one may make an imperialistic claim for truth.
I don’t believe there is one story that gives meaning to the world. I believe that consumption will give meaning to my life. I believe that the abundance of consumer goods and experiences, and the leisure time to consume them will make me happy. To this end I commit myself with all my money, time, energy, and resources. Amen.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:— Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Today I read CS Lewis’ The Great Divorce. Amazing book. Enjoy a quote:
‘Is it? . . . is it?’ I whispered to my guide.
‘Not at all,’ said he. ‘It’s someone ye’ll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.’
‘She seems to be . . . well, a person of particular importance?’
‘Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.’
‘And who are those gigantic people . . . look! They’re like emeralds . . . who are dancing and throwing flowers before her?’
‘Haven’t ye read your Milton? A thousand liveried angels lackey her.’
‘And who are all those young men and women on each side?’
‘They are her sons and daughters.’
‘She must have had a very large family, Sir.’
‘Every young man or boy that met her became her son—even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.’
‘Isn’t that a bit hard on their own parents?’
‘No. There are those that steal other people’s children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives.’
‘And how . . . but hullo! What are all these animals? A cat—two cats—dozens of cats. And all those dogs . . . why, I can’t count them. And the birds. And the horses.”
‘They are her beasts.’
‘Did she keep a sort of zoo? I mean, this is a bit too much.’
‘Every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them.’
I looked at my Teacher in amazement.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is like when you throw a stone into a pool, and the concentric waves spread out further and further. Who knows where it will end? Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.’
From Mike Goheen tonight I learn the term ‘Majority World’ to use in place of ‘Third World’. I like that replacement because it reminds me that I am one of the minority rich from whom much is due. I feel we (me, this city, the churhes) are all playing penuckle, inanely entertaining ourselves as if the world were a happy place.
With the Agur the oracle I say, “Surely I am too stupid to be a man. I have not the understanding of a man. I have not learned wisdom, nor have I knowledge of the Holy One.”
Two weeks before we moved house I rang TelstraClear to organise to have a phone connected at the new place. Just about a month later they haven’t managed to connect the phone and won’t be able to for another two weeks or so. I am old-fashioned in that I find it frustrating that there is no office I can visit, no one to go and talk to face-to-face, no one person actually responsible for anything.
Last night I dreamt about using Google to try and find the tab for Doves’ song “Caught by the River”. That was imbedded in a much more complicated situation but it’s slipping away.
On Sunday night I dreamt that Simon and I were walking beside a spectacularly beautiful lake. I saw a pelican catch three fish in its beak. I saw a Maori man near by. I thought he was going to cut off the bottom of the bird’s beak to get to the fish, but he just opened its beak, reached in, got the fish and let the pelican go free. We went to his house. His mum was doing a jigsaw puzzle of a map of the world. There were two other similar puzzles around the room. Suddenly there was a celebratory gymnastics event, a bit like Circus of the Stars. Actors from Shortland Street were performing the most amazing feats of physical agility. That’s all.
The rush didn’t seem as mad this year. It is nice that yesterday the streets were very quiet, perhaps the quietest of all the year. We went to Midnight Mass at St Peter’s. Sitting in the gallery above the bulk of the congregation, it was lovely and odd to see so many strangers with familiar faces.
I don’t believe in resurrection. I don’t believe in eternal life. I don’t believe in life after death. I don’t believe in the hereafter. Those are all opinions. I simply trust Jesus that He will deliver to me as He rose from the dead, He will raise me. Whatever that means, however it works, I trust Him because in His death is my reconciliation and in my reconciliation is my joy in Him.
[via DJM]
I’ve read some other things on that same website which you might also find interesting:
[I have been saying that] the Covenant preceeds the obedience within the Covenant. I find this very ironic for this reason: if you were to go onto Google and were to type in “tom wright justification by faith” you would turn up a lot of American websites from the Presbyterian Church of America and various other strongly Reformed centres like Westminster Seminary which would be extremely rude about the two people [Tom Wright and James Dunn] sitting on this platform for having sold Paul down the river and given up the genuine Reformed doctrine of justification by faith. And this is really quite bizzare because I think that actually what we have both done in taking Sanders proposal theologically, and Sanders really is not a theologian — I mean his putting Paul together theologically is not very convincing — he’s more of a historian pointing out the historical context etcetera. But Jimmy and I and others have tried to take this forward theologically. And I see what we’re doing is actually much more on a Reformed map than a Lutheran map, precisely because of the emphasis on the Covenant and Grace as basic, and on the Law — from the start — as being the way of life for the redeemed people. Which corresponds to Luther’s ?tertsius hertius? legacy if you like but it’s much easier to do it in a Reformed or Calvinist framework.
… the relational properties of artifacts are unconsciously designed into them. Consider the calculator. It was designed to facilitate the rapid processing of simple mathematical calculations. In addition to accomplishing that, however, it creates an environment whereby the user tends to transfer a narrow, specific, and justifiable trust in the functional reliability of the calculator to a broader and non-justifiable trust in the representational meaning of the calculation. In the days before the calculator, when the slide rule was in use, its properties required its user to estimate an answer in order to know where to place the decimal point. Having to make that estimation resulted in a healthy level of skepticism regarding the meaning of any particular computational result. The calculator, by removing the need to estimate, removes the healthy skepticism accompanying the estimation, and fosters an unwarranted level of credulity.
[via DJM]
The article feels to me like the beginning of an answer to the “so what on earth are we supposed to do about it?” feeling one gets reading Neil Postman.
Here I am, all in the new house for just on a week now, though I stayed two good nights this week at Mum & Dad’s. I’m feeling settled and at home now in this house and living arrangement. It’s going to work out sweet.
The symbol of the cross in the church points to the God who was crucified not between two candles on an altar, but between two thieves in the place of the skull, where the outcasts belong, outside the gates of the city. It does not invite thought but a change of mind. It is a symbol which therefore leads out of the church and out of religious longing into the fellowship of the oppressed and abandoned. On the other hand, it is a symbol which calls the oppressed and godless into the church and through the church into the fellowship of the crucified God. Where this contradiction in the cross, and its revolution in religious values, is forgotten, the cross ceases to be a symbol and becomes an idol, and no longer invites a revolution in thought, but the end of thought in self-affirmation.
I am excited that Doves are releasing a new album on February 21. It’s called Some Cities, and there’s a single coming on February 7 called “Black and White Town”.
I am reading Ask That Mountain: The Story of Parihaka by Dick Scott. I went to a book launch of his a week ago, and a man told me that this book changed his life. Up till now all I knew of Te Whiti was Tim Finn’s song. Interesting things have happened in New Zealand’s history:
The settler could not believe his eyes. Long furrows broke his grassland and a team of silent ploughmen was steadily extending the area of upturned soil. This was land only seven miles from New Plymouth, it had been in undisturbed European possession since the wars, the original owners, long ago killed or hunted off, had been forgotten. Courtney, the outraged farmer, rushed to stop them. But the Maori ploughmen who started work before sunrise at Oakura on the morning of 26 May 1879, serenely continued till dusk. And the next day was the same, and the next, until twenty acres were turned under.
Fifty miles away to the south the same thing happened on Bayley’s farm. And soon the dogged ploughmen were working from daylight to dark on pakeha-occupied land from one end of Taranaki to the other. Sometimes they worked with bullocks, sometimes with horses, but always they were unarmed, good-tempered — and firm. Te Whiti is not ploughing the land, he is only ploughing the belly of the government, the intruders blandly explained to irate onlookers. The Governor, Sir Hercules Robinson, who made a special visit to watch the the men at work, ‘almost exploded with indignation’ at the sight.
Wild rumours flew. Some thought the ploughing meant reoccupation of land bought and not paid for, some believed it was to call attention to the wrongs of the past, others declared it was a religious outburst inspired by Samson’s excursions against the Philistines. Parris, Civil Commissioner for Taranaki, was sent to Parihaka to sound out Te Whiti. Of course he had authorised the ploughing, Te Whiti told him. At the Waitara meeting the previous year Grey had said he would ‘plant a tree of peace whose branches would spread over the land’ — and then he had begun to steal the Waimate Plains. The ploughing was to probe Grey’s heart.
…
At Hawera where excited meetings condemned government delay in shooting down the Maoris, the settlers banded together to issue a declaration of independence. James Livingston, a sergeant in the wards, now a substantial landowner was made president, sentries guared his roughly fortified house, and over it solemnly flew the flag of the ‘Republic of Hawera’.
The plains were close to bloodshed when a hundred Hawera vigilantes, armed with loaded rifles and extended in skirmishing order, came down on a party of ploughmen. Only the cool discipline of the Maoris averted pitched battle. Tohu had been asked by the ploughmen what they should do if any of their number were shot. ‘Gather up the earth on which the bolood has spilt and bring it to Parihaka,’ he replied.
What we need to learn is that whenever we create speciality groups, we are creating the dangerous possibility that our right hand will not know what our left is doing. I am not arguing that we should do without speciality groups entirely; that would be to throw out the baby with the bath water. But we must realize the potential danger, and structure our speciality groups in such a way as to minimize it. We are not yet doing so. For instance — because it does not hurt us as a whole — our society developed and currently maintains a policy of an all-volunteer military. Our response to the antiwar sentiment engenered by Vietnam has been to opt for an even more thoroughly specialized military, overlooking the danger involved. Abandoning the concept of the citizen soldier in favour of the mercenary, we have placed ourselves in grave jeopardy. Twenty years from now, when Vietnam has been largely forgotten, how easy it will be, with volunteers, to once again become involved in little foreign adventures. Such adventures will keep our military on its toes, provide it with real-life war games to test its prowess, and need not hurt or involve the average American citizen at all until it is too late.
A draft — involuntary service — is the only thing that can keep our military sane. Without it the military will inevitably become not only specialized in its funciton but increasingly specialized in its psychology. No fresh air will be let in. It will become inbred and reinforce its own values, and then, when it is once again let loose, it will run amok as it did in Vietnam. A draft is a painful thing. But so are insurance premiums; and involuntary service is the only way we have of ensuring the sanity of our military ‘left hand.’ The point is that if we must have a military at all, it should hurt. As a people we should not toy with the means of mass destruction without being willing to personally bear the responsibility of wielding them. If we must kill, then let us not select and train hired killers to do the dirty job for us and then forget that there’s any blood involved. If we must kill, then let us honestly suffer the agony involved ourselves. Otherwise we will insulate ourselves from our own deeds, and as a whole people we will become like the individuals described in previous sections: evil. For evil arises in the refusal to acknowledge our own sins.
— M. Scott Peck, writing in 1983 in People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil
Do you know what Thoreau said? Thoreau saw the railroad coming and it gave him the shakes. Not many people had the shakes at that time; plenty of them have got them now, because what we’ve done is just an extension of the railroad that went past Walden Pond. Thoreau said, “They think they’re going to go on with this business of stocks and spades until everybody will ride. But when the whistle blows and the smoke clears away, it will be found that a few are riding and the rest run over.”
Lately in me the conviction has been growing that God v Mammon is the main battle at every level of life.
It was a very good day, but around 3pm I felt very odd, near to fainting for an hour or so.
I want to get some of the Masterton farmers of my childhood to read Wendell Berry.
It was a very good year, but I’m moving out of the Oriental Bay flat. RDB and Kathy and I are looking for a nice sunny place to rent. We want to be walking distance from town & Kelburn, and have room for a couple of PCs.
I am listening to Leonard Cohen’s new album Dear Heather. My first impressions are that he is still a dirty old man, perhaps even more than before, and that he still has a gift for good tunes and truly horrible arrangements, perhaps even more than before.
Patients in therapy all begin by protesting, “I want to be good.” If they cannot accomplish this, it is only because they are “inadequate,” can’t control themselves, are too anxious, or suffer from unconcious impulses. Being neurotic is being able to act badly without feeling responsible for what you do.
The therapist must try to help the patient to see that he is exactly wrong, that is, that he is lying when he says he wants to be good. He really wants to be bad. Morality is an empircal issue. Worse yet, he wants to be bad but to have an excuse for irresponsibility, to be able to say, “But I can’t help it.”
[Dante's] only way out is to see that his pilgrimage to the Heavenly City must be undertaken along the road through Hell. When we lay claim to the evil in ourselves, we no longer need fear its occurring outisde of our control. For example, a patient comes into therapy complaining that he does not get along well with other people; somehow he always says the wrong thing and hurts their feelings. He is really a nice guy, just has this uncontrollable, neurotic problem. What he does not want to know is that his “unconscious hostility” is not his problem, it’s his solution. He is really not a nice guy who wants to be good; he’s a bastard who wants to hurt other people while still thining of himself as a nice guy. If the therapist can guide him into the pit of his own ugly soul, then there may be hope for him. Once this pilgrim can see how angry and vindictive he is, he can trace his story and bring it to the light, instead of beign doomed to relive it without awareness. Nothing about ourselves can be changed until it is first accepted. Jung points out that “the sick man has not to learn how to get rid of his neurosis but how to bear it. For the illness is not a superfluous and senseless burden, it is himself; he himself is that ‘other’ which we were always trying to shut out.”
— Sheldon Kopp in If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!
On Engaging with Secular Thinking
(and indeed any thinking based on other religious ground motives. Some thoughts sent to Aaron x in response to his plea about engaging with Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger 20 November 2004)
I don’t find it frustrating to engage with the secular mind; on the contrary I find it stimulating and rewarding. The reason I now do so, is because I look at secular thinkers and thinking in a new way. No longer do I see it primarily in terms of its antithesis to ‘Christian’ thought and secondarily in reluctant terms of how they might have some insight. Now I see primarily that secular thinkers have genuine insight (with some exceptions below), and secondarily are antithetical to my thought in a particular way.
The reason I see it this way is that secular thinkers are still operating in the wonderful creation-framework that God gave us. The exceptions are when the secular thinker is arrogantly and proudly pushing their own views, solutions, proposals. All of us have these sins. But most good secular thinkers are not primarily that in their thought. Rather, there is something in them that genuinely seeks truth.
THEREFORE, my approach is not to first and foremost seek to identify what is wrong with the thinking, but first and foremost try to (a) identify (b) fully understand the *insights* in their thinking. Even if those insights are only partial or limited.
In your case, for example, don’t ask first “Here’s why Sartre’s critique of Hegel is bad” nor even “Here’s why its good.” The first is too unmerciful, the second too analytical. Rather, ask first, “What real insights does Sartre / Hegel / Husserl / etc. seem to be uncovering in their thinking?” Think intuitively at first. Find out what, in their thought, you find yourself responding to with “Yes, that’s a good point”.
Then examine those critically in the sense of seeking to understand the basic conditions that make their insight possible, or make it ‘work’. Then you’ll likely find it sits uneasily on the foundation of presuppositions they make.
And, in doing so, I look past the words they use and the speculations they make to what they seem to driving at. An example: Hegel spoke about the Great Spirit developing itself. He presumably meant what we mean by God (and we take that at face value) and we get upset and thus reject his ideas, and look for ways in which they are wrong. But if we replace his label ‘Great Spirit’ etc. with ‘the whole Created Cosmos’, then much of what he says makes sense. I have spelled this out in my one and only article in Philosophia Reformata (Basden A, (1999), “Engines of dialectic”, Philosophia Reformata, 64(1):15-36).
Now I am doing a similar thing with Peter Checkland’s Soft Systems Methodology, Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, and Habermas’ notions of Emancipation and Lifeworld. They are aimed at top academic journals in my field. The result is that I can *enrich* the ideas of secular thinkers rather than *destroy* them.
You see, Dooyeweerd’s philosophy is like fertile soil which, if an idea is transplanted into from the infertile soil of the Nature-Freedom Ground Motive in which it is struggling, it suddenly bursts into joyful life.
Do I not find anything wrong with the secular mindset? Indeed I do. I find certain views obnoxious, but I put that feeling behind me when trying to ‘engage’. Because I look at myself reacting, to understand the root of my reaction, and find it is due to a mix of my pistic commitment which differs from theirs plus an aggressiveness and/or arrogance on their part. Once I recognise this, and actively ignore my own reactions, I can then start to see the mindset as infertile soil rather than as poison.
Then he closed his eyes and his head slowly fell forward upon his chest and I thought he had fallen asleep. I sat there, not knowing what to do. Interminable minutes passed. I had decided to go quietly to the door and leave, when I heard him say, his head still upon his chest, “Asher, I want to tell you something. It is important that you listen carefully to my words.” He raised his head and gazed at me unblinking from beneath the rim of the dark hat. “My father, of blessed memory, once said to me, on the verse in Genesis: ‘And He saw all that He did and behold it was good’ — my father once said that the seeing of God is not like the seeing of man. Man sees only between the blinks of his eyes. He does not know what the world is like during the blinks. He sees the world in pieces, in fragments. But the Master of the Universe sees the world whole, unbroken. That world is good. Our seeing is broken, Asher Lev. Can we make it like the seeing of God? Is that possible?”
He paused a moment, then went on. “Once I told this to Jacob Kahn, of blessed memory. Yes, these same words. And he said to me that an artist, too, must see the world whole, he must somehow learn to see during the blinks, he must see where no one else can see, he must see the connections, the betweenesses in the world. Even if the connections are ugly and evil, the artist must learn to see and record them. I said to Jacob Kahn that a Rebbe, too, must see the connections, and if a Rebbe truly sees, if he is able, through the goodness and mercy of the Master of the Universe, to see as the Master of the Universe Himself sees, then he will see that all is good. Jacob Kahn said to me, ‘It is the task of the artist to see. If what he sees is good, then fine. If not, then not.” But all agree, Asher Lev, that it is the task of a Rebbe and of an artist to see, to look. That is understood?”
I nodded, slowly.
”It is understood?” the Rebbe asked again.
”Yes,” I heard myself say, as if from a distance.
”It is understood. Good. Very good. Then listen to me Asher. There are things I am able to see that I cannot reveal to you. You must understand that what I will now ask of you comes from that seeing. Listen. I ask you not to return to France tomorrow. I ask you to remain here with us for another week or two. Stay with us. I am told you must go to Paris. I ask you not to go.”
There was a long silence. I sat very still.
He leaned forward slightly in his chair. “Asher Lev, I give you and your wife and your children my blessing.”
With his right hand he made a slight gesture. Then he sat back in the chair and seemed to disappear into the shadows.
I went silently from the room.
I mean I’m completely against this idiocy … that says surfboarding is an acceptable way of life. That’s utterly absurd … surfboarding is not a way of life. People are free to think it is because the care and responsibility for society has been broken up and parceled out to the experts. People who make a life of surfboarding are living off other people. They’re leeches of the affluent society. They’re parasites of a parasite. As long as we have people making some kind of amusement a way of life, you’ll find they’re getting their support from something destructive, like strip-mining or needless ‘development’ or war-making.
I was far away in aeroplane-land. In the airport they were far away in cellphone-land. In your seats you are far away in internet-land.
But I saw New Zealand green white blue from my window, and the bus driver forgave me a dollar, and another pilgrim offered to make it up, and I’m back home, and maybe even more so soon.
In my dream I accidentally took the wrong book home from work and it was a novel written by ACT MP Deborah Coddington. Which is a strange thing to dream about. I did run back though and return the book, in case someone else needed it. Unfortunately that meant I lost track of Dad and James, with whom I was supposed to be having brunch. Happily in the lift I happened into Richie & Simon. The lift was fairly clever and moved about on a track, a bit like a monorail. It took us for a tour up and around and all over the building (which reminded me of similar clever lifts of my childhood, which is odd because there was only one lift in my childhood — it was in the tallest building in Masterton (eight stories), and was completely normal), then down into a Dutch canal. The sides of the canal were shored up with wooden tiles. I kicked some of them off before noticing a chocolate coin (5 Guilder) wrapped in gold foil under the water. I picked it up and that’s when I realised I was dreaming, which I explained in facetious detail to an old man who had deigned to materialize near the canal.
Don McGlashan reached for you like the first cigarette of the very first day. It’s always a surprise to me to discover what the morning’s first glass of water will taste like.
Yesterday on the lawn in Civic Square in the sun after a nap I finished M Scott Peck’s The Different Drum: Community & Peace-making. His idea of community stretches from intense small groups of people on retreats being very ‘real’ and ‘vulnerable’ with each other to the relationships between nations, but he didn’t give me much of a vision of how community might operate in normal weekday life. I still recommend the book though — it does give a worthwhile framework for thinking about group interactions. I got his book People of the Lie out. It is about ‘evil people’. So far, after two chapters, it’s good and interesting-sad. You can read excerpts from the book here.
I feel a river of change is about to wash us all downstream.
Today I heard very beautiful brass band music from the Army Band in the parade for the Unknown Soldier. Later in the war memorial building the small cadets and calvinettes got quite silent for the first time.
With the Buddha I’d say, “all is suffering”,
or at least, “all is sacrifice”.
But, sometimes there’s a choice to make:
painful futility one way,
fruitful pain the other.
In For Such a Time as This: The Relevance of the Neo-Calvinist Tradition today Craig Bartholomew quotes the Puritan William Perkins:
Now if we compare worke to worke, there is a difference betwixt washing of the dishes, and preaching of the word of God: but as touching to please God none at all.
Reading the article, I get the feeling Postmodernism could be seen as Mammon’s dutiful servant. When all grand stories to structure lives are suspect, ‘buy more shite’ slips under the radar. This is how Susan White says it, quoted by Bartholomew:
If there is any overarching metanarrative that purports to explain reality in the late 20th century, it is surely the narrative of the free-market economy. In the beginning of this narrative is the self-made, self-sufficient human being. At the end of this narrative is the big house, the big car, and the expensive clothes. In the middle is the struggle for success, the greed, the getting-and-spending in a world in which there is no such thing as a free lunch. Most of us have made this so thoroughly ‘our story’ that we are hardly aware of its influence.
Upon some discussion with Aaron: postmodernist and modernist selves are similar, boldly striding into the future with nary a backwards glance. The difference is the pomo’s direction of travel is a bit more private. Both choosing, choosing, choosing to discover/define the self. But the thing that isn’t obvious on the surface is that it’s always money that enables choice.
A philosopher acquaintence of mine thinks God-talk is always a veiled reference to what he calls the ‘concerting instinct’ — those connections that pull us together. He thinks money is a troublesome shortcut to, or counterfeit of, the concerting instinct. It lets selves choose independently of family, land, tradition, the past. But it’s a trick of course. H H Farmer is quoted in that article as saying, “If you go against the grain of the universe you get splinters”. The world revolts in various kinds of chaos — lonely & angry people, spoiled land, ugly buildings etc. Which is possibly another way of saying that Mammon demands sacrifices.
We are on the sun and it is swimming and hot everywhere especially down the beach with hot feet walking on hot asphalt sand and sea girls, and minds go blanks with thoughts fried. The first day of Simon’s November and here is a month early summer maybe for a day or a week. Better a furtive glance or an underhand icecream, or slow-sleeping starfish hard to see without standing very still, or a crab in the swim, still colder than it looks, as big as a two close-fingered hands swims like it walks sideways.
I highly recommend NT Wright’s 1992 book New tasks for a renewed church. Despite it’s garish cover, it is very good. Explosively good even. The book is divided in half. The first part — ‘The Modern World and the Christian Message’ — includes one amazing chapter paraphrasing the entire Old Testament. The second — ‘On Being the Church for the World’ — is where it all gets legs. It’s a plea for the Church to get its nose back to the grindstone, and a cross-shaped methodology for doing so. Of course I’d like to quote the whole book, but these two paragraphs will do for the meantime:
In particular, we can now see how it makes sense to say that, on the cross, Jesus took the weight of the world’s evil on to himself. This has often been asserted as an abstract statement of dogma, and equally often challanged by people who are not unnaturally puzzled as to why this man’s death should be credited with such an odd accomplishment. But, once we grant the initial Jewish assumptions, these questions become reasonably straightforward, albeit infinitely profound.
Israel, we must repeat, believed herself called to be God’s agent in the healing of the world. This involved being God’s agent in confronting the paganism that was at the heart of the world’s problem. We have suggested that Jesus believed this vocation to have devolved on to himself, and acted accordingly. There were two natural reactions to such a ministry. On the one hand, Jews of all sorts were angry at his radical redefinition of their varied ideas of what the kingdom would mean. On the other hand, the pagan Romans themselves were worried lest a potential rival to Caesar should be allowed to escape the normal fate. Together these reactions symbolise and focus the reaction of the whole world, explicitly and implicitly pagan, to Jesus and his dramatic claim. This is simply the climax of the pagan reaction to the whole divine plan, from Abraham to Jesus. To say that the evil of the whole world was heaped on to Jesus on the cross is not simply to deal in theological abstractions. It is to speak of actual historical events.
Every time I see an Eminem video for the first time it always grabs me, stirs me and I don’t know why. I don’t even necessarily ‘like’ the particular song. This morning I came across the video for his song “Mosh” [QT] at Russell Brown’s site, and it induced the same effect. Eminem really really wants people to vote Bush out. I’m often suprised at the amount of trust in the political process Americans display, as if a well thought out vote was a magic bullet.
I always enjoy Russell Brown’s program Mediawatch on National Radio when I manage to catch it. I was pleased to come across his blog yesterday. His post about Destiny Church is worthwhile reading.
In my world, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” doesn’t mean, “Dear Lord, please wind up this whole show as soon as possible, it’s too hard here.” Instead I think it means, “Dear Lord, please renew this place and these people, and make me an active agent of that renewal.”
There are times when I remember you
At the beach by the pier
In a broken down summer
That stretched on for years
I remember the laughter
I remember the waves
And I wish that I could just
Cut it away
Tsunami has washed me
Past the breakers
That broke me
Now I am alone at sea
With memories for company
This is the story of how God made the world in love, identified with the world in suffering, and restores the world through his presence in those he has called to recognise the world’s destiny as a world remade.
The idea of a compliation CD made of what RCNZ people were listening to this year emerged yesterday. I’d like to have a go at this, and gather suggestions for inclusion on this page over here. I’m thinking ideally things that came out this year, or at least that were ‘discovered’ this year.
As is traditional, this coming Sunday afternoon some of us want to head out to Castlepoint and stay the night on the beach. Castlepoint is the pinnacle of God’s good earth. You’re welcome to join us.
Today at the busstop I finished the best book I have read this year — Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I cannot find the best quote, but here is this:
I live in tranquility and trembling. Sometimes I dream. I am interested in Alice mainly when she eats the cookie that makes her smaller. I would pare myself or be pared that I too might pass through the merest crack, a gap I know is there in the sky. I am looking just now for the cookie. Sometimes I open, pried like a fruit. Or I am porous as old bone, or translucent, a tinted condensation of the air like a watercolour wash, and I gaze around me in bewilderment, fancying I cast no shadow. Sometimes I ride a bucking faith while one hand grips and the other flails the air, and like any daredevil I gouge with my heels for blood, for a wilder ride, for more.
There is not a guarantee in the world. O your needs are guaranteed, your needs are absolutely guaranteed by the most stringent of warranties, in the plainest, truest words: knock; seek; ask. But you must read the fine print. “Not as the world giveth, give I unto you.” That’s the catch. If you catch it it will catch you up, aloft, up to any gap at all, and you’ll come back, for you will come back, transformed in a way you may not have bargained for—dribbling and crazed. The waters of separation, however lightly sprinkled, leave indelible stains. Did you think, before you were caught, that you needed, say, life? Do you think you will keep your life, or anything else you love? But no. Your needs are all met. But not as the world giveth. You see the needs of you own spirit met whenever you have asked, and you have learned that you must not need life. Obviously. And then you’re gone. You have finally understood that you’re dealing with a maniac.
I think that the dying pray not at the last “please,” but “thank you,” as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air; and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks. Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomly secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. And then you walk fearlessly, eating what you must, growing wherever you can, like the monk on the road who knows precisely how vulnerable he is, who takes no comfort among death-forgetting men, and who carries his vision of vastness and might around in his tunic like a live coal which neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will not part.
I am listening to Hail to the Thief for the first time for ages this morning. Man it’s flash. “Go to Sleep” is a ripping cut. “Punch Up At A Wedding” is the only bum note.
Yesterday evening we went to Chow on Tory St. I can highly recommend it. All the food was very good and the staff were choice too. Mondays are 1+1=1 nights, so we ate for $9.50 each + drinks.
And when I wake I wait
for birds to tell me it’s OK to get up.
Today I am being paid to learn NZ geography and listen to NT Wright talk about the Resurrection. The sun is out again.
Paraphrasing a discussion on the forum for my linguistics paper:
It deons’t mtater waht odrer the leetrts are isndie a wrod. All taht’s reirequd is taht the frist and lsat letetr be creorct, and for msot of the innteral lterets to be trhee smeoewhre. Tath’s ptrety ntify, I rkecon.
One reason I trust the Gospel of John: It twists subverts Judaism so thoroughly, pulling each of its major symbols onto Jesus — Torah, the feasts, the sacrifices, Wisdom, shepherd, Messiah. Judaism dies with Jesus and is resurrected as Christianity. No Jew could possibly accept that radical reconfiguration, those otherwise-arrogant devolutions unless Something outside the symbols shattered their paradigm: the miracles, finally the Resurrection.
In a lecture Rod Wilson at Regent told me that when we speak we speak around one hundred and fify words a minute. When we think we think around four hundred words a minute. Conversation can easily become a free-association game, waiting impatiently for one’s turn, trading tangental anecdotes. Listening is rarer than rare.
I was listening to a speaker today at the WIT Symposium and my mind wandered for a moment or ten. Having missed breakfast I was hungry. Being hungry I was thinking about food. Thinking about food I was thinking about wheat, wondering if this reduced-wheat thing is working. It is, I think. Tiredness is a creeping dull greyness behind my eyes. After fewer-than-normal hours sleep last night I felt 90%, where until recently on the best days I would feel 80%.
I heard a Catholic teacher say today “… of course it all begins with faith — faith as gift, all of grace. Whatever else we might say about Augustine, he got that right.”
We had a nice party yesterday evening: the calm before the rugby storm but people got bored and came home early, (“I’m not going to lie to you, I’m in a pretty chill mood right now”). Scrumpy was just the ticket for this intrepid sojourner in wheat-free land, (“Turn it up”). Vying vying and some new faces — new to here that is — and the new layout working cordial wonders of conviviality.
It came to me as from on high that maybe there is a niche, a cleft in the frequency rock for a new radio station — Radio Alt-dot-Easy-Listening, playing your softly spoken un-mainstream favourites. It would be like RadioActive sans the hiphop & DnB. You could put it on in the evening and eat dinner or talk quietly with a lowkey stranger without fear of reprisals.
While I was out, my kind flatmates rearranged the two front rooms. Now when I work at home, I can see the sea without turning my head. No doubt the various seafarers will be grateful for my constant vigilance. This room also has Tim’s and Richard’s computers in it too, so it is now Productivity Central. We rearranged the main lounge so that it’s Relaxation Central, with three couches in a U-shape, the black and white teev and bookcase to the side, and our mighty mighty chess arena (coffee table) in the middle.
Lately when I go to bed at night I can’t wait to finish sleeping so that I can get up and back into it. I feel like my life is coordinated from off-stage and I am along to enjoy the ride.
If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.
This week EPR reminded me I must get a drum kit again before too long. This week I got my last salary pay. This week I finished Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House and Greg Egan’s Schild’s Ladder. This week I laid out my first book of (someone else’s) poetry. This week an old sailor told me to acheive something with my life. I asked him if he had any ideas about what I should acheive. He said, “Have children and grandchildren. They’re a pain in the neck sometimes, but you get real joy from them too.” This night I read this poem by Cameron Hockly:
and maybe after all this time./ all these e
pidemics of losing friends/losing lovers/lo
sing our favourite red shoes/ our glasses/
we may have to face the fact that/we can
lose things within us/ things we thought we
re firmly secured/ places we called home/ m
emories we could only go so long without /
referring back to./
and if we have to face the reality of this
/then we can quit pretending that we have/
never been the lost child/ never missed a t
rain/ or disappeared from everything that w
e knew familiar./
but the thing is-/ we are all so slow to a
cknow;edge this loss/ and it's not until we
have walked / back through warm doorways /
or put on worn out clothes that we can admi
t/ and even then- only very quietly/
that we have been far, far away //
The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists in listening to them. Just as love to God begins with listening to His Word, so the beginning of love for the brethren is learning to listen to them… Listening can be a greater service than speaking… One who cannot listen long and patiently will presently be talking beside the point and be never really speaking to others. Anyone who thinks his time is too valuable to spend keeping quiet will eventually have no time for God and his brother, but only for himself and for his own follies… We should listen with the ears of God that we may speak the Word of God.
I went to the World Press 2004 exhibition. Quite horrible, mostly. This set of photos stood out for me. Outside Shed 11 there was a sign. It had an arrow point towards the exhibition: ← World Press 2004, and one away from it: Comfort Zone →.
Of the world’s top 100 economies, 51 are transnationals, while only 49 are actual countries. Taking the top 20 economies in year 2000, nine were transnationals, the highest-ranking being General Motors at number eight. Unsurprisingly the good ol’ USA was numero uno. The 12th largest economy was Wal-Mart, which generated an annual revenue greater than that of 161 countries including New Zealand, Israel, Poland and Greece. The cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris, which operates in 170 countries but does not even rank in the top 100 companies, is itself bigger than New Zealand. The combined sales of the world’s top 200 corporations accounted for more than a quarter of the world’s economic activity, and, with more than 40,000 of them worldwide, the balance of economic-political power appears to be inevitably shifting in their favour. Yet in Lotto we glimpse how nation-states and transnational corporations can resolve their potential conflicts and work together to support each other’s ideals.
This week I’ve seen fish in the harbour which is really nice because I haven’t seen fish in the harbour since last summer, when you could always look down from behind Freyberg Pool or next to Chaffers Marina and see fish playing and eating each other amongst the seaweed on the sea wall. No fish since summer except for the one day I saw a seal in Oriental Bay playing with his food, a fish, like a cat with a mouse. I have seen and with my brother Richard have seen thousands of tiny fish with silver undersides moving in swirling moiré patterns revealing and hiding the silver glinting when the sun came out, with a woman in a kayak above, or larger fish below. The kahawai scared them away, the little fish, and they tell each other one at a time to get out of here, and that turns the silver swirling into pandemonium, mad flight disturbing the surface and when the bubbles had cleared one little fish left behind all alone. All alone except for the kahawai below who shoots up and swallows the straggler. And I wonder where they slept all these months.
Recently I heard that the suicide to homicide ratio in the United States is around 2:1. A little bit of squirreling around here and here at Stats NZ leads me to think that here it is around 2.4:1.
Because I see so many weak souls trampled underfoot, I am reluctant to believe in the truth of much that is called progress and education. I do believe in education, but only in the kind that is based on a genuine love of humankind.
Saturday 16 October the Wellington Institute of Theology is holding a symposium ‘Approaching the Bible’. Tim McKenzie (who wrote that letter I posted a little while back) is one of the speakers. The topics look really interesting: “The idea of revelation in a post-modern culture: The revelatory role of story & the history of God as one who reveals”, “Scripture in Christianity and Islam: a comparative study of the role of sacred scripture, tradition, and the principles of interpretation” and “Fundamentalism: the word and the phenomenon”. Download the full programme [50k PDF] if you like.
I believe in the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea who has put within time the Deep Magic, and, before all time, the Deeper Magic.
I believe in his Son Aslan who sang into being all the worlds and all that they contain: Talking Beasts and humans, dumb animals and shining spirits. And I believe that Aslan was a true beast, the king of beasts, a Lion; that for Edmund, a traitor because of his desire for Turkish Delight, he gave himself” into the power of the White Witch, who satisfied the requirements of the Deep Magic by killing him most horribly. At the dawn following that darkest, coldest night, he was restored to full life by the Deeper Magic, cracking the Stone Table and, from that moment, setting death to work backwards. He exulted in his new life and went off to rescue all those who had been turned into stone by the Witch’s want and to deliver the whole land from everlasting winter. He will be behind all the stories of our lives; and, when it is time, he will appear again in our world to wind it up, calling all of his creatures whose hearts’ desire it is to live “farther in and farther up” in his country which contains all real countries.
I believe that upon us all falls the breath of Aslan and that ours are the sweet waters of the Last Sea which enable us to look steadily at the sun. I believe that all who have thrilled or will thrill at the sound of Aslan’s name are now our fellow voyagers and our fellow kings and queens; that all of us can be for ever free of our dragonish thoughts and actions; and that one day we will pass through the door of death into “Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read; which goes on for ever; in which every chapter is better than the one before.”
Our lives as we live them seem like lives that anticipate questions that never will be asked. It seems as if we are getting ourselves ready for the question “How much did you earn during your lifetime?” or “How many friends did you make?” or “How much progress did you make in your career?” or “How much influence did you have on people?” or “How many conversions did you make?”
Were any of these to be the question Christ will ask when he comes again in glory, many of us could approach the judgment day with great confidence. But nobody is going to hear any of these questions. The question we all are going to face is the question we are least prepared for. It is: “What have you done for the least of mine?” As long as there are strangers; hungry, naked, and sick people; prisoners, refugees, and slaves; people who are handicapped physically, mentally, or emotionally; people without work, a home, or a piece of land, there will be that haunting question from the throne of judgment: “What have you done for the least of mine?”
Both candidates seem to be telling the public that if only we take care of this terror thing, then everybody from sea to shining sea can just kick back and enjoy the scenery on cruise control.
Jonathan Vandenberg (Angela’s brother, my second cousin) has recently written a rather worthwhile paper on youth ministry which you can download here [130k PDF]. It will be published in the Reformed Ecumenical Council’s journal Focus shortly.
Tonight, inspired by Paul Graham, I started to learn LISP. I found an open source implementation that works on Windows at sourceforge, and a nice tutorial. I hope to be able to write some software to help me analyse the text of John’s Gospel.
