matthew henry john bartlett

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.

Lyrics: Bill Withers/Grandma’s hands
NT Wright: The Lord’s Prayer as a paradigm of Christian prayer

Today is my 9,300th day breathing.

Daniel Nichols’ autobio continues
Daniel Silliman trims trees

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.

I got a laptop last week and now I’m working on the deck in the sun looking over the harbour and feeling pretty chuffed.

Religion, universities and public life [via Tim M]
Andrew Basden: Politics with eternal significance
Andrew Basden: In defense of marriage
Andrew Basden’s spiritual biography

Stuart Murdoch, married to the band

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]

Finally I know what we are! We’re churchgeeks! or religiogeeks! or something!

Valerie Saiving: The human situation: a feminine view [1.2MB PDF]

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.

Daniel Nichols’ autobio continues
Brian McLaren et al respond to emergent church’s critics
A Jesus creed

Daniel Silliman’s chance of rain

Rig Veda, Book X, Hymn 129, quoted by Wendy Doniger in You can’t get there from here: the logical paradox of creation myths [RA video]:

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!

THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE FUTURE ARE
NOT BEING LAID WITH WORDS

on Wendell Berry’s Sabbath poems
Commencement address by Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry on conservationists vs farmers
Charles Strohmer: Christianity, Islam & diplomacy [140KB PDF]

From Job 34:

If he should set his heart to it
and gather to himself his spirit and his breath,
all flesh would perish together,
and man would return to dust.

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.

Apparently sport is doing really well just now.

Typewriter phenomenology [via Daniel S]
Rance Darity: Demythologizing the Gospel

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.

O, and it had a really flash soundtrack.

ECO Annual Conference — 24-26 June — programme

NASA’s World Wind global satellite imaging freeware
Destiny revists the Great Plains

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.

Fr Neil Vaney: Discovering holy places

Said Wendell Berry in “A Native Hill”:

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.

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.

Berek: Eucharist friends

I want to send audio from my laptop to my stereo via bluetooth. Any ideas on where I can get a bluetooth to 2xRCA or 3.5mm stereo plug?

Peter Leithart on low- and high-context societies