matthew henry john bartlett

Matthew’s third sermon [125K PDF]
Bono interview in Rolling Stone [via Gideon]
Extract audio from DVDs
The world forest & ten thousand years of time-lapse text

BBC’s annotatable audio project [via Russell Brown]
Orson Scott Card on abortion, crime, Freakonomics, eugenics, etc. [via D]
National parks & men with guns
Slavoj Žižek on reports of New Orleans violence
Escaping North Korean labour camps in Siberia

Sue Bradford on Rod Donald’s passing [WM audio]
Mark Strom lectures on St Paul this Wednesday in Kelburn [240K PDF]

Today I met a man who showed me how to square the circle in about six steps with a straightedge and a compass.

Daniel Silliman synthesizes Girard, Berry & Derrida

Slavoj Žižek on choosing, racism, the Decalogue, sex, etc.
Daniel Silliman & the theodicy cat

Wrote John Ruskin in The Crown of Wild Olive:

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.

Isaac Freeman unpacks PowerBook, amuses

David Koyzis on city renewal
The most beautiful guarded Japanese fireworks moment
Rorty on James, Proust, Bunyan, à Kempis

Doug Jones on why Reformed churches always die [6MB MP3]

Rusty Reno on the Radical Orthodoxy project
Orson Scott Card interview [20MB QT]

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.

AJ Chesswas is a construct, apparently, or maybe not. I think I have a better appreciation now for my non-blogging friends’ negatory or ambivalent attitude to the online world.

Berek is not a hetrosexual

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.

Apparently building my laptop produced about nine tonnes of waste. I guess I better make it last.

Wendell Berry: Health is Membership
I, Cringely on Google taking over the Internet [via SDG]

Julie Rubens lecture on moral character and the US university [video]
Stanley Hauerwas, rather more bracingly, on the same topic [video]
Stanley Hauerwas on JH Yoder

Hauerwas, the fighting pacifist, down on freedom & tolerance & such
CS Lewis in the hands of The New Yorker [via Tim M]

Panama Canal timelapse video [via Ian G]

Gah, I noticed just one second-hand stereo too late that it’s Buy Nothing Day today. Though not too late for

Ben Witherington III on Anne Rice’s new novel
Where do baby computers come from?

Where do old computers go when they die? [RealAudio]
CS Lewis in the hands of the Listener [via Kathy]

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.