matthew henry john bartlett

Sad Internet porn article [via Jono th' mighty]

Deb’s notes on NT Wright lecture

Aaron being/becoming a Christian radical
Macs run Windows now
Christians having a very bad time in Iraq, U.S. doesn’t care [via CD list]
Hauerwas on Wendell Berry & the university
Tim Flannery on the hydrogen economy & climate change
Starving Zimbabweans throw away their babies [via D]

A friend of mine is looking for Java/C++ programming work, 10-20hrs a week.

I heart Gillian Welch.

A criminal justice researcher told me New Zealand’s prison population per capita is second only to the US of A’s.

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…”

Stanley Hauerwas and Noam Chomsky

April 2006 Hauerwas lecture on war [34MB MP3, from here]
Kunstler on U.S. vs Iran

I want and Dad wants to know what Christian pacifists do when their grandmother is getting beaten up.

Hey I don’t want to alarm anyone but I think I might just have had the perfect powernap.

Women are mostly better than men because they have more difficult lives.

$10 bus Auckland to/from Wellington [thanks Jono]

& 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.

Rock and roll is the opiate of the masses.

Why I am not a neo-calvinist

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.

Quote from a recent Wendell Berry interview [w-berry list]:

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.

April 24–30 is TV turnoff week.

Ananda Coomaraswamy wrote:

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?

[from w-berry list]

The ternary operator ? is the most elegant thing in the world.

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:

Help me expand/complete my table if you like.

NZ unemployment graphs
Jesus and I broke up
Make art like a Christian

5.30pm tonight, 8 Kelburn Pde: GW Bush on Campus / Christians in Wartime [180KB PDF]
8pm tonight, 8 Kelburn Pde: The Fog of War
RaceWalk game [Flash req'd]

Ben & Franci’s house for sale ($222K) in Masterton

Erin Middlewood on breastfeeding and toxins
Derrick Jensen on environmentalists beyond hope
A reason not to buy Coke

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.