Matthew Henry John Bartlett

Guardian somewhat impressed with NZ’s climate change response [via Rob]

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)

What can you do? Steve Hatfield Dodds suggests writing to your MP or city councillor to let them know climate change is important to you. 42collective have eighty other suggestions.

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.

David Farrar‘s short notes on the Wellington Council election candidates

I’m looking for a Super-8 projector to borrow for a short time.

We’re still looking for a housemate or two
Evil, caring and mental health

I’ve bought my tickets for Frankfurt.

Seamus Heaney’s poem “The Republic of Conscience”, composed for Amnesty International

Tertullian, around AD200, said: “The Lord in disarming Peter henceforth disarms every soldier” (from Stanley Hauerwas and Enda McDonagh, “Abolishing War? An Appeal to Christian Leaders and Theologians”).

Discovering mum’s right about religion: priceless [via Rob]

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.

Freecycling facilitates frugality
Human FM gets some podcasts up

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)

We’re looking for a housemate or two
pilgrimage to Eastern Orthodoxy and pacifism

Said Wendell Berry in What are People For?:

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.

proximate justice for Christians in ‘politics’

Hoyts make Dom Post
Russell Norman on the ANZ/deforestation bizo [YT vid, feat Rob A]

From a discussion panel with Richard Hays, Richard Stubbing and Stanley Hauerwas [60MB mp3], here are Richard Hays’ three sets of three questions around the topic of How does scripture inform how we think about politics in a situation very different from that of the NT Christians?

A brochure about how you can support Human FM & Joel Carpenter

In other news, I hear tell Tool are coming to town. Does anyone have any details about this?