February 2004

Congratulations to Steve Taylor who got the big “thumbs up” to his PhD oral yesterday. Why don’t you drop on by e~mergent kiwi: Examiners recommendations and leave a message for him.

Saw these tonight

The Grace Lent Blog where “every day during lent someone from the grace community/network will (if they remember) post a scripture, a thought, a reflection, an animation, an insight, a photo or a space to be silent….”

And Maggi’s nice summary of Lent, Ash Wednesday and Shrove Tuesday.

Today is Ash Wednesday - a time of self examination as Lent begins.

A collect for Ash Wednesday from the New Zealand Prayer Book.

God of the desert, as we follow Jesus into the unknown,
may we recognise the tempter when he comes;
let it be your bread we eat,
your world we serve and you alone we worship.

An excellent contemporary collect for urban dwellers is A Collect for the City Desert by Matt Humm.

More about Ash Wednesday at BBC - Religion & Ethics - Ash Wednesday.

For more on Lent and why “purple” see BBC - Religion & Ethics - Lent. (Some Christian traditions use different colours for Ash Wednesday and Lent (including unbleached linen)).

Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras) today. On Saturday while at Cityside Baptist we were all given a small black envelope with a fold-out series of reflections for Lent inside it. Some thoughts for milestones through Lent with suggestions for reflective activities on that day.

Today’s entry reads

SHROVE TUESDAY - 24 February. Day before Lent
Sometimes know as ‘pancake Tuesday’ from the tradition of using up the eggs and fat in the house before the Lenten fast.

Suggestion: Gather friends together to make and eat pancakes. Talk together about changes you would like to make to who you are and how you live your life.

Sounds like a plan to me.

We’re having house group here for pancakes tonight - must go and get some lemons off the tree in the garden.

More info on Shrove Tuesday at: BBC - Religion & Ethics - Shrove Tuesday.

Just looking through my bookmarks collection and came across Heidi Campbell’s Web Page: Research in New Media and Religious Online Communities. She’s “investigating the nature of community, religion and the social through an analysis of new media technologies.” Intriguing stuff.

There are some links to things she’s written including online versions of some of them.

Some links to activities and reflections for Lent and Easter from the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand. They’re pretty trad but they can either stand on their own or as a starting point for variations upon the theme. See presbyterian.org.nz: Lent and Easter 2004

Too tired to blog anything much for the next few days. Went to the discussion day with Brian Walsh at Cityside Baptist yesterday. Intellectually stimulating as well as a good time to talking and eating with all sorts of interesting people (including Paul). Big thanks to Andrew (at CCSP) and Mark (at Cityside) for putting it together.

Also going to create a “Lent” category to generate a set of resources for the Lenten season. Over time I’ll add bits and pieces in there.

Oh, and Maggi has an good posting “Postmodern Church; Antediluvian Attitude?” over on her blog.

Very busy week coming up with Kim working extra hours, kid stuff needing attention and lectures starting next week. And somewhere along the way I need to do some more on my critique of models/categories of science-religion interaction.

From the blog A Cup of Rich I see that the outfit that brought the great Follow the Star Christmas devotional site has one for Lent (with the same cool Jazz).

Check out Journey to the Cross: A Daily Online Devotional Guide

For those of you whose churches don’t follow the Church year (like the liturgical traditions do) you can find out more about the Christian Holy Days at BBC - Religion & Ethics - Christian Holy Days.

Found the link the other day when I was searching for some Lenten stuff on the net and the articles are good for beginners.

The next one is Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras) next week, BTW. We have house group that night so hopefully pancakes all round.

The new university year rolls around and it’s been 15 years since I began my postgraduate journey (with a few years off here and there not studying). So in honour of what seems like a fairly momentous anniversary for me here a quick class snap and a link to some from my fourth year computer science class back in 1989.

Raymond Wilson, Neil Sharman, Colin Daniels, Tim Wilson, Clinton Logan
Greg Davidson, Simon Glass, Craig Nevill-Manning, Stephen Garner
Computer Science Honours & First-year Masters Class, University of Canterbury, 1989

Full archive at: Nevill-Manning Photo Album: “Canterbury University: Computer Science, 1989″

It was a pretty brutal year as I remember it with stacks of pressure and work covering courses on geographic information systems, computer graphics, data encryption, data compression, computer networking and database theory (relational alegra & calculus) to name a few. (Kim was doing Operations Research postgrad at the same time and they worked pretty hard too).

As you can see there were no women in the class so it had the whole monastic type feel (plus a lack of balance). Kim was the only woman in her year in OPRE.

The Internet was pretty much unknown out there in the “real world” but we used Usenet, e-mail & FTP (gopher, archie, WAIS and WWW weren’t really there yet) and computers with a mouse were still a novelty outside of Apple Macs and Sun Workstations.

It was around here that my love affair with UNIX began and now I can run a UNIX-based Mac OS on my iBook I’ve pretty much reached heaven on earth.

The pictures give a quick view into life in the Honours room but it looks like most of them were taken at night. Ah, those were the days when youthful vigor (and caffeinated soft drinks) allowed all night coding.

There’s an interesting article in this week’s Listener magazine: NZ Listener | State of the nation by Ranginui Walker which argues that ‘Rather than a dangerous “drift towards racial separatism”, all the evidence points in the other direction.’

(For those of you outside of NZ the “Rip Van Winkle” character in the article is Dr. Brash, the leader of the National Party in NZ (see: Don Brash to spread race message buoyed by poll results))

In a moment of coincidence I read Steve’s posting e~mergent kiwi: whats the internet point at the same time as I found (Pop) Culture: Playground of the Spirit or Diabolical Device? by Stanley Grenz. He writes

For a large and growing segment of the population, pop culture serves as the chief referent for the cultural task. It provides the central tools by means of which they engage in the age-old task of meaning-making as persons within society. It mediates to them the paradigmatic narrative by means of which and in accordance with which they make sense of their otherwise seemingly senseless lives and thereby construct a sense of personal identity. To the extent that it fulfills this purpose well, pop culture becomes the playground of the Spirit.

. Conversely he argues that if it becomes a false god it degenerates into a diabolical device.

Will have to download the article (it’s about 28 pages long) and have a read more fully later.

Finished of watching the remake of Battlestar Galactica last night. On the whole a reasonable job though TV3’s slicing for commercials destroyed pretty much any continuity or tension. I remember going to see the first movie when I was a kid and the old Cinerama theatre in Wellington shook with the “Sensorround” effects.

There were a few retro touches that were nice and you can cope with the switching of genders/ethnicity of some of the characters. What struck me was that it looks like religion may play a more significant part in the new series than the original. It will be interesting to see how they handle it as on the whole sci-fi TV shows don’t handle religion well. (Babylon 5 is an exception that I’ll blog about later on.)

A couple of useful books for looking at the relationship between science fiction and religion/theology are Stephen May’s Stardust and Ashes and Anthony Thacker’s A Closer Look at Science Fiction.

May’s book is the more academic offering a critique of a wide range of science fiction literature and its themes. Thacker’s approach is more useful for discussion material as he takes a theme (e.g. redemption) and then uses science fiction films (e.g. Star Wars) and TV (Star Trek, Babylon 5, Dr. Who) to unpack that theme. Both are written from a UK slant.

Related to this is also Stanley Grenz’s use of Star Trek’s development to trace modern to postmodern shifts in contemporary culture. See Grenz, Stanley J. “Star Trek and the Next Generation: Postmodernism and the Future of Evangelical Theology”, Crux (Vancover), 30(1), March 1994, pp.24-32. (Also part of his A Primer on Postmodernism”).

Came across this today at the Damaris web site while searching for a book on science fiction and faith.

Matrix Revelations: a thinking fan’s guide to the Matrix trilogy.

Seems they have a book which

examines the Matrix phenomenon, with in-depth analysis ranging from the science fiction and comic book influences to the philosophical and religious themes that underpin the films.

I see also they have information about using the Matrix trilogy as a discussion tool for small groups with material you can download (including a sample chapter).

While I think that too many Christians have an uncritical view of the films, seeing all the Judeo-Christian symbolism without the other philosophical and religious themes, there may be something here for them to begin to engage more critcially. It may also open the door to thinking about looking at engaging other films too.

Paul Fromont blogged about the book “Get up off your knees: Preaching the U2 catalog” which had an essay in it by Brian Walsh. (See Reinhabiting the Biblical Story - The Hope of Our Times). I’m going to the same conversation as Paul (meeting a blogger in the flesh - how novel!) so thought I’d add in this link to a review of that book.

Prayer, Prophecy, and Pop Culture - The Hallelujah Mix - from @U2

Plus, I get to see if this trackback thing works.

I’ve been busy getting things moved over to Movable Type this week. The blog content has been imported and categorised but comments will have been lost (sorry).

I’ll blog about the process for doing this later but in the meantime I’ll note that while I’ve looked at this under variety of Mac browsers and IE 5+ for Windows 98 and 2000 it may break in places. CSS just doesn’t work right on every browser. Leave a comment if you can and I’ll work on it.

I’ve updated the Viriditas page and now you can get an RSS feed too.

Now, back to my research.

Interesting article over the ditch at signposts:
signposts: I hate the “emerging” church

Spawned a few thoughts for the (non?)emergentkiwi too

Saw this today and it made me feel sad. Sad for those who want to have children and can’t have them, and sad that someone makes money out of selling these substitutes. It may help some people but it gave me a creepy feeling too.

ic Newcastle - Virtual babies aim to ease parenting pain

In trying to track down some art work by Kenn Brown I found this amazing piece of digital art work from found in New Scientist Magazine. It’s loaded as a FlashVR object so it takes a while but it’s awesome.

Kenn Brown: DNA

I came across this today while trying to find something completely different using Google. After a quick skim it looks like something that I will be coming back to every now and then for a read. Nice to have non-US/non-British opinions. Check out: Social Justice and Faith Magazine in Canada called The Social Edge.com

David Lyon once wrote “Reality refuses to go away, even when the air is thickly postmodern.” It was a quote I remembered today when we lost a bit of our roof. A clear, calm day in Auckland - light breeze and no rain. Then about 3pm this afternoon a single huge gust of wind, the house shook and then a second or two later a loud bang followed by several smaller ones.

On checking we’d lost a tile from one of the ridges of the roof over the rumpus room which left a nice big hole looking inside the house. This being Auckland it’s bound to rain soon and this being NZ it’s a public holiday today - no roofing people available. So it’s covered up with plastic and bricks until someone, better qualified than me, can fix things back together.

It was bizarre. We haven’t had a breath of wind since. And “act of God” perhaps?

Made me put my discussions on contemporary culture, emerging churches etc. into perspective. Food, shelter and water refuse to be deconstructed. Maybe that is why when we feed, clothe and shelter others we do it to Christ as well.

After Wednesday’s conversation with Steve and his comment on this blog that I might need to work on developing an urban (urbane?) spirituality I’ve been thinking.

Two things are rattling around in my head.

The first is the prayer Jesus in the City by Doug Gay (from the book Alternative Worship).
It’s a prayer that I’ve read several times, and used in different contexts, and it always speaks
to me. It ends with the lines

God of the City,
Maker, Saviour, Spirit,
Come close to hear us and speak to us and touch us tonight.
So we pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.

The second thing is a song by The Mutton Birds called Envy of Angels which starts

Look over there, you used to say
The shape of the land beneath the street
Ridges and valleys and underground streams
You have to know what’s under your feet

So you can make things strong enough
To take the weight
The weight of all the people
That haven’t been born

That’s what you said to me
And it’s the envy of angels

Don McGlashan of the Mutton Birds writes of Auckland in 1998

Arriving in Auckland, sitting at the lights surrounded by pristine four-wheel drives, we read a billboard which says: “There’s no such thing as an unfair advantage, unless it’s you that doesn’t have it”. Not a motto to build a civilised city on, but it seems to fit just now. It’s a harsher, more red-necked place than we left. And behind the billboards and half-finished apartment blocks, it’s more fragile as well. The electricity has failed, and the sewage and transport systems might not be far behind. Friends seem more resigned and helpless about the state of things than I remember them to be, too. How does that happen? Would I feel that way if I was still living here? Does the rest of the country feel the same?

So two things (among the many): the closeness of God in the city and a deep knowledge of this place.

Barclay Barrios of Rutgers University, New Brunswick has put together a nice site called The Year of the Blog: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom. It’s got an overview of 2003 with respect to blogging, blogging resources, blogs as writing practice, blogs in the classroom and some other stuff.

Just switched to HaloScan comments from Enetation to see if that improves the commenting in the interim before I shift to MT or pMachine. For those of you who posted comments on the old system they are still there in the ether but just not visible at the moment.

Hopefully this improves things.

A few things today.

Had a nice cup of coffee and chat with Steve at Auckland University today and then hitched a ride with Rachel (thanks!) (and Steve) back out to West Auckland. Good to hear that Steve’s settling into Christchurch and that the Auckland course is going well. Disappointed that Rachel doesn’t have a red sports car though.

I also popped along to the public lecture on “The Biological Basis of Memory” by Nobel Laureate Prof. Eric Kandel. Intriguing stuff. Some nice background material for the stuff on neurotheology that’s waiting to be read.

Also you may want to check out the following DVD. I heard the end of an interview with Dean Hapeta on National Radio at the weekend and the Ngatahi project sounds really interesting.

NGATAHI - KNOW THE LINKS is a stimulating streetwise orchestration of philosophical thought focusing on socio-political issues amongst indigenous and marginalised peoples in twenty countries.

Shot, produced, directed and edited by Dean Hapeta a.k.a Te Kupu parts 1 & 2 of this four part “rapumentary” series are available now on DVD featuring footage from Canada, england, France, Colombia, Hawai’i, Cuba, USA, Jamaica, Australia and Aotearoa.

There’s more information at NGATAHI - KNOW THE LINKS with a fuller description at Ngatahi.

Oh! And it rained a lot today. Again. Must be summer here in Auckland. Expressed the opinion to Steve that living in Auckland must be the equivalent to the exodus in the desert. Sooner or later you get to leave and enter the “promised land”. Either that or Auckland is Purgatory.

Encouraged by Paul’s entry on Prodigal Kiwi Blog: Colossian Targums I printed a copy of Brian Walsh’s Colossian Targums: Reading Paul in a Postmodern Context and was glad that I did so.

The second part, entitled “Targum #2 - Subversive Poetry in a Postmodern World:
Colossians 1.15-20″, was amazing. A couple of parts linked in with some cyberculture stuff I’ve been reading.

In the face of a disconnected world
  where home is a domain in cyberspace
  where neighbourhood is a chat room
  where public space is a shopping mall
  where information technology promises
  a tuned in, reconnected world
    all things hold together in Christ
      the creation is a deeply personal cosmos
      all cohering and interconnected in Jesus

Now I’m off to play board games with my three and a half year old daughter. Enough virtuality for today.

I’ve had the library’s copy of Playing God by Glenn Colquhoun (2002) out for a week or so and have been reading it in the evenings. Colquhoun is a doctor who writes poetry and this collection is out of his medical experiences here in NZ. Like most poetry I struggle with it sometimes but on the whole I have found his poems engaging, challenging and refreshing. Today I saw his poem about Asthma and it fitted in with life just right.

The poem ends with the lines

This small boy has a flock of birds
let loose inside his chest.

And quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
the magpies said.

The last part is from a poem by Denis Glover

Here’s a link to Colquhoun’s bio and “To the girl who stood beside me at the checkout counter of Whitcoulls bookstore in Hamilton on Tuesday” (Overseas readers substitute in the name of your local stationer/bookseller for Whitcoulls.) (Also I’ve bought many books in the Hamilton Whitcoulls)

And another to his poem “Bred in South Auckland”. Another that captures Auckland life.

Philip came home this afternoon (after we were told he’d be in for another night). Parents are relieved and tired and siblings are happy to see Philip and their parents again.

Thanks again for the support.