March 2004

A bed-time prayer from my three year old daughter.

“Dear Jesus, please look after Daddy, and Jesus please look after Jesus. And Jesus please look after - who’s Jesus friend? Oh yes, God. - Jesus please look after God too. Amen.”

Spent part of yesterday lecturing on how the love relationship within the Trinity was picked up by various theologians’ understanding of the image of God. Sometimes the children’s simpler ways of expressing things work best - the members of the Trinity are friends.

Maggi’s recent posting Rahner was an amateur and Steve’s posting of a while back a jest at floating language struck chords with me. I’m a theologian by profession, spending my working week researching, developing and teaching theology yet I often think of myself as a “beginning theologian”. The more I know and study the more there is to explore within God and God’s creation.

The term “beginning theologian” is one that has stuck with me every since I read the excellent book Confessions of a Beginning Theologian by Elouise Renich Fraser, Professor of Systematic Theology at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary (Philadelphia).

The book covers her journey from conservative Southern Baptist roots, through seminary and university theological studies, and into theological teaching. Through this all she learns

I hate looking and sounding like a beginner. Making mistakes and asking questions. Not sure yet where I’m going, much less how I’m going to get from here to there. Afraid of what might happen along the way. But God loves beginners.

Becoming a theologian is about becoming a beginner. It isn’t about whether you’re old enough, young enough, smart enough or good enough. . . .

It isn’t about becoming someone else, changing your personality or leaving your past behind. And it isn’t about becoming dull and dry, giving up fun and excitement, retreating from the world to attain some more exalted existence.

Definitely about being playful, an “amateur”, recognising that anyone who has had a thought about the divine is also a theologian, and that we make mistakes as we struggle to grasp the infinite. Highly reassuring.

Her book is interesting too in that it gives a woman’s perspective on the inside of seminaries and theology departments. In the book at one place she finds herself ostracized by conservative women for being “too feminist” while their liberal counterparts consider her “too fundamentalist”. Challenged me to consider how I view and treat my female colleagues and students.

So borrow the book and give it a read - even if you only read the first and last chapters it’ll help you get a feel for becoming a theologian.

There are some excerpts from the book can be found at Amazon.

Netcraft notes that the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) web site now appears to be running Linux and ponders whether that would mean that SCO might include the RIAA in it’s lawsuit against major companies using Linux. The possibility of SCO suing the RIAA over breaching their intellectual property is far too much irony to start the day with. Sometimes it just makes you want to be a lawyer (but only for a few seconds).

Here’s an intereting Kiwi article from Wired News that talks about developing new photo technology to help photgraph NZ endangered frogs.

Wired News: Kissing a Mirror to Find a Frog

Came across this today while doing some literature trawling. I’m lecturing on “being human in a technocultural world” in a couple of weeks time and I’ll probably add this article into the suggested readings for the class.

See: God Is My Palm Pilot, Sojourners Magazine/July-August 2001.

In it one of the authors (David Batstone) writes

So what does it mean to be spiritually alert in an age of technology? It means being conscious of the choices that are before us and where they are likely to lead. It means charting how knowledge is distributed and how to access it. It means learning the ideas, skills, and strategies that enable success in a given location. It means learning how to use the resources of local communities to establish leverage against dominant elites. It means intentionally creating the kinds of community that allow us to live with dignity. It means learning how to take care of people, not just people learning how to take care of themselves.

For an article on technology and faith and looking at issues of access to information they have, somewhat ironically, an extended web version of the print version at Web Exclusive: God Is My Palm Pilot, Sojourners Magazine/July-August 2001.

A recent article on Roman Catholic blogging at COMMONWEAL - February 27 2004 - St. Blog’s Church.

There’s a related article at Reporting From the Trenches: The New Catholic Media.

In our house group we’ve been talking about vocation and employment recently. (Actually we’ve been using a book of studies somewhat variable in quality). Last week we were talking about the difference between vocation or calling and paid employment - what overlap is there between each of those?

It was my turn to lead things so I was looking for an interesting way to talk about vocation. I’ve been influenced by Richard Bolles little book “How to find your mission in life” (also part of “What color is your parachute?”) and like his three-fold approach to this. In a nutshell it’s like this:

• Your first mission in life is to love, worship and serve God.
• Your second mission is to love one another.
• Your third mission is to go that which you have been uniquely gifted to do and enthuses you while carrying out your first two missions.

So your vocation is always framed by loving God and loving one another.

Pizza works well to demonstate this. The base is like Jesus Christ - the bread of life. The love of God like the tomato base that covers the base and undergirds all. The cheese is the love of one another that holds all the rest in place. And then we can add on what we like within that context to create a pizza or vocation that is uniquely ours.

So we talked and then we ate different pizzas. If we’d had more time I’d have had us make them as well.

(Sometime I’ll blog why the emergent church is like a pizza)
Bon appetit!

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Germany and the University of Calgary in Canada have used a silicon chip to coax a pair of nerve cells to communicate. See:

• Chip Controls Neural Connection
• Cdn. researcher: Cells can grow on silicon
• The brain on a microchip

Sermons at our church have been based around parables for the past couple of weeks. The parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector and the parable of the Talents. And the sermons have been good on the whole.

But I’m sure that our familiarity with the parables robs them of their impact. We know in advance who is wearing the black and white hats, what the morals of the story are (if indeed more than one is “allowed”) and how they will be linked into our world. That’s why I find it challenging and refreshing to read articles like the following one. It makes me reassess where we stand in light of the parables, of what sort of conversation we might have with the text, and what our presuppositions are.

The Other Side — Towering Trees and Talented Slaves by Ched Myers and Eric DeBode

THE PARABLES OF JESUS IN THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS represent the very oldest traditions in the New Testament. Despite this (or perhaps because of it), our churches often handle these stories timidly, if they handle them at all. Perhaps we intuit that there is something so wild and subversive about these tales that they are better kept safely at the margins of our consciousness.

We also have a sense today that the meaning of the parable should be clear to everyone (it is our right) when it certainly wasn’t to the all the original hearers.

Sometimes all those people who write about the evil and immorality on the Net get it right. NZOOM - Attempt to sell women on the web.

Online marketplace eBay Inc. said it had removed from its website a listing that offered three young Vietnamese women for auction and will report the person who posted it to local authorities.

CNET has an article on the new internet search engines and companies that are trying to be a better Google that Google. If you’re looking at trying something else the have a look at: Search upstarts storm Google’s gates | CNET News.com.

The NZ Herald carried this story a few days ago: New Zealand News - Technology - A cellphone is a girl’s best friend.

Increasing numbers of youngsters tucked up in bed with their mobile phones are, in effect, sleeping with a whole bunch of strangers, research from Victoria University shows.

The phenomenon is the result of “cold calling”, where teens text unknown friends of friends to gauge the possibility of romance or friendship, then leave their phones on overnight in case they get a call.

Reminds me of a excerpt of writing from Richard Briggs who says

It is said that virtual reality is displacing our real world. The world is shrinking. Not, let it be noted, because we are being washed whiter than ever, but because it is now possible to enter anyone’s personal space, get inside their home, and achieve intimate inter-personal contact without having to deal with what they look like, smell like, sound like, or in fact what they are like in any human dimension at all. This is a new definition of inter-personal, but since it is so much more convenient than the old one, that’s no problem. We live, then, in a global village: neighbours to all kinds of unsavoury other people. Better not to dwell on that. Wouldn’t want to have to get involved. Well, the pastoral implications alone are staggering.

Prodical has blogged a few times on the need for space for communities and individuals to “breathe.” (Most recently Listen to the silent crowds)

As I spend a bit of time each week stuck in Auckland’s traffic jams I think that we will never solve them because they provide some of that space. One person - in a car - stuck in traffic - listening to what they want - no interuptions - no demands - a personal space enclosed in a metal and glass frame - my space - my time - a place for thinking.

Well mostly.

A lightweight piece on commercial robots from C-Net. I quite like the idea of the one that comes out each day and vacuums the house. See Invasion of the robots

The following applies in relation to supervisors. Pick your translation carefully.

Job 13:15 (NIV)

Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him;
I will surely defend my ways to his face.

Job 13:15 (NRSV)

See, he will kill me; I have no hope;
but I will defend my ways to his face.

(In my case I have two supervisors and both translations can then apply simultaneously - after the appropriate inclusive language emendation)

Just finished reading Rocks of Ages : Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life by Stephen Jay Gould as part of an ongoing project evaluating models of science and religion interaction. It was one of those books where after the preface and the next 8 pages you knew pretty much all you needed to know. Still 200+ pages later it’s done. If you want to read a book about how science and religion relate to separate things (facts vs. values), basically shouldn’t talk to each other and science has the last say, then this is the book for you. Still he painted the “two-worlds” argument with verve even if he reuses the old cliches like “science tells you about the age of rocks; religion tells you about the rock of ages” and “science tells you how the heavens go; religion tells you how to go to heaven”.

Knocked that off and I’m on to Elaine Graham’s Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture which looks far more promising. Flicking through her bibliography I noticed that she has cited not only a lot of the printed material I’ve been working with but also many of the electronic sources too. Sort of reassuring to know someone else has walked a similar path as well.

I also find it interesting that both Graham and Noreen Herzfeld (In Our Image: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Spirit in their respective engagements with theology and technology spend significant effort using cinema, television and literature as primary sources. In thinking about this last year I wrote

These contemporary narratives highlight what Lelia Green calls �the widespread fascination with the interface of biology and technology, and the potential for fusion between the two.� It is in these type of stories that society explores the boundaries of what it means to be human as well as trying to distill the essence of humanness. Questions about how to live and how to be human are addressed, as well as the hopes and fears of people who are increasingly dependent on technology and the cultures it creates. There is, she asserts, almost an enthrallment with the question of how much technology compromises the essentially human.

I’ve only dipped into Graham’s book but already the synapses are firing as I’ve skimmed through it.

Another observation is that a lot (most?) of the people writing in the areas overlapped by culture, technology, sociology and religion are women - Brenda Brasher, Margaret Wertheim, Susan J White, Anne Foerst, Noreen Herzfeld, Elaine Graham, Lelia Green, Jennifer Cobb, Nancey Murphy and Sherry Turkle to name just a few off my bookshelf.

Anyway, only another million books or so to go after this one so I’d better get cracking.

Temporal shifting (time travel) is the name of the game over the last few days. One minute I’m reading about science and religion interaction in the 19th century, then the 20th and then the 21st. Catching up on cyberculture and post/humanism too and the flicking back to looking at the etymology of “selem” (image) and “demuth” (likeness) in the Hebrew Scriptures. And reading bits of Justin Martyr’s (100-165 CE) comments on the physical body in relation to the image of God.

Tomorrow (hopefully) will be spent firmly in 2004 for most of the day.

BTW: Title taken from the No. 1 hit (June 1988) Doctorin’ the Tardis by the Timelords.

Nice summary of how to get a RSS newsfeeds displayed on a Movable Type site at Learning Movable Type: Displaying an RSS Newsfeed on Your Site.

I use the zFeeder option which I made the Blog Portal page with a few months back. It stands in a static MT index page but you could get it added into the side bar of the page with little effort.

Interesting interview here with Elaine Graham: Finding humanity’s place on the Starship Enterprise. Again more stuff directly related to my research - definitely agree with her comment that “theologians must remember that technologies have to be considered within a wider political economy, as well as the broader ontological and philosophical issues.”

Dropped by the Science and Theology News web site today and saw the article on Robot helpers: How close to human should they look? which fits right in with my own research.

“Most people doing social robots believe that human faces will turn people off and will disturb them. I think that’s ridiculous,” Hanson said. “The human face is perhaps the most natural paradigm for us to interact with.”

What do you think? Should they look more like human beings or not?

A more detailed version of the article can be found at: CNN - Tech - Giving robots a human face.

Nice little Flash interactive game thing at Albino Blacksheep - Flash / Grow . Put things together in different ways to get a new thing - eclectic emergent metaphors anyone?

A new report out by the NZ Department of Statistics on The Digital Divide (2004) notes that:

• The more money you have the more likely you are to be connected to the Internet.
• The better your formal education the more likely you are to be connected to the Internet.
• Households with one person, or one parent and dependent children, are less likely than all other household types to access the Internet at home (16 and 30 percent, respectively).
• The more children in the house the more likely you are to have Internet access at home.

Not earth-shatteringly surprising.

They also have a companion report on The Digital Divide with lots of graphs etc. in it.

Dave has some thoughts on church’s moving towards WiFi and such stuff here .

I’ve written before in the Digital Divide (The term ‘digital divide’ is used to describe the gap between those who have access to information technologies such as the Internet, and those who do not) and those who are “information poor” and those who are not. See: Techno-spirituality.

But I’m still thinking about it.

Blessed are the information poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

A while back (Battlestar memories) I said I’d blog about Babylon 5 and theology. Today as I sat in church we had some Gospel readings from the Passion week and I remembered the B5 episode Passing Through Gethsemane. To me it has much in it that fits with the Lenten season.
Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting article on addiction to television at Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Television Addiction Is No Mere Metaphor.

For growing numbers of people, the life they lead online may often seem more important, more immediate and more intense than the life they lead face-to-face. Maintaining control over one’s media habits is more of a challenge today than it has ever been. TV sets and computers are everywhere. But the small screen and the Internet need not interfere with the quality of the rest of one’s life. In its easy provision of relaxation and escape, television can be beneficial in limited doses. Yet when the habit interferes with the ability to grow, to learn new things, to lead an active life, then it does constitute a kind of dependence and should be taken seriously.

Now blogging wouldn’t be addictive, would it?

Tim blogs some comments about religious freedom in the West (esp. NZ) over at SansBlogue in light of the recent provision of dedicated Muslim prayer facilities at a “secular” NZ high school. (For those who don’t know NZ schools are meant to be totally secular - RE/Bible in Schools etc. tends to happen (thought not always) when a school is technically closed.)

While it’s live you can hear the interview that the Minister of Education, Trevor Mallard, gave to Linda Clark on National Radio on Friday.
Windows Media Player link (Go to 17:30 minutes into the stream.)

More also at:

Government rattled over race-based funding, says Hide

Mallard backdown on Muslim prayer room

Mallard questions schools using karakia and not Lord’s Prayer

Here’s a report on NZ religious freedom at about.com NZ Religious Freedom Report (2003).

I received a flyer in the mail the other day about a new play here in Auckland called “Mary’s Gospel”. With all the buzz about “The Passion of the Christ” this play may have slipped under your radar. “Mary’s Gospel” looks like it has some engaging and challenging issues set in a Kiwi context.

Mary is a mental health consumer. Her cousin, Lizzie is her daily caregiver. Both women are part of the O’Malleys – a large, Irish Catholic family, who control most of the construction business in the Hutt Valley. At 15, Mary had a baby boy… Christie. In the beginning there were no words Only the dark And the cold. Naenae dark, Little Fish, busted – light dark. Breath like marshmallows from Woollies; Powdery, fat. So Mary begins her gospels. The story of her life, for her half-caste son, Christie. Little Fish. As she speaks, Christie responds in the language of dance. This communion is their Gospel truth. This moving, poetic and funny play, presents a view of life from the inside of mental illness, and is the newest work from the pen of Geraldine Brophy.

and

Mary’s Gospel is about the Labour of daily love – the humour and hardship that abound when someone you love has a mental illness, the family you’re part of has a moral illness and there is no place between Heaven and Hell.

Booking details at The Edge®: Whats On.

The secret life of a rubber duck. A Duck’s Tale is a cute CGI animation of a rubber duck weighing in at a hefty 10Mb (MPEG-4 format). I’m trying to think of how I can use it in class because it’s just so cute - maybe something about the human need for love and relationships?

Saw this today too. Cyberduck a free OSX FTP client.

I currently use another free FTP client (when I’m not using the command line) RBrowserLite for uploading stuff to the web site outside of Movable Type but who can resist an app called “Cyberduck”?

Monkey Food have a selection of small Mac OSX apps on their web site. The “Tagging Service” looks really useful for adding HTML tags into blog entries.

Lent is bizarre down here in the Antipodes.

It starts when summer is ending - during it the clocks are set back as daylight saving time ends - and the days get shorter. The temperatures drop and by Easter it can be getting cold and wet. So the imagery of Easter as heralding in new life, a new springtime, new birth sort of gets lost. Lent becomes the long, spiral into winter, towards Gethsemane and Good Friday and not necessarily out of it. When Eastertime is done the world here enters winter.

I’ve been thinking about this and about how Easter might signify not merely the entering of the long dark but instead the power to live in the winter, when there is no spring.

Flicking through Joan Chittister’s little book “In a high spiritual season” I came across this meditation on moving through autumn and into winter. While it says November it could be April/May here instead.

On the East Coast, November is a sear month, beautiful for its bleakness. The skies hang gray and heavy, the wind gnaws and bellows. Life changes drastically from the velvet days of early autumn. The things we love begin to die right before our eyes. The roses begin to shrivel on the bush, the sun draws away, the colors around us start to darken. Then the streets get quieter, the neighbors disappear inside their houses, and the days darken before the light has had time to seep through the mist of morning. The earth rests.
Autum is a time of great life learnings. We learn that we cannot control the passage of time in life. We learn to accept each of the stages of life with serenity. We learn to look to new moments in life with hope rather than dispair.

First day lecturing in the new semester today. New college (Carey Baptist College) and a new course Humanity and Hope - “An exploration of the Christian understanding of the nature of human beings and the concept of Christian hope.”
Some really good topics here including the nature of the human person, understandings of the soul and image of God, sexuality, being human in the contemporary (technocultural) world, as well as themes of (eschatological) hope for creation, individuals and communities.
Allows for the interplay of the doctrines of humanity and creation with eschatology within a contemporary context.
Nice crossing over between my thesis and the course content. Also nice to be co-lecturing it with Martin Sutherland.