April 2004

Sometimes you read stuff on people’s blogs and it fits in really well with other things going on in your life. I was preparing a lecture on human sexuality last week and both Maggi Dawn and Paul Fromont posted things that helped tie some loose ends for me.

Maggi’s posting, Honesty, part ii, contained a helpful reminder that all human beings, regardless of sexual orientation, are in need of grace in their relationships - that no one ever lives without some relationships that involve hurt and pain.

Paul’s posting on Douglas Coupland, Hey Douglas Coupland!, included a link to an interview that made the comment that when you target a group of people (say, for marketing purposes) you dehumanize them. So too when we talk about “issues” in human sexuality. It’s not “issues” were talking about, it’s flesh and blood, real live people.

So a big thanks to them, and to all the other blogs I read intermittently. You never know when something you post is incredibly helpful to others.

Socks that plug into a battery and keep your feet warm using special conductive wool developed here in NZ.

Fly fishermen, skiers, hikers and sports fans, take note: Soon, all you will need to keep your toes toasty warm are special wool socks and a 7-volt battery.

See: Wired News: Warm Toes Are Happy Toes

Meeting with my PhD supervisors on Monday as part of the ongoing PhD supervision process. Have suspicion it will be something like Amos 5:18-20.

18 Alas for you who desire the day of the LORD!
   Why do you want the day of the LORD?
It is darkness, not light;
    19 as if someone fled from a lion,
  and was met by a bear;
or went into the house and rested
    a hand against the wall,
  and was bitten by a snake.
20 Is not the day of the LORD darkness, not light,
  and gloom with no brightness in it?

It’s ten years since my most favourite TV show began to air and gave us a intelligent science fiction as a single continuous story line over five years. Of course, it was buried at 2pm on Saturday afternoons on TV2 - where else would you put intelligent science fiction? And pretty much in NZ at the moment there is no science fiction on TV (apart from SKY-1’s reruns of a few programs and the second season of Jeremiah).

With it being the 10th anniversary of B5 and the release of the 5th season on DVD FilmForce have a really good piece looking back at B5 and the people involved. It’s at: FilmForce: Spotlight: Babylon 5.

As creator, producer, and writer of most of the episodes, J. Michael Straczynski accomplished a miraculous feat - he managed to create a continuity-driven show that had a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end. Even more amazing, he pulled off something even more precious (and rare) - intelligent science fiction for TV. Outside (most) of Star Trek, the television landscape is a virtual boneyard for failed attempts in the sci-fi genre, especially those that tried to comport themselves with a modicum of brains with their brawn.

B5 wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea - it’s pretty hard to start watching in the middle of the second and third seasons (let alone the fourth and fifth) - everything is connected to incidents and references from previous episodes. And the first season dragged in places while they spent time fleshing out people’s characters and backgrounds. Still lots of my friends, many of whom aren’t sci-fi fans, enjoyed watching it for the in depth characterisation and the intelligent sub-plots about politics, racism, faith and religion, and characters struggling with their human flaws.

Of course, now I covet the DVD collections over my perfectly adequate VHS collection. Memo to self : Must be strong

I’ve been spending a bit of time finding some articles for a couple of lectures I’m giving in a week or two on cosmic eschatology (”End times” for the non-theological). My co-lecturer is dealing with personal eschatology and things like heaven and hell, intermediate states (what happens when we die but before the final resurrection) and like. I get to look at the eschatological implications for creation and the wider world, including how eschatology shapes our interaction with the world now with respect to things like mission, social justice and environmentalism.

In reading around I came across the following article by Telford Work called Once Upon a Tribulation originally published in the now defunct Re:generation Quarterly.

Work argues that evangelical apocalyptic fiction and other similar writing acts like a legitimized Harry Potter or Dungeons and Dragons for Christians. It’s the fantasy or science fiction that you can read without feeling guilty about enjoying it.
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Reading the quote in Prodigal Kiwi Blog: Churches - They Just Couldn’t Speak to Me reminded me of theologian Miroslav Volf’s comments on the transmission of the Christian faith in his book After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity.

Volf says that the successful transmission of the Christian faith, within the church context, involves two different identifications.

1. The mediation of faith can succeed only if those standing outside that faith are able to identify with the church communities embodying and transmitting it. Those outside will connect with the community if they see something within it that they can sympathise with.
2. The degree to which transmission of faith occurs presupposes the identification of a church’s members with that church. The more included, affirmed and participatory people are, sharing in the values of the community, the more they are willing to be involved in transmitting the faith that underlies that community.

Volf argues that both are missing in contemporary Western society, particularly in the Protestant Free Churches - the “gathered churches”.

In particular, Volf thinks that we need “to develop an ecclesiology that will facilitate culturally appropriate - which is to say, both culturally sensitive and culturally critical - social embodiments of the Gospel.”

I think the situation is two-fold too. Those outside the community can’t see anything within the church to connect to - either it doesn’t appear relevant or it appears simply a mirror of contemporary culture. And those within the church either don’t have a strong commitment to the local body or cannot understand or connect to those outside of that community - they don’t know them well enough to care about them in a personal sense.

Sympathetic connections need to be made in both directions.

Interesting article from Newsweek that I saw linked to from the Science & Theology News web site that comments on the increasing discussion over the place of spirituality and religion in the health sector.

Modern medicine, of course, still demands scientific proof on top of anecdotal evidence. So over the past decade, researchers have been conducting hundreds of studies, trying to scientifically measure the effects of faith and spirituality on health. Can religion slow cancer? Reduce depression? Speed recovery from surgery? Lower blood pressure? Can belief in God delay death? While the research results have been mixed, the studies inevitably run up against the difficulty of using scientific methods to answer what are, essentially, existential questions. How do you measure the power of prayer? Can one person’s prayer be stronger - and more effective - than another’s? How do you separate the health benefits of going to church or synagogue from the fact that people who attend religious services tend to smoke less and be less depressed than those who don’t?

Full article at: MSNBC - Faith & Healing

Been laid low for the last few weeks with a virus (hence lack of blogging). However things are looking up now and energy levels are coming back up to normal. That’s the little b*gger (cytomegalovirus) in the 3D model. Amazing how something that small can completely topple you over.

Been trying to think of some deep, theological contextualization out of the experience but nothing yet.

Maybe, “The kingdom of heaven is like a virus…”

I’ve always appreciated Philip Matthews’ columns in the Listener. Not that I always agree with him or his approach to different topics but there is always something in there to stimulate discussion and it’s nice to see religion being engaged with intelligently in the mainstream media.

This week’s edition has an interesting three page article on Christian rock music in New Zealand and abroad. You can find it at: NZ Listener | Let there be rock by Philip Matthews subtitled Inside the strange and increasingly prosperous world of Christian rock music.

So it’s Easter Sunday morning here and I’m at home with Laura. Both of us are sick which means that we can’t be at church celebrating Easter with everybody else. It feels a bit wierd - Easter should be about celebration and the new community and life - but while intellectually I assert that, my body is not present at the celebration and moreover it feels shattered.

And I was meant to be doing the children’s talk today. “The Colours of Easter” using heaps of different coloured jelly beans to talk about all the different aspects (facets, Steve?) of Easter. Kim, however, has volunteered to do it so it should be good.

So today we look forward to new life - amen to that. We could use a little right about now.

Last Monday in class we watched a variety of people talking about conquering death or prolonging life indefinitely - cryonics, longevity treatments, nanotechnology and “uploading” consciousness into silicon constructs. Provoked some discussion in class.

Today I saw this Methuselah Man in which biogerentologist Aubrey de Grey predicts 5000 year life spans relatively “soon”. Answering a question he says,

My argument says that if you’re young enough, and we fix human aging soon enough, then we will be able to extend your lifetime to 150 years. Then basically we’re going to be able to get you out to infinity, depending on your not walking in front of buses and stuff like that.

We really don’t want to die, do we?

10 years on the people of Rwanda remember their own nightmare, their own terror.

BBC NEWS | In Depth | 2004 | Rwanda

A few doors up the road one of our neighbours sells fruit and vegetables at his front gate. Recently it’s included passionfruit which gets its name from Christ’s Passion for several reasons.

Jesuits in South America saw the hammer and nails of the crucifixion in the flower, St. Francis is said to have seen visions of the passion flower vine entwined around the cross, and early Spanish missionaries recorded accounts of seeing the flowers during church holiday seasons, especially during the Lent and Easter holidays.

Thinking about symbols for Antipodean Lent & Easter the passionfruit might be one that has a southern hemisphere “taste”. Passion Week might be “Passionfruit Week” with Easter eggs replaced with the new fruit of the vine.

Very busy day yesterday capping off a very busy month or two. Mark and Christopher’s soccer season started for the year, visitors dropped by for the afternoon unexpectedly (very nice to see them) and then we hosted a gathering of people for friends who graduated from BCNZ yesterday.

Would have been good to get to Palm Sunday service today but health-wise and energy-wise not a good idea for any of us. I wonder how the disciples and others felt that day. Several years of following Jesus around the countryside and then a big climactic entry into Jerusalem. I imagine once the hype died down the tiredness set in with a bang. Definitely “Hosanna” - “Save us”.

Lord, in this Passion Week may we be passionate about you no matter what our circumstance.

Spent an hour and a half this afternoon watching the documentary Synthetic Pleasures (1996) by Iara Lee as part of my research and also to get some discussion questions for Monday’s lecture on being or becoming human in Western technoculture. Couldn’t get hold of a copy in NZ so ordered it in from overseas post-haste.

IMDB’s plot summary says

Conceived as an electronic road movie, this documentary investigates cutting edge technologies and their influence on our culture as we approach the 21st century. It takes off from the idea that mankind’s effort to tap the power of Nature has been so successful that a new world is suddenly emerging, an artificial reality. Virtual Reality, digital and biotechnology, plastic surgery and mood-altering drugs promise seemingly unlimited powers to our bodies, and our selves. This film presents the implications of having access to such power as we all scramble to inhabit our latest science fictions.

That’s a fairly good summary. In places the movie drags a little and 8-9 years on it’s looking a little dated but there’s some really interesting material in there for discussion. What it means to be human, on the place/role of the body (consumer/consumed), on dreams of immortality and freedom from the flesh, as well as the bizarreness of people in general.
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