July 2004

Interesting article on religious education in schools in NZ: With God on their side by Sally Blundell | New Zealand Listener

Increasingly, New Zealanders are demanding that schools give their children religious instruction - especially as a way to teach values like trust and honesty. But is religious extremism
being stopped at the school gates?

Interesting essay by Roz Picard at MIT on Does HAL Cry Digital Tears?

Are emotions a desirable property for computers to have? It’s hard to imagine someday walking into a computer store and saying, “Give me the most emotional machine you’ve got.” After all, isn’t possessing the highest form of rationality one of the hallmarks of computers? Aren’t Mr. Spock and Data the unemotional patron saints of computer scientists? Imagine how a computer with emotion might work — perhaps it would have to feel interested before it would listen to what you have to tell it. On the face of it, emotions in computers sound absurd. After all, didn’t emotion cause HAL to malfunction?

Started teaching my part of Introduction to Christian Theology yesterday with the session entitled “Theology? Who needs it?!”.

Spent a bit of time getting the class to get their feet wet by discussing in small groups the statement “To love is to know God.” I find getting the students to do something like this and then present their thoughts to the class is a good way to see how they approach theological thinking at the start of the course and what sources they use to do theology.

It was the sources I was keen to get them to start thinking about for themselves. In a week or two we’ll look at the typical sources used in theology, such as scripture, tradition, reason and experience, and others like contemporary culture and art. Tradition is a hard source for many evangelical students to grasp (or even consider) but Maggi’s post tradition and traditionalism has given me some useful starting points to approach it. She says,

But there’s another way of useing (sic) the word tradition. To appeal to tradition as a measure of authority and truth (…) places our efforts at expressing the truth of the gospel in our time and culture in the context of other efforts to do the same, in other times, and in other places.

It’s nice to read blog entries that you feel carry a depth behind them.

Also talked to the class about how I think everyone is a theologian of one sort or another. If you pray, think about the words of a song in church, hold a position that denies God’s existence or try a understand another’s faith you’re doing theology.

Following up on several of recent Steve’s postings on How do we go deep? here’s a crowd that claim to have recognised the lack of depth in the general media and blogging. Their alternative is to produce detail 5-20 page “manifestoes” to be copied, shared and transmitted across cyberspace with a view to soliciting comments and deeper thinking. They argue,

In the Internet (and especially blogging), we see the glimpse of an alternative. Taken over time, many of the best blogs create a thoughtful, useful argument that actually teaches readers something.
Alas, blogging is falling into the same trap as many other forms of media. The short form that works so well online attracts more readers than the long form. Worse, most blogs stake out an emotional position and then preach to the converted, as opposed to challenging people to think in a new way.

I’ll be watching to see if it’s productive.

See: ChangeThis.

A sobering opinion piece on torture and the process of developing torturers at: After Abu Ghraib, psychologist asks: Is it our nature to torture?.

Philip G. Zimbardo says in it,

I condemn all uses of torture, not only because of the suffering and moral degradation it causes, but also because it represents a corruption of the creative mind in the service of evil.

Human beings are creative - it seems to be part of our nature and possibly, some argue, a product of being image-bearers of a creative God. Not only does torture corrupt that creativity within the torturer but it ultimately dehumanizes all parties involved. Expressing our human creativity serving evil strips us of our very humanity that creativity is part of.

Interesting short post over at TheyBlinked talking about theology of the future being done through blogging.

I’d agree with some of the sentiments there. Theology is, I think, a conversation with God and with others. As such blogging and other Internet developments will contribute to the conversation. The following comment concerned me though,

a great preponderance of these voices will be coming not from the seminaries or vocationally religious with their shrinking coffers and ever-disgruntled constituencies, but rather from the interconnected lives and words of the normal women and men of Santiago, Montreal, Mozambique and Bangalore: the demythologizing, fundamentalisms, liberations and deconstruction of the twentieth century the past to a functional global pragmatism of difference; of justice and mercy transforming the small spaces that hold the secrets of the worlds yet to come.

I agree wholeheartedly that we need to listen - really listen - to the voices from the non-Western world in our theology - especially their critiques of us. But for many in that world blogging won’t open that up - the digital divide between the West and others will effectively marginalise those voices. So the Internet opens up new possibilities but also introduces new barriers and gatekeepers in the same way that print media is not an option if you don’t have the financial resources or support from within the print community.

So while the assertion that blogging will be part of the theological process I wonder how much the medium will exclude voices we need to hear and dictate the thought forms (techno-postivist?) that will shape that theological community. How then will discussions of justice and mercy be framed?

Just my two-cents.

Just interested if anyone had read Philip Seddon’s recent book from Grove called “Gospel and Sacrament: Reclaiming a Holistic Evangelical Spirituality. It’s S89 in their spirituality series.

Any comments? I see that you can now download the books as PDF e-books so I might give that a bash later on.

It also has supporting Internet links at: S 89 Further Resources.

A recent talk given by Ursula K. Le Guin (one of my favourite writers) on the assumptions made about writing fantasy stories (and why they’re wrong). She notes the assumptions are:

1. The characters are white.
2. Fantasy Land is the Middle Ages.
3. Fantasy by definition concerns a “Battle Between Good and Evil” (BBGE).

Some interesting comments on the perils of each perspective, including criticising the implicit understanding in point 3 that violence is the only answer to evil.

See Ursula K. Le Guin’s: Some assumptions about fantasy.

I’ve been a comic-book junkie ever since I can remember. As a child I remember growing up reading and collecting various comics (both British and American). Every now and then I stop off at a comics shop and have a look around to see what’s being published now.

The July Sojourner’s magazine had an interesting article on the comic book format as a vehicle for telling spiritual stories, which of course pricked my curiosity. You can find the article at Holy Warrior Nuns, Batman!, Sojourners Magazine/July 2004. It was the final paragraph or two that struck me. In particular

What they add to the experience of their readers is the call to a life lived with at least one eye open to the possibility of an enchanted universe - a place where the spiritual world is alive, active, and intervening in the affairs of humanity. This intervention isn’t in the form of brightly costumed messiah surrogates who can leap tall buildings in a single bound, but in the lives of fairly ordinary human beings, imperfect and often conflicted in their motivations, who are struggling to find meaning in their lives beyond the dulling drone of the culture’s demands, the sudden storms of violence that threaten to overwhelm their worlds, and the limitations of life boxed in by not enough justice, not enough joy, and not enough hope.

Read the rest of this entry »

The last couple of weeks have been different from normal. A couple of theological conferences combined with school holidays and a break from PhD writing left some more time for introspection and catching up with people outside of the everyday run of things.

The trip to Australia went well. I appreciated the chance to listen to those speaking from Eastern Orthodoxy - voices that I haven’t really had a opportunity to hear in person before. And also the chance to see people integrating the writings and thoughts of the Patristics with topics such as dementia. Nice also to be able to visit family and to take my two eldest boys over to visit grandparents.

The conference at Carey back here in Auckland was good too - though I tended to “dip into” selected talks rather than go for the whole day each day. I found Steve Bevan’s talks on contextual theology and a recovery of missiology and Trinity in theology stimulated my own thoughts, including an essay topic for students this semester.

Also good to catch up with Steve and to hear (and see) his powerful metaphor of reweaving theological strands (esp. our starting place as recognising the brokeness in the world), as well as talking about blogging, teaching and life in general. Dinner with Paul was great as well.

Tomorrow life reasserts itself with the new semester. I’m co-lecturing Introduction to Christian Theology at Carey as well as online tutoring the distance students for that same course. This will give me a good chance to “compare and contrast” the different modes of delivery for the same course in the same semester.

With teaching thoughts in mind I caught the end of A Cheating Crisis in America’s Schools an ABC documentary screened in NZ tonight. Some interesting stuff in the documentary on the widespread nature of cheating, attempts to curb internet plagiarism and the lack of a sense that cheating is actually wrong. Wish I’d taped it rather than coming in at the last 10 minutes or so.

Plus, just starting to read Ric Machuga’s In Defense of the Soul: What It Means to Be Human. Having spent the last few months in Science-Religion reading I’m heading back toward Christian anthropology for a while.

Had a few moments of disorientation in the last couple of weeks. The most significant was when I was in Melbourne last week. Everything looked and felt like home here in Auckland but not quite. The $1 and $2 coins are similar but the sizes are the reverse of here. The same brands are sold on the shelves but they taste subtly different. (More wax in the chocolate to compensate for higher temperatures in Aus?) The accents are not unfamiliar, just not quite the familiar. As one conference delegate said, it felt like being in a Star Trek episode where you’ve been translated into an alternate universe that mirrors your own imperfectly.

Orientation/Disorientation is a theme that seems to permeate the Bible. Brueggeman picks it up in his approach to the Psalms with different genres of psalms reflecting a process of orientation (original affirmations of faith), disorientation (when existence and God are disturbing), reorientarion (faith reshaped by the experience) within the psalter.

So too, with the parables. Jesus paints a world that is looks the same as the everyday one, but somehow isn’t. A kingdom disorientation occurs allowing faith to be reoriented. And the Spirit in Acts seems to be continually disorienting and reorienting the early church.

So maybe Vegemite can become an “enacted parable”. Promoting a sense of disorientation that allowed me to confront my assumptions about the world and shape my reorientation within it. It’s when the familiar suddenly ceases to be so that the effect is felt more vividly than for a “culture-shock” you prepared yourself for.

Part 2 of the interview by Tony Watkins with Douglas Coupland at Damaris: Culture Watch - Interview with Douglas Coupland (Part 2). (Part 1 is available from the link here: Greenflame: Interview with Douglas Coupland).

Back from Melbourne safe and sound. I’ll post some thoughts on the conference and Melbourne itself in a day or two.

My son came home with an end-of-term newsletter from his primary school yesterday.

Next term their middle school topic is: “Help! Save our forests!”

Most excellent. I look forward to be educated.

PhD chapter handed in to supervisors, exam marking finished and miscellaneous errands run. Now it’s off to Melbourne today to go to the ANZATS conference and to catch up with my folks (who conveniently live in Melbourne).

And then back in a week’s time for the God’sZone? Theological Scholarship in Aotearoa-New Zealand conference. (Including paper by e~mergent kiwi [Abstract here]).