Kingdom Builders 04 finished yesterday and Steve and I wrapped up the “Theology and Real Life” stream looking at Jesus and technology. Over the past three days we’d run sessions on Jesus & the environment, Jesus and the foreshore, and Jesus and technology using Karl Barth’s quote “Tell me your Christology, and I’ll tell you who you are” to weave them together.

It was good to work with Steve and see him in action. His presentation on the foreshore issue here in NZ, where he worked strands of exclusion & embrace, theologies of land and place, and meeting Christ on the foreshore, was outstanding in my opinion. Hopefully it will see publication at some point in the near future.

I learnt a lot in the process about collaboration, presenting outside of the “ivory tower” and also about myself and how I cope (or don’t cope) with stress. (Big “thumbs up” to Kim and Steve there.)

Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!
Go to the nzepc – new zealand electronic poetry centre.
Enjoy.
Have a look at nzepc – 12 Taonga – Whetu Moana under the Features section.
(Here be text and sound recordings).

Nice quote seen over at jonnybaker: rushkoff on blogging who adds his own sping onto it. He’s highlighted a chunk of Douglas Rushkoff’s The Real Threat of Blogs.

I believe that the most dangerous thing about blogs to the status quo is that so many of them exist for reasons other than to make money. A thriving community of people who are engaged for free, to me, have a certain authority that people doing things for money don’t.
…
Likewise, I believe the greatest power of the blog is not just its ability to distribute alternative information – a great power, indeed – but its power to demonstrate a mode of engagement that is not based on the profit principle.

In particular he asserts that the Internet, and blogging, move people outside of the traditional market-driven activities of consumption and production. In a sense, they become subversives.

Some ideas here that might be useful for Saturday’s talk on Jesus, the Internet and technology.

Being something of a comic book junkie (see: Greenflame: Holy Warrior Nuns, Batman!) I was interested to read this yesterday over at Jolly Blogger: Superman, Jesus Christ and Jim Caviezel.

Great posting with lots of links to interesting articles and sites linking in religious themes with comic book characters (mostly Superman).

Seems the pace of blogging – the frequency and length of posts – is slowing up, particularly in the NZ blogs I read. Must be the end of winter – spring is almost here (an “already but not-yet” tension for the eschatologially minded) but the energy burst of new growth isn’t quite here yet.

On the other hand, the northern hemisphere blogosphere seems to be humming – a late summer/autumn rush before the winter?

PhD supervision meeting today. Time to “vent” about how I’m feeling about my thesis progress to my supervisors. No writing due today just time to talk. They listen, they encourage, they offer wisdom – nice to have that sort of relationship with them. Going to take a few weeks away from the main work and clear my desk of other outstanding work – lecture prep, a magazine article and some IT work. But spend some time thinking about the thesis through skimming a couple of books (including From cells to souls – and beyond)

In their helpful book How To Get A PhD Estelle Phillips and Derek Pugh identity a series of psychological stages the PhD student goes through:

• Enthusiasm
• Isolation
• Increasing interest in work
• Transference of dependence from supervisor to the work
• Boredom
• Frustration
• A job to be finished

Definitely in the boredom and frustration stages at the moment but hoping to move on to the final run to finish up by the end of next year.

Just a little “stocking stuffer”. The new Apple – iMac G5.