December 2004

I see Tim’s off on a new venture (SansBlogue : Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit (animated)). Could this be a prophetic rabbit - railing againt the oppressive McGregor regime after the manner of Amos?

Reminds me of DJA Clines paper, “New Directions in Pooh Studies: Überlieferungs- und religionsgeschichtliche Studien zum Pu-Buch“, which always makes me smile when I read it. Especially the bit about “ecumenical” connections,

Half-way between Pooh’s house and Piglet’s house was a Thoughtful Spot where they met sometimes when they had decided to go and see each other, and as it was warm and out of the wind they would sit down there for a little and wonder what they would do now that they had seen each other (H 8.125).

Sometimes that’s so true.

For those of you wondering what “Gattung” in the Clines article is see Tim’s helpful entry : Bible study resources: Gattung.

Hmm. Given the number of “emergent-types” who seem to dote on their iBooks and Powerbooks I guess they’re not aiming for “biological growth” in the emergent church
Reuters.co.uk | Hot laptops could cook men’s fertility.

In a fit of efficiency I’ve moved the blog from running on the Berkley DB over to MySQL. Hopefully this will give me more control over the blog and maybe even some performance improvement.

If it all turns to custard in the near future I’ll be rolling back a few days.

BTW - Backups were made before doing this. Once you’ve deleted a database or two by accident you learn the benefits of backups (which I had - and they worked!).

Well, it’s a couple of hours until Christmas Day - the lights are twinkling outside the house, we’ve been to the children’s Christmas Eve celebration that Kim helped organise at church, toured around the neighbourhood looking at lights, and things are beginning to settle down (still a child or two trying to stay awake). One of our next door neighbours just gave us a big box filled with baking (muffins, cakes, caramel-chocolate slice) which was a nice surprise.

Quiet day tomorrow - church in the morning, a light lunch and hopefully a backyard game of cricket in the afternoon. Kim’s folks are here and we’ll have a couple of other friends over during the day too. Then on Boxing Day, if the weather improves, most of the family are off to the one day cricket at Eden Park (NZ-Sri Lanka).

Blogging will probably slow down (cease?) over the next week. I’ve appreciated reading various people’s blogs concerning advent and Christmas. Some really good things to think about - too many to note (Stu’s postings have been helpful in getting me thinking about what I value about Christmas and what things I should change).

So Seasons Greeting to all and may Christ become more real, more incarnate, to you this season.

Shades of “RePet” from The 6th Day with this Guardian story.
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | The world’s first cloned pet (cost $50,000)

A cat lover in Texas has become the world’s first owner of a cloned-to-order feline, paying $50,000 for a genetic duplicate of her dead pet.

Pondering

• Mitochondrial DNA
• Comments made by some students discussing the Incarnation about Mary’s DNA.
• Did Mary’s other children produce offspring?
• And if so have we “bumped into” the great-great-…-great nephews and nieces of Jesus?

Suddenly the humanity of Christ, of the incarnation, comes jarringly into focus.

Something I was thinking about the other day. With all the heated discussion on embryonic stem cell use what about stem cells that can be gathered and cultured from adults? This article starts to answer my question.
Science & Theology News - News: Focus on embryos neglects adult cell possibilities
There’s line in there that reads “With scientists working toward sidestepping the moral issues altogether, this argument might be moot.” Well, it may sidestep one set of moral issues related to stem cells but that doesn’t mean there aren’t others.

I was so looking forward to this mini-series. Now I don’t know. I guess I’ll go back to the books (which I love).
A Whitewashed Earthsea - How the Sci Fi Channel wrecked my books. By Ursula K. Le Guin

A brief editorial pondering the US debates over origins, separation of church and state, and spiritual question asking in schools.

Science & Theology News - Editorial: Questions we cannot ask.

It raises a good point - where are the safe places for people to ask questions about faith, science and other stuff?

I am in awe (and my iBook is now more than a little afraid).

MacMod - Picking up where Apple leaves off ” The i-Tablet “

Christina’s put together a blog to work through her research project on emerging church stuff. She says,

The purpose of this blog is to record the process of a research paper i am embarking on. in this paper i’m going to explore the trajectory that emerging expressions church, faith and spirituality may be on. in other words…if we can identify them as emerging then what might they look like in 10 years time.

Looks interesting, especially as she’s talking about the sources she’s using to do this.

More at: where are we going?

From the NZ Herald,

Research into indigenous New Zealand species is cutting the time it takes to rehabilitate devastated land with native plantings by a decade or more, says a company developing the plants.

Full article at: The New Zealand Herald: Planting with native ferns can save devastated land.

Opened the latest copy of the ATF (Australian Theological Forum) journal Interface yesterday and was met by a violent, hot pink cover (the photo does not do it justice). Once I got past that though I found that the issue (Vol.7 No.2 Oct 2004) was entitled “Stem Cell Research and Cloning : Contemporary Challenges to our Humanity.” Looks like it has some very interesting articles in it. Hopefully before Christmas I’ll be able to skim a couple.

As I’m still playing around with my digital camera and the panorama mode on it I was interested to see this posting on printing and framing panorama photos : DIY Large Panorama Prints.

Craig L. Blomberg, Distinguished Professor of New Testament at Denver Seminary, reviews Bruce McLaren’s book “A Generous Orthodoxy” in response to observing its reception by some Christians as being equivalent to a Harry Potter novel.

Denver Journal - 7:0302 - A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-Yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished Christian

Another from the Auckland Festival catalogue that intersects with my research - excellent!
Gina Czarnecki: Infected

Moving Image Centre presents a selection of new video works by artist Gina Czarnecki. Infected is a hybrid melting point of dance and digital imagery that confronts issues surrounding the convergence of biology and technology and possible corruption of the human genetic mix. Through the sensuality of the human body in dance and movement, Czarnecki explores where what is naturally possible ends and the digitally manipulated begins - asking the audience to consider “what is real, what is not, and does this matter?”

Nouslife: slide presentations -the rules broadens (and includes) Andrew Jones insights) on “rules” and observations on using presentation software. Some helpful stuff there. Almost a year ago I blogged Greenflame: PowerPoint Is Good/Evil on similar themes. I’m still looking for my “killer app” for presentations. Inspiration comes close and I’ll probably buy a copy in the next month or so but the integration with Powerpoint (or similar) was less than optimal last time I checked.

Just received my copy of the event guide to AK05 - Auckland Festival ‘05 and it looks like there’s something for everyone.

Of interest to me in particular are events at the Corban Estate Arts Centre which is about 5-10 minutes walk from home. So I’ll be trying to get to Gleem - Multimedia Light Sculpture Festival. From the blurb,

Gleem is a free twilight festival of light-based art and intrigue set in the historic Corban Estate Arts Centre park. New media meets nature – be mesmerized by multimedia, interactive sculptures, live music, dance and theatre.

(More details also available here www.gleem.org)

Cellphones get broken by tight jeans according to a recent survey by manufacturer Siemens. Just one of the more common ways of destroying your mobile.

Reminds me of common notebook computer accidents - like leaving a pen or pencil on the keyboard and closing the screen. Or the incident a friend (who serviced notebook computers) told me about the guy who’d taken everything out of the boot of the car to repack it, forgot to put the notebook bag back in the car at the end, and reversed over it. Data recovered but case, keyboard and screen were history.

Article on how advertising might slip into podcasting (click on link to get Wikipedia explanation of that).

In Pondering Possibilities in Podvertising a variety of schemes are proposed (inserted audio ad, sponsorship, RSS ads etc.) as a response to those who like time-shifted audio (and video) content delivered to their MP3 player or similar.

Over the last few days I’ve been trying to impose a level of order upon the chaos produced by writing and teaching. That, plus having to clean out my Carey office, meant the office at home has been covered in paper for days. Draft chapters, notes taken, half developed lectures, that same lecture/draft/article printed several times as it evolved, newspapers and magazines and several “million” memos, flyers and printed out web pages. So much for technology’s development of the Paperless office

Lecture notes are now filed, drafts in the filing cabinet, magazines are under control (only a year’s or two’s worth of Listeners to file away now), and an orderly pile of papers and articles to enter into EndNote (I keep a separate EndNote database of what’s in my filing cabinet) and then file.

But if I don’t do it today or tomorrow the piles will develop a life of their own and take over the floor & desk again.

Part of the problem is that I don’t like reading large amounts of text on a screen - reading a printed copy on the couch or in bed and being able to scrawl all over it. I like not being tied to my iBook for reading.

For the reading I do have to do on it maybe Tofu, a Mac OSX app to help reading large amounts of text on the screen, will aid me?

Ordered God In The Machine: What Robots Teach Us About Humanity And God today. Always good to find a book directly related to your thesis topic.

Hollywood to the halls of NASA, robots loom large in the popular imagination. But what feelings do these lifelike machines really provoke in us? In God in the Machine, Dr. Anne Foerst draws on her expertise as both a theologian and computer scientist to address the profound questions that robots such as Cog and Kismet raise for us all: What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to have a soul? And what do robots teach us about our relationship with God?

I’ve read Anne Foerst’s material over the past few years and it’s been helpful in seeing how someone set out to establish a dialogue between theology and artificial intelligence, and weaves in her interpretation of what the image of God is and how that relates to AI.

There’s a very brief article here (KurzweilAI.net - Robot : Child of God) written by her with general responses posted below it for those of you who are interested.

November Wired Magazine’s lead story was about music, sampling, remixing, copyright and creative commons. Came with a CD of music (and MP3s on the web site) from well known artists released under a creative commons licence. Some musings on the creative process as being in part derivative or creating using others work as inspiration. Also the tension between art as culture and art as commerce.

See: Wired 12.11: Sample the Future.

So the wintery weather appears to have moved on for the moment - blue skies and wamer temperatures at the moment, though it was cold and wet this morning.

Too hard in high winds, rain and hail to attempt to outside decorations, but inside the Christmas tree is up, Advent calendar is progressing and the Nativity scene is stuck to the lounge front window facing the road.

PhD meeting went well - always a good idea to combine it with lunch - and now I’m ready to work on my paper for the Virtual Theology colloquium in February. Something on technology and religion interacting through the use of metaphor perhaps. Or perhaps not.

Journal article submitted, marking finished, supervision meeting on Monday to wrap things up for the year, and no outstanding deadlines. A time to catch my breath.

Tomorrow will be a day of stuff - post office, overdue library books to return, Christmas decorations to do with the children (Kim’s bought 32m of fairy lights, plus I’ll attempt to get the coloured lanterns into the tree out front and stick the nativity scene onto the lounge window), food shopping, end of year PhD BBQ hosted by the School of Theology, and the All Black game in the middle of the night. But it’s all low impact.

Article due tomorrow. All the ideas are in my head and most of them are on paper. 400 words of the 5000-odd left to put on the page and then some more proof reading. In the words of the Holsoms(?) bread ad it’s time to “let it go.”

Today’s Calvin and Hobbes seemed somewhat apt - though I’m definitely not in the genius category this week/month/year. (Calvin and Hobbes — 1999/12/02/)

From Technology and Human Becoming by Philip Hefner.

If the techno-human, the cyborg, is created in the image of God, what does that tell us about God?

Hefner uses the term ‘created, co-creators’ to describe human beings. Created in the sense the we are finite (stands against hubris) but capable of being part of God’s wider creative enterprise, and agents in that enterprise. It’s an optimistic engagement with technology at a time when emergent technologies seem to meet with innate conservatism.

Random neurons firing at the moment as I’ve been reading a lot of bioethical and theological reflections on technology (e.g. cloning). How should the tension between - don’t do evil - and - actively choose to do good - be worked out technologically?