Extreme Anglicanism: A Liturgical Guide to the Sporting Year

In this book, Catherine Fox suggests a completely new liturgical year, starting with the Season of Football (colour: black and white stripes), then passing through Rugby (blood), Cricket (white with grass stains) and Wimbledon (clergy, white; laity, purple and bottle green). High days include the Feast of the Blessed Jonny Wilkinson, and, for our friends Down Under, Billabong Sunday with its unique liturgy (“yeah, with you too, awesome priest dude”). She also identifies several biblical sporting heroes, such as Jonah, who took swimming with dolphins a whole step further. As the author’s elder son observes, there are three kinds of people, those who can count, and those who can’t. ‘Extreme Anglicanism’ will help you score in the Great Game of Life.

I’ll add it to my list of books to have a look at when it’s published.

Short article discussing the state of conservative/post-conservative theological dialogue – next-wave > church & culture: The state of the debate by Steve Bush. Bush uses the recent book “Reclaiming the Center”, a response to Stanley Grenz’s “Renewing the Center”, as a starting point for looking at where fruitful (and not so fruitful) conversation might take place.

The next step for postconservatives will have to be to challenge the evangelical obsession with epistemology, which in turn reveals a privileging of theory over practice and philosophy over cultural, economic, and political theory. Yes I know everyone is afraid that their kid is going to stop believing in Absolute Truth, and soon thereafter convert to satanism and start doing drugs, but there are other things to talk about.

Steve Bush blogs over at Harbinger which looks an interesting read.

As the start of the undergraduate academic year looms I’ve been playing around with Moodle – an open-source learning management system (LMS) that will support students I’m tutoring this semester (as well as for other courses). I’ve been pleasantly surprised with its features and hopefully it will allow me (and others) to bring together learning material online in a much more integrated way than in the past. From the blurb on the Moodle web site,

Moodle is a course management system (CMS) – a software package designed to help educators create quality online courses. Such e-learning systems are sometimes also called Learning Management Systems (LMS) or Virtual Learning Environments (VLE). One of the main advantages of Moodle over other systems is a strong grounding in social constructionist pedagogy.

Moodle is free to download, install, modify and use and runs just fine on my iBook (for testing). If your Windows system supports a web server and PHP then you can run it on there too. So if you’re looking for something that can support a group of students, or a wider enterprise, then it may fit the bill for you. I’ll blog again at the end of semester when I’ll be more familiar with it and I’ve seen how it’s held up under the student load.

In the past I’ve installed and used Discusware (both free and pro versions) to support distance student interaction. If you want a purely discussion-based system that has its origins in education then that is useful too.

Is it wrong to want to write an imprecatory psalm about spammers? Or to carry out the wishes of said psalm upon the physical bodies of said offenders.

Cost for a new printer drum for my laser printer ($243)
Cost for a new printer including the same drum, a (small) toner cartridge & warranty ($248)

Welcome to the disposable society – please place your old printer in the landfill on the way out the door.
And we wonder why concepts of stewardship are hard to teach.

Paul Teusner, who I met at the Virtual Theology colloquium, has some interesting material over at Crossing Over or Crossing Out? where he’s collating material relating to his work on “The Media’s Influence in Young People’s Religious Language and Imaginings.”

He’s also blogging at Slashing through the Information Jungle, which I think is an excellent name for a blog.

Check it out.

I’m always on the lookout for new material that I can use with our house group. With it being Lent I wanted to focus on the person of Jesus and how we should live. In looking for resources I came across Spirituality of Jesus by Jon Horne (Agapé) (scroll down the page).

A series of modules looking at John’s Gospel and how one might be “at home” with God. The book is aimed primarily as an evangelical tool to connect with people in the workplace but we’re adapting the material to work with our more devotional group. The things about it that struck me positively included:

• It is presented in an engaging fashion – mixing text, images, activities.
• It treats the people using it as intelligent persons.
• It shows its “exegetical underwear” (Thanks to Steve for the metaphor)
• It had a sample chapter I could download to have a look at. (http://www.agape.org.uk/workplace/downloads/soj.pdf)
• David Wenham (NT Scholar) consulted on it and I loved his little book The Book of Signs : John’s Gospel : Good News for Today
• Inside the cover it says “Multiple copies of this document may be made for group use.”
• It respects the literary devices and imagery in the text.

We took a stab at it for the first time last night and it seemed to go well. I don’t know what the other Agapé stuff is like but this book seems like a good resource for getting into John’s gospel.

At the Virtual Theology I mentioned in passing the series of User Friendly cartoons that talked about auctioning advertising space on your body for cash. (http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20050205)

Now reality(?) catches up with virtuality in NZ with a pregnant woman doing just that via the main NZ online auction service. NZ Herald : Mother auctions her bump for advertising space

Reminds me of a clip I saw once over at Adbusters a while back called “Human Branding”. Cameras in a shopping mall focusing on all the different brands people paid to advertise. (It was submitted as part of a competition and it may still be floating around the internet.)

The colloquium was great. Some really interesting people & papers. Will post more later. Need to clear the head cold I came down with over the weekend first. Tim took the picture below at lunch (From left-to-right: Peter, Ian, Paul, me and Ann).

Just had an excellent late breakfast and coffee with Phil, a fellow PhD student in the School of Theology. Always good to catch up with someone else who’s walking a similar path to yourself. Good food, good drink and good conversation. A nice way to start the day and to try out a new café over on Te Atatu Peninsula.

Phil’s question to me today – “How would you define or describe forgiveness?”

Then, after reading some more interesting VT papers, the Virtual Theology Colloquium kicks off with dinner tonight. Time to meet the people who’s work I’ve been scrawling online comment on (and vice versa). The tomorrow we start unpacking our papers. The discussion should be stimulating. I’m looking forward to it. Time to meet some new people and catch up with some old faces.