April 2005

Heard about the “Every Child Counts” lobby and awareness group the other day on the radio. They are made up of various organizations and individuals that seek to raise the awareness of issues relating to children in the run up to the general election and to influence the policies of the political parties.

On www.everychildcounts.org.nz it says,

What is Every Child Counts?
Every Child Counts is a campaign aimed at encouraging all political parties to put children at the centre of their policies. The campaign will coincide with the lead up to the 2005 general election.
Every Child Counts will stimulate public debate about the importance of children to New Zealand’s social and economic development.
We will focus on four key policy issues with the potential to significantly improve the health and wellbeing of New Zealand children, in the interests of improving the prosperity and security of all New Zealanders.
Every Child Counts is not party-political. We are working with all of the political parties, equally.

The key issues include child poverty, family violence, child health and support for parents. You can sign up as a supporter at their web site here as well as subscribe to a newsletter.

I’m continually challenged by Matt 25 - that those inside the community of faith will be judged according to how they respond to “moral issues” like child poverty and health.

The Bioethics Council (Toi te Taiao) is currently looking for submissions and dialogue on the issue of xenotransplantation. From their web site,

Xenotransplantation - animal-to-human transplantsIn recent years a new type of technology has hit the headlines - xenotransplantation. In human medicine, xenotransplantation means using living non-human animal cells, tissues or organs to treat humans. It is not a new idea - animal organ and tissue transplants have been tried a number of times over the centuries, but with little success. Now, however, researchers are working on this technology again.

The Council is currently promoting public discussion on the cultural, spiritual and ethical aspects of animal-to-human transplantation.

You can contribute to this discussion here - Xenotransplantation - animal-to-human transplants.

The more people who do this now the better. Here’s an issue where spiritual input is being asked for as well as ethical input. How does a Christian understanding of human being interact with this issue? Have your say.

I’ve used Scot McKnight’s Galatians commentary from time to time so I was interested to see he has an engaging blog. His posting Jesus Creed: Image of God: Meaning? is intriguing and hopefully will develop a little further.

Got a whole bunch (well, at least 2) ideas running around inside my head about the origin stories that occur in comic books, their significance for the development and understanding of characters and their possible function within the community of faith. While thinking about these I came across two interesting - and opposing - blog entries on them.

• Origin Stories. (Against)
• Point of Origin. (For)

Sometime soon I hope to put my thoughts down when some measure of coherence emerges.

Saw this yesterday which made me smile: UserFriendly April 20, 2005. (I guess Star Wars comics/cartoons are back on the agenda for a while.)

Reminded me of this article from last year in the NZ Listener - Beer and fear by ear by Olivia Kember | New Zealand Listener. Loved the opening paragraph,

It must be the best – it might be the only – use of the New Zealand accent in a Hollywood blockbuster: “I’m just a simple man trying to make my way in the universe”, as delivered by Temuera Morrison’s Mandalorian bounty hunter Jango Fett in Star Wars 2: Attack of the Clones. Local audiences roared at Jake the Muss in space, but his Rotorua-bred tones sounded, among the fluent American of the rest of the Empire, unmistakably alien. Forget the special effects and the bucket on his head; the very intonation conjured up an origin far, far away.

We play lots of board and card games. Some of our favourites include Carcassonne (+variants), Settlers of Catan (again +variants) and Tigris and Euphrates. But nothing we play is on this scale - it has to be the largest game of Carcassone I’ve ever seen. Scoring the farms must be a pig (pun intended). See BoardGameGeek

BTW - Board games form a fairly regular part of our social life. You can get a group of people together around a game or two, with drinks and food, and spend an evening with stimulating conversation and shared stories while the games are played. Unlike a movie or video game the capacity to interact with others seems better as the games aren’t constantly demanding your attention. We’ve found that all sorts of people who might normally not mix together enjoy this environment.

[Of course, there are our other friends who hate board and card games but we still love them anyway ]

The last week. Lecturing on technoculture and the gospel last Monday here which was great. Good bunch of students who had some good questions and comments including “why doesn’t the church talk about Jesus and technology?” Then following up from that I ran into someone the next day who said they’d read my “Technology with heart” article (sorry, not online) and had started thinking about Jesus and technology (glad someone read it). Tuesday night house group pondered the nature of home in light of John 14 and Walsh & Bouma-Prediger’s article (as well as assembling and decorating 3D paper house models) - evangelism as hosptiality? Wednesday and Thursday marking introductory theology assignments for a couple of days which was quite enjoyable and finally dipping into articles from this issue of Currents in Theology and Mission on the created co-creator. It’s not available in NZ so I’m being drip-fed article by the library as I can only interloan two articles at a time from a single issue of a journal. Saturday we went to soccer to watch Mark’s team come back from 3-3 at half-time to finish ahead 11-3 - the second half was amazing with all the team thinking about the game and playing as a team. Christopher scored a goal for his team but was playing at another ground so I didn’t get to see that.

School holidays now so timetables are different for the next week. But I’m speaking on “A (systematic) theological contemplates the trauma of being human” for the Carey integrative seminar programme this week as well as serving on a panel which students present their research proposals to. Somewhere I’ll be writing a section on the created co-creator too.

Standby Power Home Page has a lot of interesting and helpful information about power consumption of electronic devices (TVs, DVD players, computers etc.) left in “standby” mode. Even has a link through to some NZ information here.

Standby mode is one of those real “convenience vs consumption” issues. The convenience of being able to turn the TV on remotely results in energy being consumed regardless of whether its being used. Making devices “want” to be in standby mode rather than being powered on and off completely (i.e. doing that too much might shorten life span) just buys into energy consumption - in standby mode or by having to buy a new product earlier because of shortened life span by power cycling. While a VHS might need to be on for taping programmes and the fridge keeps on cooling things like TVs, dishwashers and DVD players don’t need to be.

Short posting by NT scholar Scot McKnight on Jesus Creed: Hermeneutics of Love.

Still thinking about them as a I work through some articles for my research. Am I reading them with the hermeneutic of love or the hermeneutic of abuse?

The radio this morning referred to North Shore City, Waitakere and Rodney looking for submissions on a by-law to reduce the amount of junk mail delivered in the city. The key problem being its effect upon landfill volume. Basically it becomes illegal to put junk mail in a letter box with a “No circulars” or like sign on it. Sounds like a good idea to reduce paper waste though I’m not sure how it’d be policed - there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to “opt-out” of unsolicited advertising. (Sure you can call the DMA (DMA Name Removal) and NZ Post (0800 804 307) to get name removal etc. but it’s not a simple process).

Earlier in the year North Shore ran a trial with “No Junk Mail” stickers to evaluate how much waste material they reduced. They claim that they produced a 70% reduction of waste paper equating to a saving of at least 30.6kg of waste paper a household a year, though the number of households in the survey was not large.

There’s an article here (‘NZ Herald - No junk mail’ stickers cut waste heavily) on it as well as the full report available here (Envision - NZ).

The DMA’s own opinion on the proposed legislation is here - DMA - Legislation Alert.

By dint of a couple of close ones going my way I’m now 8267th out of 125995 players in this year’s Virtual Super 12 after 7 rounds and ahead of all the “experts”. Just thought someone might like to know.

Always had faith the Hurricanes would get there this weekend (Not a good weekend for the Red-and-Blacks though).

Guest lecturer next Monday for Gospel in a Post-Christian Society at BCNZ Henderson on “Gospel and Technoculture”. Over the past few years I’ve done similar lectures and this year I’ve decided to emphasize the themes of Christian hope and spirituality within Western technoculture and focus less upon science and religion interplay. Normal mix of slides, discussion and movie clips. Also going to use these two amazing images to stimulate discussion - Deus Ex Machine 02 and Genemechene.

Looking forward to it.

Now this is scary. I can just imagine that one of the first applications will be in fast-food advertising.

NZ Herald : Sony aims to beam sights and sounds directly into brain

“All in all a very successful, relaxing and peaceful few days. Now some solid work is required over the next few weeks while I’m still fresh from it.”

Stomach bug decimates the entire family this week. Even those who have recovered have no energy to do anything. Must pick the most uncomfortable chair in my supervisor’s office tomorrow for my PhD meeting. Would not be a good look going to sleep in front of them halfway though a sentence….

Have returned from a pilgrimage to the sacred city of Wellington for the weekend. Time off with no kids for the two of us to visit friends and family. Stayed out at Raumati Beach with my brother and his family, went the commissioning service on Sunday of friends heading off overseas this week with Wycliffe, caught up with an old Uni friend, meandered around old haunts and purchased extra luggage to cope with the various secondhand book shops that we came across. Plus the Hurricanes beat the Chiefs (didn’t look like it at half-time) at the Cake Tin (though we didn’t go to the game).

All in all a very successful, relaxing and peaceful few days. Now some solid work is required over the next few weeks while I’m still fresh from it.

The Buzz Report: Enter the robots - CNET.com is a brief survey of robots seen at the International Expo in Japan.