Greenflame

Jottings on science, religion, technology, pop culture, photography and faith from the Aotearoa New Zealand

  • Babylon envy

    It’s ten years since my most favourite TV show began to air and gave us a intelligent science fiction as a single continuous story line over five years. Of course, it was buried at 2pm on Saturday afternoons on TV2 – where else would you put intelligent science fiction? And pretty much in NZ at the moment there is no science fiction on TV (apart from SKY-1’s reruns of a few programs and the second season of Jeremiah).

    With it being the 10th anniversary of B5 and the release of the 5th season on DVD FilmForce have a really good piece looking back at B5 and the people involved. It’s at: FilmForce: Spotlight: Babylon 5.

    As creator, producer, and writer of most of the episodes, J. Michael Straczynski accomplished a miraculous feat – he managed to create a continuity-driven show that had a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end. Even more amazing, he pulled off something even more precious (and rare) – intelligent science fiction for TV. Outside (most) of Star Trek, the television landscape is a virtual boneyard for failed attempts in the sci-fi genre, especially those that tried to comport themselves with a modicum of brains with their brawn.

    B5 wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea – it’s pretty hard to start watching in the middle of the second and third seasons (let alone the fourth and fifth) – everything is connected to incidents and references from previous episodes. And the first season dragged in places while they spent time fleshing out people’s characters and backgrounds. Still lots of my friends, many of whom aren’t sci-fi fans, enjoyed watching it for the in depth characterisation and the intelligent sub-plots about politics, racism, faith and religion, and characters struggling with their human flaws.

    Of course, now I covet the DVD collections over my perfectly adequate VHS collection. Memo to self : Must be strong 🙂

  • Once Upon a Tribulation

    I’ve been spending a bit of time finding some articles for a couple of lectures I’m giving in a week or two on cosmic eschatology (“End times” for the non-theological). My co-lecturer is dealing with personal eschatology and things like heaven and hell, intermediate states (what happens when we die but before the final resurrection) and like. I get to look at the eschatological implications for creation and the wider world, including how eschatology shapes our interaction with the world now with respect to things like mission, social justice and environmentalism.

    In reading around I came across the following article by Telford Work called Once Upon a Tribulation originally published in the now defunct Re:generation Quarterly.

    Work argues that evangelical apocalyptic fiction and other similar writing acts like a legitimized Harry Potter or Dungeons and Dragons for Christians. It’s the fantasy or science fiction that you can read without feeling guilty about enjoying it.
    (more…)

  • Prodigal and the Volf

    Reading the quote in Prodigal Kiwi Blog: Churches – They Just Couldn’t Speak to Me reminded me of theologian Miroslav Volf’s comments on the transmission of the Christian faith in his book After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity.

    Volf says that the successful transmission of the Christian faith, within the church context, involves two different identifications.

    1. The mediation of faith can succeed only if those standing outside that faith are able to identify with the church communities embodying and transmitting it. Those outside will connect with the community if they see something within it that they can sympathise with.
    2. The degree to which transmission of faith occurs presupposes the identification of a church’s members with that church. The more included, affirmed and participatory people are, sharing in the values of the community, the more they are willing to be involved in transmitting the faith that underlies that community.

    Volf argues that both are missing in contemporary Western society, particularly in the Protestant Free Churches – the “gathered churches”.

    In particular, Volf thinks that we need “to develop an ecclesiology that will facilitate culturally appropriate – which is to say, both culturally sensitive and culturally critical – social embodiments of the Gospel.”

    I think the situation is two-fold too. Those outside the community can’t see anything within the church to connect to – either it doesn’t appear relevant or it appears simply a mirror of contemporary culture. And those within the church either don’t have a strong commitment to the local body or cannot understand or connect to those outside of that community – they don’t know them well enough to care about them in a personal sense.

    Sympathetic connections need to be made in both directions.

  • Faith & Healing

    Interesting article from Newsweek that I saw linked to from the Science & Theology News web site that comments on the increasing discussion over the place of spirituality and religion in the health sector.

    Modern medicine, of course, still demands scientific proof on top of anecdotal evidence. So over the past decade, researchers have been conducting hundreds of studies, trying to scientifically measure the effects of faith and spirituality on health. Can religion slow cancer? Reduce depression? Speed recovery from surgery? Lower blood pressure? Can belief in God delay death? While the research results have been mixed, the studies inevitably run up against the difficulty of using scientific methods to answer what are, essentially, existential questions. How do you measure the power of prayer? Can one person’s prayer be stronger – and more effective – than another’s? How do you separate the health benefits of going to church or synagogue from the fact that people who attend religious services tend to smoke less and be less depressed than those who don’t?

    Full article at: MSNBC – Faith & Healing

  • Punching above its weight

    Been laid low for the last few weeks with a virus (hence lack of blogging). However things are looking up now and energy levels are coming back up to normal. That’s the little b*gger (cytomegalovirus) in the 3D model. Amazing how something that small can completely topple you over.

    Been trying to think of some deep, theological contextualization out of the experience but nothing yet.

    Maybe, “The kingdom of heaven is like a virus…”

  • Let there be rock

    I’ve always appreciated Philip Matthews’ columns in the Listener. Not that I always agree with him or his approach to different topics but there is always something in there to stimulate discussion and it’s nice to see religion being engaged with intelligently in the mainstream media.

    This week’s edition has an interesting three page article on Christian rock music in New Zealand and abroad. You can find it at: NZ Listener | Let there be rock by Philip Matthews subtitled Inside the strange and increasingly prosperous world of Christian rock music.

  • Easter Sunday

    So it’s Easter Sunday morning here and I’m at home with Laura. Both of us are sick which means that we can’t be at church celebrating Easter with everybody else. It feels a bit wierd – Easter should be about celebration and the new community and life – but while intellectually I assert that, my body is not present at the celebration and moreover it feels shattered.

    And I was meant to be doing the children’s talk today. “The Colours of Easter” using heaps of different coloured jelly beans to talk about all the different aspects (facets, Steve?) of Easter. Kim, however, has volunteered to do it so it should be good.

    So today we look forward to new life – amen to that. We could use a little right about now.

  • Live long and prosper

    Last Monday in class we watched a variety of people talking about conquering death or prolonging life indefinitely – cryonics, longevity treatments, nanotechnology and “uploading” consciousness into silicon constructs. Provoked some discussion in class.

    Today I saw this Methuselah Man in which biogerentologist Aubrey de Grey predicts 5000 year life spans relatively “soon”. Answering a question he says,

    My argument says that if you’re young enough, and we fix human aging soon enough, then we will be able to extend your lifetime to 150 years. Then basically we’re going to be able to get you out to infinity, depending on your not walking in front of buses and stuff like that.

    We really don’t want to die, do we?

  • Good Friday

  • Maundy Thursday

    10 years on the people of Rwanda remember their own nightmare, their own terror.

    BBC NEWS | In Depth | 2004 | Rwanda