Greenflame

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

  • Shattered

    Too tired to blog anything much for the next few days. Went to the discussion day with Brian Walsh at Cityside Baptist yesterday. Intellectually stimulating as well as a good time to talking and eating with all sorts of interesting people (including Paul). Big thanks to Andrew (at CCSP) and Mark (at Cityside) for putting it together.

    Also going to create a “Lent” category to generate a set of resources for the Lenten season. Over time I’ll add bits and pieces in there.

    Oh, and Maggi has an good posting “Postmodern Church; Antediluvian Attitude?” over on her blog.

    Very busy week coming up with Kim working extra hours, kid stuff needing attention and lectures starting next week. And somewhere along the way I need to do some more on my critique of models/categories of science-religion interaction.

  • Journey to the Cross

    From the blog A Cup of Rich I see that the outfit that brought the great Follow the Star Christmas devotional site has one for Lent (with the same cool Jazz).

    Check out Journey to the Cross: A Daily Online Devotional Guide

  • Holy Days

    For those of you whose churches don’t follow the Church year (like the liturgical traditions do) you can find out more about the Christian Holy Days at BBC – Religion & Ethics – Christian Holy Days.

    Found the link the other day when I was searching for some Lenten stuff on the net and the articles are good for beginners.

    The next one is Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras) next week, BTW. We have house group that night so hopefully pancakes all round.

  • Geek Anniversary

    The new university year rolls around and it’s been 15 years since I began my postgraduate journey (with a few years off here and there not studying). So in honour of what seems like a fairly momentous anniversary for me here a quick class snap and a link to some from my fourth year computer science class back in 1989.


    Raymond Wilson, Neil Sharman, Colin Daniels, Tim Wilson, Clinton Logan
    Greg Davidson, Simon Glass, Craig Nevill-Manning, Stephen Garner
    Computer Science Honours & First-year Masters Class, University of Canterbury, 1989


    Full archive at: Nevill-Manning Photo Album: “Canterbury University: Computer Science, 1989”

    It was a pretty brutal year as I remember it with stacks of pressure and work covering courses on geographic information systems, computer graphics, data encryption, data compression, computer networking and database theory (relational alegra & calculus) to name a few. (Kim was doing Operations Research postgrad at the same time and they worked pretty hard too).

    As you can see there were no women in the class so it had the whole monastic type feel (plus a lack of balance). Kim was the only woman in her year in OPRE.

    The Internet was pretty much unknown out there in the “real world” but we used Usenet, e-mail & FTP (gopher, archie, WAIS and WWW weren’t really there yet) and computers with a mouse were still a novelty outside of Apple Macs and Sun Workstations.

    It was around here that my love affair with UNIX began and now I can run a UNIX-based Mac OS on my iBook I’ve pretty much reached heaven on earth.

    The pictures give a quick view into life in the Honours room but it looks like most of them were taken at night. Ah, those were the days when youthful vigor (and caffeinated soft drinks) allowed all night coding.

  • Ranginui Walker on the state of the nation

    There’s an interesting article in this week’s Listener magazine: NZ Listener | State of the nation by Ranginui Walker which argues that ‘Rather than a dangerous “drift towards racial separatism”, all the evidence points in the other direction.’

    (For those of you outside of NZ the “Rip Van Winkle” character in the article is Dr. Brash, the leader of the National Party in NZ (see: Don Brash to spread race message buoyed by poll results))

  • (Pop) Culture

    In a moment of coincidence I read Steve’s posting e~mergent kiwi: whats the internet point at the same time as I found (Pop) Culture: Playground of the Spirit or Diabolical Device? by Stanley Grenz. He writes

    For a large and growing segment of the population, pop culture serves as the chief referent for the cultural task. It provides the central tools by means of which they engage in the age-old task of meaning-making as persons within society. It mediates to them the paradigmatic narrative by means of which and in accordance with which they make sense of their otherwise seemingly senseless lives and thereby construct a sense of personal identity. To the extent that it fulfills this purpose well, pop culture becomes the playground of the Spirit.

    . Conversely he argues that if it becomes a false god it degenerates into a diabolical device.

    Will have to download the article (it’s about 28 pages long) and have a read more fully later.

  • Battlestar memories

    Finished of watching the remake of Battlestar Galactica last night. On the whole a reasonable job though TV3’s slicing for commercials destroyed pretty much any continuity or tension. I remember going to see the first movie when I was a kid and the old Cinerama theatre in Wellington shook with the “Sensorround” effects.

    There were a few retro touches that were nice and you can cope with the switching of genders/ethnicity of some of the characters. What struck me was that it looks like religion may play a more significant part in the new series than the original. It will be interesting to see how they handle it as on the whole sci-fi TV shows don’t handle religion well. (Babylon 5 is an exception that I’ll blog about later on.)

    A couple of useful books for looking at the relationship between science fiction and religion/theology are Stephen May’s Stardust and Ashes and Anthony Thacker’s A Closer Look at Science Fiction.

    May’s book is the more academic offering a critique of a wide range of science fiction literature and its themes. Thacker’s approach is more useful for discussion material as he takes a theme (e.g. redemption) and then uses science fiction films (e.g. Star Wars) and TV (Star Trek, Babylon 5, Dr. Who) to unpack that theme. Both are written from a UK slant.

    Related to this is also Stanley Grenz’s use of Star Trek’s development to trace modern to postmodern shifts in contemporary culture. See Grenz, Stanley J. “Star Trek and the Next Generation: Postmodernism and the Future of Evangelical Theology”, Crux (Vancover), 30(1), March 1994, pp.24-32. (Also part of his A Primer on Postmodernism”).

  • Matrix Revelations

    Matrix Revelations coverCame across this today at the Damaris web site while searching for a book on science fiction and faith.

    Matrix Revelations: a thinking fan’s guide to the Matrix trilogy.

    Seems they have a book which

    examines the Matrix phenomenon, with in-depth analysis ranging from the science fiction and comic book influences to the philosophical and religious themes that underpin the films.

    I see also they have information about using the Matrix trilogy as a discussion tool for small groups with material you can download (including a sample chapter).

    While I think that too many Christians have an uncritical view of the films, seeing all the Judeo-Christian symbolism without the other philosophical and religious themes, there may be something here for them to begin to engage more critcially. It may also open the door to thinking about looking at engaging other films too.

  • U2, Sermons and Brian Walsh

    Paul Fromont blogged about the book “Get up off your knees: Preaching the U2 catalog” which had an essay in it by Brian Walsh. (See Reinhabiting the Biblical Story – The Hope of Our Times). I’m going to the same conversation as Paul (meeting a blogger in the flesh – how novel!) so thought I’d add in this link to a review of that book.

    Prayer, Prophecy, and Pop Culture – The Hallelujah Mix – from @U2

    Plus, I get to see if this trackback thing works.

  • Cooking with Gas

    I’ve been busy getting things moved over to Movable Type this week. The blog content has been imported and categorised but comments will have been lost (sorry).

    I’ll blog about the process for doing this later but in the meantime I’ll note that while I’ve looked at this under variety of Mac browsers and IE 5+ for Windows 98 and 2000 it may break in places. CSS just doesn’t work right on every browser. Leave a comment if you can and I’ll work on it.

    I’ve updated the Viriditas page and now you can get an RSS feed too.

    Now, back to my research.