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Convert, or else

In August 2011 I created an updated crucifix showing Jesus put to death by today’s most powerful empire. Possibly in that same spirit but with way more awesomeness Kris Kuski has created some amazing sculptures of church joining state.

Churchtank by Kris Kuski

If you fancy some related reading, I recommend what John Michael Greer and Greg Boyd have to say about civil religion.


21 April 2013
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On returning to America, finding nothing has changed except a bunch more people are needlessly dead, and mostly leaving again out of indifference

So I did that fast from America thing. Pretty much. I looked in on the election now and again, and I had a nosey at what Matthew Paul Turner and Rachel Held Evans had to say a couple times, just to be sure. American Christianity and politics have not found any sanity since June. Mostly I found out I didn’t miss anything too much. Of course, that could be because of all the blood-pressure-raising ‘entertainment’ that British Christianity and politics have been providing of late.

Here is who is going back into my feed reader for 2013: John Michael Greer, Love is What You Do and Larry Shallenberger. That’s it for now.


27 December 2012
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In olden times before phones were smart we called this a ‘blogroll’

A thing we old people like to do to amuse ourselves is to subscribe to ‘blogs’ via ‘feed readers’. Many of you youngsters won’t understand these things because you haven’t found the secret click combination to get outside of Facebook or else you aren’t sure what to do with writing that is longer than 140 characters. But some of you kids might want to experience the old-fashioned Internet. If that’s you, there is a small chance you may enjoy some of the things on the non-exhaustive list of what I like to read and look at.

Comics, illustration, design

  1. Doodlemum – these are way better than doodles
  2. Dresden Codak – cyborg sci-fi in a weird world
  3. False Positive – webcomic tales of the surreal, fantastic and macabre
  4. Happle Tea – a funny and insightful webcomic about mythology and other things
  5. Hark a Vagrant – Kate Beaton is excellently superly excellent
  6. Doodlemum
  7. Illustration Art – insightful commentary on the world of illustration
  8. Jill Lorraine Turpin has a great take on family life
  9. Marlo Meekins is much funnier and stranger than most people
  10. Nimona – when the sidekick has actual powers and doesn’t follow the supervillain rules
  11. Punching the Clock – surviving the daily fail of big box retail
  12. RUTH AND ANNABEL RUIN EVERYTHING – it’s in all caps for a reason
  13. Ryan Andrews – beautiful engrossing short story comics
  14. Sin Titulo – It’s going to take a while to read, and it will suck you in. Clear your afternoon schedule
  15. The Abominable Charles Christopher – he’s actually not abominable at all
  16. the johnson banks thought for the week is the blog of my favourite UK design studio
  17. Thrillbent’s Insufferable – What happens when you’re a crimefighter and your sidekick grows up to be an arrogant, ungrateful douchebag? What on Earth could draw the two of you back together again?
  18. Willow Wood Starfall – gorgeous comic in a nouveau style
  19. XKCD – a webcomic of romance,
    sarcasm, math, and language.

Lots of words in a row

  1. Doors of Perception – John Thackara’s blog about design, energy and the planet’s future
  2. Heresy Corner – questioning received wisdom on culture, politics and religion
  3. Kester Brewin – Peter Rollins’ mate writes about pirates, theology, education and stuff
  4. Michael Rosen – author and former children’s laureate blogs mostly about education, especially how Michael Gove is ruining everything
  5. Peter Rollins – pyrotheology
  6. What If? – the author of xkcd answers hypothetical questions with physics and funny

Good blogs I’m not reading right now because I’m taking a break from American Christianity and politics

  1. Greg Boyd – with all the shouty Calvinists about it’s nice to be reminded the bible has other salvation metaphors and visions of eternity
  2. Matthew Paul Turner – obvs
  3. John Michael Greer – Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society. Don’t let the ‘druid’ throw you. This guy is a genius
  4. Larry Shallenberger – author, pastor, writer of this blog that I really like even though he sometimes writes about sports
  5. Love is what you do – she’s actually living the gospel in real life
  6. Rachel Held Evans – obvs
  7. The Beautiful Due – I’m not a fan of poetry. I love this guy’s poetry
  8. Two Friars and a Fool – theology and culture with an emergy kind of vibe

What do you like to read and look at?


21 August 2012
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On leaving America

11 years ago Christine and I with our 2.5 year-old son left the United States to live in North Wales. We set out to make a fresh start, and we did. But I sort of failed at something. I never really left America. I blame the Internet.

While Christine and I were starting fresh and getting healed up from a full term stillbirth and some whacked out ideas about God and the response of a church that didn’t know what to do with an unhealed dead baby, I sort of stayed in America. I kept up with American politics and Christianity via the Internet. Being the Internet, it was kind of a cartoon version of American politics and Christianity.

It was fine for a while. Some bits were very good: I found Greg Boyd, Rob Bell, John Michael Greer, Shane Clairborne and Larry Shallenberger. Other bits were bad. My evolving views made my wonderful sister and brother-in-law angry and lost me a really good friend.

Lately, America has just been making me mad. I’m cheesed off that American Christians are still debating whether or not women can do the same jobs as men or be considered their equals. I’m cross that they are still trying to decide whether or not LGBT people get to be counted as fully human. I cannot endure one more pastor with perfectly reformed theology expounding ad nauseum why a different conclusion than his is Dangerous. I’m sick of the fake miracles and the politics of fear. (‘AMERICA IS DOOMED!’ Of course America is doomed, not because it has a black liberal president but because America is an empire and all empires are doomed.) I don’t have the stomach for this presidential election. I don’t need to hear the latest pronouncement by the church’s prophets of Baal about what kind of prayer and fasting we need to do for the next 40 days to make sure God doesn’t lightning bolt the country. I have no interest in what the evangelical pope has to say about anything. I’m sick of the megachurchcorp CEOs and their obsession with their big numbers. I’ve had it with the whole thing. I have no grace to offer.

I realised a couple days ago that the problem isn’t America – okay, actually the problem is America and its stupid paranoid greedy consumer religion. But that’s not my problem. My problem is that I’m making it my problem. I live in Wales, UK. My job is to serve and love people in Wales. Raising my blood pressure over what the Americans are doing is stupid and dumb. I’ve been stupid and dumb.

I’m going to stop.

American Christians are on their own journey. My meddling in it displays a serious lack of faith in the Spirit’s work in those Christians and an unwillingness to fully concentrate on the work I’m doing here. It’s time for me to leave America – for real – and keep my face pointed in the same direction as the plough.

This is what I’m doing. Until the end of 2012 anything to do with American spirituality or politics is out of my life, the good and the bad. (The exceptions are family and friends, of course. And I’m keeping Josh Garrels in my playlist.) Basically I’m cutting out a bunch of podcasts, books that I may have read, blogs, Twitter accounts and all their links and link and links. Here’s a list for people who like lists:

This will give me space to clear my brain. Once I get to 2013, I’m not sure. My goal is not to pretend that America doesn’t exist or has nothing spiritually good to offer. Rather, I want to return (metaphorically) full of grace and love and no longer fighting against a bunch of rules and ideas that haven’t actually applied to my life for years. It may take me more than six months to get there.

This is obviously a big overblown statement full of broad brushstroke characterisations. It says more about me than it does about the United States. That is the point. I want to expose my own dysfunction so that it is clear (to me probably more than anyone else) why I am doing this. It also makes me kind of accountable. If I announce something on the Internet, I am a lot more likely to do it. Also, I tend to make big overblown statements about things that don’t need big overblown statements.

If you are an American reading this blog, you are welcome to keep reading and to comment. I’m not going into hiding.

Finally, thank you, Greg Boyd, Rob Bell, John Michael Greer and Shane Claiborne and so many others. You have helped me to become a better person. I’ll be back listening to you again, maybe as soon as next year.

I start as soon as I finish my last book on spirituality by an American author for now. (The book is Falling Upward by Richard Rohr. It is the perfect book for where I’m at right now.)


4 June 2012
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Here it is in broad but terribly accurate brushstrokes

From John Michael Greer’s latest essay:

It’s among the major failures of contemporary Western culture that the keepers of its religious traditions have so signally failed to deal with the core issues of our time. There’s a history behind that failure, of course. In what used to be the religious mainstream, well-meaning but clueless attempts to become relevant in the 1960s and 1970s led clergy to replace authentic spirituality with a new definition of religious institutions as some sort of awkward hybrid of amateur social service agencies and moral lobbying firms, deriving their values from the contemporary nonreligious left rather than from any coherent sense of their own traditional spiritual commitments. Since the vast majority of Americans then and now are on the moderate-to-conservative end of the political spectrum, and have next to no patience with the liberal ideologies that drove this shift, the formerly mainstream denominations ended up with a fraction of their old membership and influence as parishioners abandoned them in droves for more conservative churches and synagogues.

Those latter, meanwhile, had just completed the same transformation in the other direction, surrendering their own traditional commitments in order to embrace the political ideologies of the contemporary right. This is why so many of today’s supposedly conservative clergy are out there right now urging their congregations to vote for a Republican party whose platform could not be further from the explicit teachings of Jesus if somebody had set out to do that on purpose. Very few American religious groups have avoided falling into one or the other of these pitfalls.

That has had any number of unhelpful consequences, but the one relevant here is that either choice makes it effectively impossible for those who speak for religious institutions to say anything at all about the reality of our nation’s and civilization’s decline. The denominations of theold mainstream are committed to what, without too much satire, could be described as the belief that everyone in the world deserves a middle class American lifestyle; those of the new conservative religiosity are just as rigidly committed to the claim that middle class Americans deserve, and ought to be able to keep, that lifestyle. Neither can begin to address the hard fact that this lifestyle and nearly everything associated with it are going away forever.

If you are not reading Mr Greer, why? And don’t say it’s because he is the head of an American order of Druids. In the words of somebody that Rob Bell quoted, all truth is ours. (I’m not bothering with the actual source because I’m having an out-of-college-for-the-summer break from sources.)


31 May 2012
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Hope for the new year

In the same way, hope doesn’t depend on a sense of entitlement that insists the universe is obligated to provide us with whatever happy ending we think we want, and in any real sense, it’s incompatible with notions of that kind. Hope is the quality of character and the act of will that finds some good that can be achieved, no matter what the circumstances, and then strives to achieve it. The sense of entitlement, in turn, is precisely equivalent to the belief that victory is inevitable, and it produces the same sort of brittleness; it’s for that reason that it tends to collapse into despair, and it’s despair, ultimately, that feeds fantasies of the apocalyptic event that will make everything different.

Emphasis mine. Read the whole essay by John Michael Greer.


30 December 2011
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Oh aye? ’ell!

The future is not bright. Respected asset manager Jeremy Grantham tells us why. Christian think tank Ekklesia points out that until the government pays attention, things won’t get better. The Archdruid explains that governments won’t pay attention, and why plucky optimism and a can-do attitude are not what we need right now. This is a thing to take seriously.


1 December 2011
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Encounter with Jesus

My church has been doing a sermon series about people’s encounters with Jesus. I have been thinking about the difference between some of the encounters in the Gospels and the stories that church members have been telling about their encounters with Jesus. I’ve also been thinking about John Michael Greer’s recent posts about binary thinking and about Peter Rollins’ retelling of John 9 (Jesus healing the blind man) in his book The Orthodox Heretic. Once I stirred it around enough, this poem came out. I performed it this morning at church.

Listen:

I never knew Jesus when he was a man
with a plan for the planet of a kingdom that would span it.
I didn’t watch him walk on water
or tell Jairus’s daughter,
‘Little girl, I say to you arise.’
She rose,
but not while I was watching.
The blind guy with Jesus Mud in his eye who washed and could see –
That wasn’t me.
I wonder what did happen to me that made my blind eyes see,
even though my eyeballs are 38 and not what they used to be?

You see,
Jesus lived and died and was resurrected 2,000 years before
my folks went to bed unprotected
and theologians detected – are God’s stories
historical
or metaphorical?
I can’t be categorical about what really happens at the moment
when the darkness passes.

When you took off your dark glasses,
whether you were taking classes
or smoking grasses
or making passes at lovely lasses,
in that moment –
whether you were in a cathedral singing,
standing under the cold rain stinging
your face, in a café wringing
your heart out to a dear friend –
in that moment
something changed.
Everything changed.
Everything stayed the same.

BUT SOMETHING CHANGED.

And it is
so real but you cannot see it,
so solid but you can’t grasp it,
so you clasp it to your heart,
these words that sound so absurd
when heard aloud among the madding crowd:
‘I was blind but now I see.
Jesus rescued me.’
This is why we try poetry;
science will never fully explain or contain
the refrain of a heart that has been set free.
You see?


6 November 2011
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Look at my pretty paradigm!

John Michael Greer is at his best this week, writing about paradigm change. He writes about the difficulty of change, the way that our paradigms prevent us from eve being able to ask certain questions, much less answer them, and in describing the thinking of some dude called Thomas Kuhn he shares this bit of brilliance:

It’s standard practice for the new paradigm to include the value judgment that the questions the new paradigm answers are the ones that matter, and the ones the old paradigm does better don’t count. Nor is this judgment pure propaganda; since the questions the new paradigm answers are generally the ones that researchers have been wrestling with for decades or centuries, they look more important than details that have been comfortably settled since time out of mind. They may also be more important, in every meaningful sense, if they allow practical problems to be solved that the old paradigm left insoluble.

Yet the result of that value judgment, Kuhn argued, is the false impression that science progresses, replacing relatively false beliefs with relatively more true ones, and thus gradually advances on the truth. He argued that different paradigms are not attempts to answer the same questions, differing in their level of accuracy, but attempts to answer entirely different questions – or, to put it another way, they are models that highlight different features of a complex reality, and cannot be reduced to one another. Thus, for example, Ptolemaic astronomy isn’t wrong, just useful for different purposes than Copernican astronomy. (From the standpoint of relativity theory, please note, this is quite correct: since there are no fixed points in the cosmos, only frames of reference, it’s as meaningful to take an earth-centered frame of reference and calculate the movements of the planets from there as it is to take a sun-centered frame of reference and do the same thing.)

So basically, the paradigm you just threw away because it is old and useless still explains certain parts of life, the universe and everything better than your shiny new one does.

Go read the whole article, and while you are there dig into Mr Greer’s archives and subscribe to his feed. I know he writes about peak oil and ecology, but if you want to understand why the white western evangelical church is failing, why most of the church is stuck talking about the possibility of rearranging the deck chairs on our Titanic, and WHY the things that Alan Hirsch, Floyd McClung, Frank Viola and even Brant Hansen are saying are so important, then I can think of no better teacher than John Michael Greer.


24 April 2009
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...stuck in a linear rut, imposing patterns of one-way flow on a universe that consistently moves in circles

—John Michael Greer

This has stirred up my thinking about a bunch of different things that I hope to write about soon, but for now this will serve as a good reminder for me.


28 February 2008
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Grids

In which I neatly jump from graphic designers’ grid systems to the internet’s most famous archdruid to the historian Arnold Toynbee to a church in North Carolina to the bible to you.

grid

Image borrowed from Mark Boulton’s grid systems design tutorial

Graphic designers use grids…

Keep reading
14 February 2008
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Ah, Spring. The sun is shining. The trees are blossoming. The druids are writing blogs.

I don’t usually start the day wondering what The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America has to say, but you never know where the life (or the internet) will take you. A blog I read linked to this article about peak oil (basically, a so far accurate theory for predicting the rise, peak and decline of production in any oil field. This theory predicts that oil production for the whole earth will peak this decade.) The entire article was interesting, but this is what really caught my eye:

…human thought is mythic by its very nature. We think with myths, as inevitably as we see with eyes and eat with mouths. Thus any attempt to bring about significant social change must start from the mythic level, with an emotionally powerful and symbolically meaningful narrative, or it will go nowhere.

In other words, what really matters to people, what really creates change is

You cannot bring someone into the family of God through a rational argument. They must come through Jesus, a person who told stories that touched people’s hearts. He showed love in ways that were meaningful to first century people — healing, feeding, casting out demons. He made people think, oh yes, but even more he aroused great feeling in people’s hearts.

The Grand Archdruid’s article, The Failure of Reason is longish, but excellent reading. Go check it out.


4 April 2007
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