marramgrass

I’ve come to the end of the middle section of Wright’s book, and while there are a couple of points he makes that may be fairly controversial to some (or many), I think he has largely brought me with him. The problem is that when he writes about what happens immediately after death (in a chapter simply titled “Purgatory, paradise, hell”) — as he really has to, however tempting it might be to skip on by — Wright is addressing questions where we really don’t have much in the way of Scriptural witness to go on, and where tradition is mind-bogglingly difficult to sort through. However, he plainly recognises this fact, offering attempts at understanding rather than suggesting prescriptions.

Following on from this, the final movement of the book is where the author begins to answer the simple question of, in his own words, “so what?”

Surprised By Hope (2007), SPCK, p204:

The point of this final section of the book is that a proper grasp of the (surprising) future hope which is held out to us in jesus Christ leads directly and, to many people, equally surprisingly, to a vision of the present hope which is the basis of all Christian mission. To hope for a better future in this world — for the poor, the sick, the lonely and depressed, for the slaves, the refugees, the hungry and homeless, for the abused, the paranoid, the downtrodden and despairing, and in fact for the whole wide, wonderful and wounded world — is not something else, something extra, something tacked on to ‘the gospel’ as an afterthought. And to work for that intermediate hope, the surprising hope that comes forward from God’s ultimate future into God’s urgent present, is not a distraction from the task of ‘mission’ and ‘evangelism’ in the present. It is a central, essential, vital and life-giving part of it. Mostly, Jesus himself got a hearing from his contemporaries because of what he was doing. They saw him ’saving’ people from sickness and death, and they heard him talk about a ’salvation’, the message for which they had longed, which would go beyond the immediate into the ultimate future. But the two were not unrelated, the present one a mere ‘visual aid’ of the future one, or a trick to gain people’s attention. The whole point of what Jesus was up to was that he was doing, close up, in the present, what he was promising long-term, in the future.

There are a number of phrases in that portion (and the chapter it’s taken from) that I was tempted to highlight, but then I realised that I’d end up emphasising all but a few words. In so many of the conversations I have, day by day and week by week, this is what I’m trying to say. I’m now keen to see where Wright ends up…

The Telegraph’s 50 best cult books, following the example of Random Piercings. Please do join in.

The rules: books you’ve read in bold and books you started but never quite finished in italics.

• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
• The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (1957-60)
• A Rebours by JK Huysmans (1884)
• Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946)
• The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (1991)
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
• The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
• The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield (1993)
• The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart (1971)
• Chariots of the Gods: Was God An Astronaut? by Erich Von Däniken (1968)
• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980)
• Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
• The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1824)
• Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health by L Ron Hubbard (1950)
• The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley (1954)
• Dune by Frank Herbert (1965)
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979)
• The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)
• Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973)
• The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
• The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943)
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter (1979)
• Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)
• The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (1982)
• I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948)
• If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)
• Iron John: a Book About Men by Robert Bly (1990)
• Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and Russell Munson (1970)
• The Magus by John Fowles (1966)
• Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (1962)
• The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1958)
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
• No Logo by Naomi Klein (2000)
• On The Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson (1971)
• The Outsider by Colin Wilson (1956)
• The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (1923)
• The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell (1914)
• The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám tr by Edward FitzGerald (1859)
• The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (1937)
• Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922)
• The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)
• Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954)
• The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)
• The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda (1968)
• Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1933)
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1883-85)
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig(1974)

I could have added a third category, of the books I plan to read when I come across them.

A number of years ago, the wife of a local farmer died in an accident on the level crossing beside a cottage where we sometimes holiday. There follows my revision of a short piece I wrote that summer while we were staying in the cottage.

Continue reading Vanishing Point.

There are probably many worse ways to spend late-afternoon on May Day
than being punted up and down the Cam with your brother-in-law doing
all the hard work.

It took some convincing to get me on to the river, and when I was
there I stayed firmly sitting down, but it was great fun.

The photo above shows something I never thought I’d see. There were
three punt-loads of men in maroon and orange, often crashing into the
bank and each other. It looked like they were having as much fun as we
were.

Maybe next time I’ll work up the nerve to have a go with the pole, if
I decide I can trust my balance enough.

I’m experimenting with using Flickr to post photos directly to my blog
from my phone. You could call this one a test.

During the week my wife tried her hand at making a pavlova. It was so
good she is reprising her masterpiece for our hosts (and me!). This is
a good thing.

There are few things that will make me go all girly like puppies or kittens. It’s the way I’m wired, and I make no apologies.

One of my in-laws’ Irish Water Spaniels birthed a small litter earlier this week. For scale, the first image features my wife’s hands which are smaller than mine in the second image.

Altogether, now: “awww.”

Being only a few days old, their eyes are still closed and it will be a fair while before they can stand. They swim around on their bellies just like the little brown and furry tadpoles they resemble.

(This post has been two-thirds written for a couple of weeks. I’ve just returned from a gathering and a conversation which has reminded me to progress it and publish it — see the first and second posts in this series for what I’m doing.)

Several years ago I began to wonder about online expressions of community. I was young(er) and full of fire, and I believed that it was real and it was good. I remember sitting in a bar having lunch with an older and wiser colleague, trying desperately to convince him of the potential in ‘online church’. I think the only thing I convinced him of was a slight softness in my head. That was then.

Now, with all these ‘online communities’ and ’social’ sites springing up all over the web, I have to ask: is ‘community’ the correct word? Whereas once I would have shouted my ‘yes’, now I’m really not so sure.

While I am wary of overusing dictionary definitions in this kind of discussion, I’ll let dictionary.com provide the following perspectives:

A social group of any size where members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage.

A social, religious, occupational or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists (”the […] community”).

the public; society.

A group of organisms or populations living and interacting with one another in a particular environment.

From those definitions, maybe not.

Given the constantly changing and developing nature of language, perhaps ‘community’ is becoming the right word, but for now I’m not really comfortable with using the same term I could easily apply to our family, our church, a street, a neighbourhood.

But since this technology facilitates communication, I suppose it could be moving us in that kind of direction.

What about that communication?

It’s an inherently different thing to sit and have a face to face conversation with a friend, perhaps over a good meal, than to talk on the telephone. The phone is a different experience again from a hand-written letter, which differs from a typed letter. All are some way from an email.

I’d suggest that at least some of the difference is down to decreasing levels of direct physical presence in/through the medium. At one end of the spectrum we can experience the full range of nuance and meaning, while at the other end there is nothing that is ever directly encountered by both parties — electrons are transmitted and translated until beams of light take over…

How often have you been party to a major misunderstanding of an email sent or received? It happens regularly, to me and to people I know.

Technology has given us myriad tools and venues for sharing and transmitting information, with increasing volume and efficiency. The one that has caught my eye recently is Twitter. I didn’t get it at first, but when I discovered a couple of friends were using it I decided to give it a try. I was quickly hooked. (You can maybe get some idea by browsing over my Twitter stream.) Based simply in keeping communication open between people, even in a micro-broadcasting or micro-blogging kind of way, it’s fun, entertaining, cute and very occasionally useful.

What Twitter isn’t, I think, is substantial or meaningful. It’s more of a “because I can” sort of thing, and a good example because of how it encourages quantity over quality of communication. In a world beset by measures and targets, it’s easy to forget that neither volume nor efficiency are necessarily the thing.

Community is formed out of relationships, which are in turn based on communication. The quality of each affects the others.

I’ll be returning to these twin questions of communication and community.

When you’re not very disciplined at keeping your grass at a reasonable length, the self-propelled petrol lawn mower is one of man’s greatest inventions.

It is, however, tricky enough to control.

And when starting your brand new mower, it’s best to ensure that you are more than one elbow’s reach from the wall behind you.

• Stuff Christians Like. This is great.
• The Prime Minister on the Twitter. Sort of.
• How to break a bottle on a ship. Apparently it’s not as simple as you’d think.
• Innocent photographer or terrorist? This keeps coming up over the last few years. It’s a debate I keep an eye on, since I appreciate and enjoy good street photography.
• Powerbook to Desktop. Looks like turning an old laptop into a basic desktop machine would be pretty straightforward and fun. But my wife would not be pleased.

Real posts to follow soon, I promise.

(See the first post in this series for what I’m doing.)

As I’ve been thinking about the interactions that take place online, in my mind they’ve fallen into two broad categories based on ‘venue’:

• Centralised, if not necessarily in a technological sense, where the interactions take place through a specific website, newsgroup, mailing list or similar.
• Decentralised, in the manner of separate blogs forming an organic network.

Within these groups I find that that there is variation as to what brings them together.

Centralised Venues.

Networks and groupings can form on the basis of:

• Shared interest or purpose, for example a discussion forum or mailing list focussed on a particular subject. I have participated in groups discussing technology of various flavours, youth ministry, theology, particular authors, photography and even the collection and use of fountain pens. This sort of group can be an excellent source of information.
• Shared experience, for example Friends Reunited, or the way many use Facebook — “we went to school together.”
• Shared presence — stumbling into people you have never and may never have otherwise met. In my short experience this is the way MySpace seemed largely to operate.

All these factors reflect processes that occur in the real world, where we physically meet different people in all kinds of different contexts.

Decentralised Venues.

Where I find it more difficult to draw a real-world parallel is in the ‘blogosphere‘.

Anyone (with the necessary resources) can publish a website, and can interact with what anyone else has published either through direct communication (public or private) or by responding back on their own site. Networks of individuals gather around particular conversations, but can also easily draw in others who have some other incidental interest or curiosity. It’s fascinating (to me at least) to click around various blogs and follow the lines of who links to who, and who participates where — and you can participate in the wider network to as large or as small a degree as you like.

There are strengths and weaknesses in each of these forms of network, and they all intermingle anyway, connecting and overlapping through the individuals involved. I suppose it’s called the ‘web’ for a reason :-) You probably could map it, but it would get very complicated very quickly.

So far I’ve deliberately avoided using the word ‘community’, even though it has threatened to roll out by itself. I’m wary of applying that name to what goes on online, but it’s a question that needs asked:

Is this ‘community’?

That’s for the next post in this series.