marramgrass

Each morning, driving into Belfast (not so bad when the schools are on holiday), we listen to BBC Radio Ulster. It’s the only time in the day when I receive the news via a human voice rather than through the blue-on-white of Google Reader, but I’m getting fed up with it.

Take this morning as an example of why. Yesterday the Air Traffic Control radar at Dublin Airport fell over causing delays, diversions and cancellations to mess with the plans of many a holiday-maker. This morning a representative of one of the airlines was being interviewed on the radio. The first question he was asked: “Who is to blame?”

The was no acknowledgement that sometimes these things happen, and only a passing reference to the fact that the decision to take the system down was intended primarily to ensure the safety of flights in and out of the airport. The interviewer’s main concern seemed to be who would be held accountable for this terrible, awful, atrocious turn of events where no-one at all was injured.

I’m coming to despise that phrase, “held accountable”, and all the other variations that express the same idea: this was someone’s fault, and they shall pay.

It shows in the journalism, where interviewers seem to believe that their job is primarily to make their interviewee, whoever they may be, squirm as much as possible. Sometimes the desire to ask a tough and hard-nosed question is necessary, often it’s just silly and irrelevant. It shows in the phone calls, emails and text-messages from listeners, as the new, interactive BBC lets everyone throw in their two pen’orth. And you can see plenty of it — more, even! — online where the communication is oh-so-easy.

Of course society needs to ensure that everyone from government to grocer deals fairly, honestly and safely with each other, but I wish we could recover the shrug of the shoulder that recognises that sometimes stuff just happens, you know?

Again I think about something I’ve seen or heard, and I wonder about grace. When I encounter a mistake or an inconvenience, I do my best to remember to acknowledge no harm and let it go, but it’s tough when everything I listen to in the morning is focussed on assigning blame.

Do you think we could manage, as a society — especially in this little corner of the world where so much real harm and hurt still casts it shadow — to try for that grace?

(See the first, second and third posts in this series for what I’m doing.)

This series is exploring a bit more widely than I intended. It was conceived when I started wondering about how ‘the media’ (including those that operate mainly offline) and other commentators place such emphasis on the internet as a venue, a forum and a significant influence on society. I began to wonder if this was all just a little bit closed, a little self-important and short-sighted — especially as I am someone who has been fascinated by technology and by online goings-on for years.

Technology has allowed me to have contact and conversation with many people who I would otherwise never be in touch with. I have learned from them, laughed with them, shared in the little corners of life they choose to share, and I hope to continue to do so. However, by far the most meaningful contact I have had online has been with those with whom I have some form of relationship in the real world. Previously I posted about my infatuation with Twitter — it’s most fun with the folks I know in real life.

Beyond that, though, what connection has all this with ‘real life’?

Every now and then you’ll meet someone who goes all misty-eyed and smiles in an unnerving way when they talk about the internet and the good it can do. Maybe it can’t do much good in itself, but access to information is generally a good thing, and when it comes to making info accessible you generally can’t do much better than the internet. Ish.

The question is availability. Broadband uptake in Northern Ireland is high (Alan in Belfast recently provided a deal of analysis of this), but there are still plenty of folks who, if they have internet access at home at all, rely on dial-up. Even for those with a high-speed connection, cable covers a small area and DSL is a fragile technology that needs you to be pretty close to your telephone exchange. And it does cost money.

Theoretically the network of public libraries provides internet access for all, but even if we accept that then there is still the issue of capacity. Just because I’m completely comfortable using the web to find out what I need to know, communicating by email and IM, doesn’t mean my gran is.

Of course, this has changed (progressed?), is changing and will change, as long as no-one slips through the gaps.

Useful (powerful?) as technologically advanced communications are, perhaps it’s best to remember that they are as well as rather than instead of everything else we already had and relied upon. I wonder, generally as well as from my own experience, if more and more people will find it takes a conscious effort to write a letter, pick up the phone, drop by and say “Hi” rather than send an email or a tweet, or leave a message on a Facebook wall?

That’s at an individual level. For society, I doubt that there’s any going back. Commerce, government, entertainment… the change has happened, and corporately nothing is the same. Just remember that ’society’ and ‘community’ aren’t necessarily the same thing, and what works on one level doesn’t always work on others.

Yesterday afternoon I paid £1.14 a litre to fill the petrol tank of my car. On a 55-litre fuel tank that takes me well past the sixty pound mark for a fill.

I’m not complaining about this because for now I know that we can afford it, but I also know that it’s a heavier problem for some.

I’ve been operating on the assumption that at least part of the reason for the hefty duty on fuel in the UK was an effort to discourage car use for environmental reasons. I may be wrong — the duty has been substantial for longer than the environment has really been on the radar, I think.

When we moved back to Northern Ireland (almost two years ago, now) we took what was for us a difficult decision. We bought a second car. This was a result of the nature of the work we both do: I move around a lot during the day, and not having to rely on public transport makes for less time spent traveling, plus I often am out and about in the evenings; my wife works on calls ‘from home’ and needs quick transport to the hospital to be immediately available; it’s impossible to co-ordinate these two factors.

That was our thinking, and most of the time I manage to convince myself that it’s not just an excuse. On occasion, though, I wonder if we’ve been seduced by a little taste of decadence, even if the second car only leaves the drive when we really need it to.

Sometime in the next few months, we’ll need to fill the oil tank for our central heating, too. That one I am a little concerned about. When it comes to it, though, we’ll rein in for a while and we’ll be able to pay the bill I fully expect to be in the region of £5-600. Again, we’re lucky (which is to say, privileged) — we’ll be able to do that. Others won’t.

What to do?

This is where I start to get a little uncomfortable, because ultimately I think it’s a cultural thing that is as much to do with me as anyone else, consuming everything.

I have convinced myself that we need two cars in our family, however uncomfortable I claim to be with that arrangement. We, a couple with no children yet, need a whole car each?

Maybe, for now, it’s true that we do. I still hope, though, that I’ll never stop asking myself that every time I look out at our drive and see them sitting there. When I stop, then I’ll need to worry.

I suppose that’s a solid principle: don’t get comfortable.

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…

(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.

(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.

My reading through of NT Wright’s theology of resurrection has been slowed by life getting in the way. I don’t get nearly as much time to sit and read as I used to, and when I do I tend to fall into easy fiction that doesn’t require too much thought.

As I continue to crawl my way through the second section of the book, the text on a couple of pages jumped out at me.

Surprised By Hope (2007), SPCK, p108:

Redemption is not simply making creation a bit better, as the optimistic evolutionist would try to suggest. Nor is it rescuing spirits and souls from an evil material world, as the gnostic would want to say. It is the remaking of creation, having dealt with the evil which is defacing and distorting it. And it is accomplished by the same God, now known in Jesus Christ, through whom it was made in the first place.

Surprised By Hope (2007), SPCK, p106:

Evil then consists, not in being created, but in the rebellious idolatry by which humans worship and honour elements of the natural world rather than the God who made them. The result is that the cosmos is out of joint. Instead of humans being God’s wise vice-regents over creation, they ignore the creator and try to worship something less demanding, something which will give them a short-term fix of power or pleasure. The result is that death, which was always part of the natural transience of the good creation, gains a second dimension, which the Bible sometimes calls ’spiritual death’. In Genesis, and indeed for much of the Old Testament, the controlling image for death is exile.

Surprised By Hope (2007), SPCK, pp105-6:

Nor — and this is crucial — does evil consist in being transient, made to decay. There is nothing wrong with the tree dropping its leaves in autumn… indeed, it is precisely the transience of the good creation that serves as a pointer to its larger purpose. Creation was good, but it always had a forward look. Transience acts as a god-given signpost, pointing not from the material world to the non-material world, but from the world as it is to the world as it is meant one day to be…

Prior to this, Wright has explored what he views as the two most common ways Christians tend to view the destination of creation: that it is progressively improving towards perfection, or that it a vile physicality to be endured until we find perfection in some ’spiritual’ reality. While he doesn’t spend too long presenting evidence for the prevalence of these views, they certainly fit with what I have heard and observed — while not fitting terribly well with my reading of Scripture. The author then goes on to explain what he understands as the Scriptural picture.

I am intrigued by the image of death as exile, never having given it too much thought. I’m looking forward to exploring it further as a way to help understand salvation, redemption and new life.

At this point in my reading I find the passages I’ve quoted above to be full of hope, but I wonder how well they would be received by the very most conservative and traditional, what with the slightly gnostic (gasp!) tendencies that tend to be expressed in those ends of the Church.

(Please forgive the poor pun — sometimes I can’t help it.)

It seems like over the last year or two everyone paying attention to the web has been talking about social networking sites. The chat in the press started with the Arctic Monkeys, and then somewhere down the line Microsoft paid a fortune for a tiny bit of Facebook.

There is something inherently social about the internet. It’s a medium all about the transmission of information, and that information has to come from somewhere (and go to somewhere).

All over the world there are people writing, publishing, singing, dancing, talking, and there are plenty of people reading, watching and listening to them. I’ve been writing this blog for a bit over five years now, pretty much just for the hell of it; there are even a surprising number of people who drop by here regularly, don’t ask me why. The power of the internet: although I haven’t seen the complete works of Shakespeare materialize just yet.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the implications of all this and I thought it would be interesting, for me at least, to chart my own engagement with the social aspects of internet use.

When I was a teenager my parents stuck a PC in the living room with a 56k modem that introduced me to email. That was pretty much all I used it for. The same people I saw every day, talked to on the phone regularly, we emailed each other too.

Once I moved to Scotland, email became a more important way of keeping in touch with people. I also began to discover how much information there was out there on the web — and its great potential as an aid to procrastination.

Since then, this is the journey I have taken through various online interactions:

• Fora and newsgroups. Discussions, theoretically based around a particular subject area.
• Instant Messengers (MSN et al.). Like a phone call, only slower :-)
• Friends Reunited. Feeds the gossip in us, or it did the last time I went near it.
• Flickr. A mix of photos and fora.
• MySpace. Maybe a year or two ago I followed a bunch of friends to MySpace. You can probably count on two hands the total number of times I’ve logged into my account there.
• Bebo. I have an account, and I’ve literally never done anything with it beyond signing up.
• Facebook. More recent, a similar story as MySpace except you can probably do the counting on one hand.
• Twitter. Tough to describe. I was initially very skeptical, but there’s something compelling about it.

Alongside this there are all the blogs out there (like this one). It’s not a formal network built around one specific site. Instead readers and authors link to each other, communicate through comments, emails and other posts. Some of those I follow are linked in the sidebar over there; I still haven’t got round to making it a more complete list.

After all that, though, I’m left with some questions:

• What’s the point of it all?
• What’s the use of it all?
• What constitutes quality, genuine interaction and communication?
• Does it matter ‘in real life’?
• Where can we take it?

In the car this morning I was listening to an interview with Tony Jones (of Emergent Village) where he said:

I just don’t think we can overstate how important the internet is in reshaping the social structure of our society. It’s an egalitarian force…

Is this true?

I may have a few thoughts and ideas, but I’ve formed no conclusions yet. This short series of posts is by way of me thinking out loud, so please do chip in.

I’m sitting here writing a youth session on the life of Daniel. With references to Jesus and the martyrdom of Stephen, sacrifice and the willingness to make sacrifices for what you believe are themes that I keep returning to.

There is a documentary on the life and death (40 years ago today) of Martin Luther King, Jr playing on the TV in the background. The relevance is not lost on me.

Martin Luther King, Jr, 3 April 1968, Memphis:

And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

I began blogging my exploration of this book last week. I didn’t originally intend a blogging-through-the-book series, but that looks like where it’s going.

Following on from that previous post, the next two chapters comprise the remainder of the first section of the book. In these Wright offers a defence of belief in the actual, bodily resurrection of Jesus. In doing so he places the events of the first Easter in context alongside Jewish understanding of resurrection — that it will be the experience of all believers on the ‘last day’ — and identifies how he sees that early Christian belief expresses, to use his terminology, ‘modifications’ or ‘mutations’ of that understanding. These changes, of course, came about as a result of the resurrection of Jesus, an event that Wright argues must affect completely how we view the world around us — he talks in terms of paradigm shift1. I agree.

While, in these chapters, Wright addresses in varying detail many of the arguments against belief in the resurrection of Jesus as it is recorded in Gospel, he is careful to not hang too much on historical and scientific enquiry.

Surprised By Hope (2007), SPCK, p75:

But this is where I want to heed carefully the warnings of those theologians who have cautioned against any attempt to stand on the ground of rationalism and to attempt to ‘prove’, in some ‘mathematical’ fashion, something which, if it happened, ought itself to be regarded as the centre not only of history but also of epistemology, not only of what we know but of how we know it. I do not claim, in other words, that I have hereby ‘proved’ the resurrection in terms of some neutral standpoint. I am offering, rather, a historical challenge to other explanations, and to the worldviews within which they gain their meaning. Precisely because at this point we are faced with worldview-level issues, there is no neutral ground, no island in the middle of the epistemological ocean as yet uncolonized by any of the warring continents. Historical argument alone cannot force anyone to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead; but historical argument is remarkably good at clearing away the undergrowth behind which scepticisms of various sorts have long been hiding. The proposal that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead possesses unrivalled power to explain the historical data at the heart of early Christianity. The obvious fact that this remains hugely challenging at the personal and corporate level ought not to put us off from taking it seriously. Or were we only playing when we entertained the question in the first place?

(The question to be entertained being simply, “did it happen?”)

I found it encouraging and refreshing that a serious, contemporary theologian is happy to state his belief that Jesus was actually, bodily raised from the dead.

The discussion in these two chapters is compelling, but often a little quick and shallow. The author recognises this, and rightly points out that to go into full detail just isn’t possible in this book, but he regularly left me wanting more detail. As the end notes frequently point towards his earlier work (frequently The Resurrection of the Son of God, all 817 pages of it), I suspect that I am about to start a long journey through the writings of Wright.