maggi dawn

un-be-lievable

facebook blunder par excellence - national security all over the internet

Alpha on TV

I was sorry to miss Jon Ronson's TV documentary on Alpha the other week, but Rachel Cooke at the New Statesman offers her reaction here. She is always good with the witty lines, such as her reaction to Charlie Cleverly speaking in toungues/baby language - 

“Oh, Father,” he said. “Balala, dilly doodle, boogy bala . . .” Or something. Amazingly, no one laughed. I think they were too stunned to laugh. Call me old-fashioned, but what is wrong with a firm recitation of the Lord’s Prayer?"

religious descrimination on Facebook

Archbishop Cranmer is one of the best blogs around for discussion of religion and politics. (In fact I haven't checked, but I seem to recall it's award winning.)  It's on the conservative end of things, but I'll forgive him that. Always a good read.

Archbishop Cranmer also had a Facebook account. But was asked to remove the account, or rename it - which he did, simply to Thomas Cranmer. However, other accounts under pseudonyms (Miss Piggy, King Henry VIII, Cardinal Wolseley, etc) were allowed to stand. "Thomas Cranmer" entered into a lengthy correspondence with Facebook, the upshot of which was that he was disallowed the pseudonym "Archbishop" but allowed "Ayatollah Cranmer".

So will Facebook allow Catholic Cardinals, and Ayatollahs, but not Anglican Archbishops? I don't know whether to be disgusted at discrimination, or delighted that they think Anglicans are that dangerous and interesting. Read the whole story here. And check out Ayatollah Cranmer here.

open your eyes

"They don't want you to close your eyes and pray - they want you to open your eyes and lead."  (one of my favourite West Wing quotes...)

John Henry Newman (almost a Saint)

So John Henry Newman is to be beatified. The Pope has decreed it.

I read lots of Newman when I was an undergraduate, and liked his elegant thinking. My favourite story about him, though? I tell it at least once a year to overwrought students around revision time. JHN was intensely clever, but as an undergraduate at Oxford he worked and worked and worked, too hard for his own good, and in the end he got a Third Class degree. Happily this was 1821, and his tutors recognised that the result was not a true measure of his worth. Only a year later he was made a Fellow, and never looked back. Two salutary lessons from this:

1) if you are a student, don't work all day and all night. It is possible to work too hard and end up just dull, even for the stellar intellect. A balance of work and rest and sleep is important.

2) a system (such as the one we have right now) where you can only get on if you tick every box correctly means that brilliant mavericks slip throught the system. We should create space for people who we can recognise (through daily experience) as something special not to lose their place in the world just because of one spectacular failure. We should have enough flex in the system to give them space. Right now the system doesn't have enough of that flexibility. and that's not a good thing.

The Jesus Prayer

I just came across a blog by Kelvin Wright, and it has some GREAT writing on it - including this little description of how to pray the Jesus Prayer. Check out Kelvin's blog here

Sit somewhere where you are comfortable enough not to move for the duration of your intended meditation. Try and keep your back straight. Close your eyes. As far as you can, try to relax every part of your body; be especially aware of contracted muscles in the face, shoulders and neck. Silently repeat the phrase Lord Jesus Christ Son of the Living God Have mercy on me a sinner. If that seems too long, shorten it. Try just the first 8 words. Or even, just a couple of selected words: Lord...mercy... Repeat the words slowly giving equal weight to each word. I find it helpful to pace the words with my breath. Don't go theologising or thinking or trying to feel the presence of God. Don't worry that you suddenly remember that the washing machine needs turning on or the cat needs combing; it can wait. Don't get all excited by any mental pictures or "profound" thoughts that might burble up from the unconscious: that's just your brain having a dose of gas and it doesn't actually mean anything. If it really is a message from God, he knows your number and he'll get back to you later. If your mind wanders off, it's no big deal. Just pick up your phrase again and continue repeating it. Do this for a reasonable period; 10 minutes would be a good start for a newbie, but 20 would be better. Do it a couple of times a day. Do that every day for a week. See what happens. You might be surprised.

hard and soft knowing

Ruth Gledhill quotes Rowan Williams at this week's conference:

'The philosopher Pascal famously said: “The heart has its reasons of which the reason knows nothing.” That’s a wonderful line but .... slightly tends to suggest that there are two incommunicable sorts of knowing.

'There is the stuff that reason deals with and there is the stuff that something else deals with and as that division unfolds in our country history, it tends to lead to the view that reason deals with the hard stuff and whatever else is is, deals with the soft stuff.

'Reason deals with stuff that’s successful with everybody and at the end of the day is reasonably open, reasonably open to clear exception and to some extent, rational manipulation. The heart deals with the fuzzy stuff which is inside rather than outside and is incapable of providing clear resolutions.

'I think we all know some of the problems that are raised culturally and intellectually by this distinction between the hard and the soft, frequently matched directly onto the sciences versus the humanities and increasingly, of course, seen as a distinction between real or objective knowing and the rest which is subjective or impressionable or emotional, or whatever suddenly doesn’t belong in the same category.

'One of the rather bizarre, paradoxical effects of this, is that some people who find themselves cast on the soft side of this story panic and decide that they need to be hard, which is a little like the weedy teenager suddenly deciding that they’ve got to be tough.

'One of the least helpful expressions of this is, of course, Creationism. No indeed, the Bible’s not about soft, emotional stuff, the bible’s about hard, scientific stuff, and we can prove it - and that rather peculiar own goal on the part of some religious people in the last few decades simply has the effect to illustrate how deeply unhelpful the stand off is between the two kinds of view, hard and soft, real and fuzzy.

'I think, even more so today, it is good to keep in mind the risks of that model, because if you ask about knowing in terms of how people would use the language of knowing, or coming to know, or learning to know, you realise what a rich term it is.

'How you come to know things depends a great deal on the question you’re given. What counts as knowing in various parts of our cultural activity is going to be very varied.

'You don’t have to be totally committed to a philosopher like Wittgenstein to realise that the actual diversity and use in the way that we talk and the way that we use words ought to be given warning signs whenever we’re tempted to think that there is one real thing called knowing and the rest is farce....

'Pascal is right as far as his own vocabulary, context and purpose. It would be the greatest possible mistake to take that as licence for carving up the world into, as I said, the hard and the soft, the real and the unreal. What this conversation, I think shows is that there are indeed different kinds of knowing available as there are kinds of learning in our world. Being as precise as permitted, as clear about those kinds of learning, particular disciplines and particular rigour appropriate to each one, this is one way, I believe, towards a degree of intellectual clarity.'

Beach Labyrinth

link

DFS, Direct Funeral Services - are they dodgy?

Dave Faulkner reports that a funeral director, whose services are available nationwide via a website, is a dodgy dealer and should be avoided.  BBC Watchdog did a piece on them last year. Here's what Dave says:

"...received an email overnight from a trusted friend, alerting me and other ministers to the fact that a funeral director with a very questionable history appears to be operating again. He has evidence of his activity in Woking in May.

The man’s name is Richard Sage. His companies are either called DFS, Direct Funeral Services or St Christopher’s – the last one being a business run from his villa on the Costa del Sol, offering funerals to expatriate British citizens.

If you come across him, beware. There is a seven-minute report on him from the BBC TV show Watchdog last November..."

Oh to be in Paris...

Todd Bentley restoration: too much too soon

Dave Faulkner reports on the "restoration" of Todd Bentley. Dave is gracious and thoughtful, not cynical or rude. I agree with Dave's estimation of this. I smell a rat. Large, dead, and very smelly.  

Slaughter of the Sheep adds another opinion: "Perhaps some consider this to be straining at a gnat, but he left his wife and children, and then married his mistress... "

Some have alleged that Bentley's recent marriage was in part motivated by the wish to become resident in the USA. Who knows. I would imagine there are enough powerful people around him that he wouldn't need to resort to a "green-card" marriage. But he clearly is making the US his new base of operations as his new brand name is Fresh Fire USA ministries. The website neatly blames all his past failures on "the enemy" - a pretty familiar routine for those who can't explain away scandal.

Rick Joyner's voice welcomes you to the website, bigging it up with "God mobilising", at this "strategic time", "miracle power", etc etc. There are links galore to Bentley's teaching, and you can buy his books, and invite him to minister. OK, so allegedly he isn't actually taking UP any invitations right now, as he is still in a period of "restoration"... still, you don't launch a new website when you aren't planning your comeback, do you?

Michael Jackson

The last couple of nights I've stayed up way too late watching James May and others talking about the 1969 moon landings. Like all kids of that era I remember the tension and mystique, waiting to hear if they made it into orbit, waiting to hear if they landed, waiting to hear if they made it round the dark side of the moon and were heading home or - horror of horrors - might disappear forever into eternity.

1969 was a great year. J5 suddenly were everywhere with I want you back, and Michael Jackson was absolute dynamite, and all that apparently effortless talent grew into a startling career in his early adulthood. Who can even begin to wonder about the source of all the strangeness that followed. But I hope people will remember the talent and not let the wierd stuff eclipse it.

Gilead

In the matter of belief, I have always found that defenses have the same irrelevance about them as the criticisms they are meant to answer. I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always and inadequacy in argument about ultimate things. We participate in Being without remainder. No breath, no thought, no wart or whisker, is not as sunk in Being as it could be. And yet no one can say what Being is. If you describe what a thought and a whisker have in common, and a typhoon and a rise in the stock market, excluding existence, which merely restates the fact that they have a place on our list of known and nameable things (and which would yield as insight: being equals existence!), you would have accomplished a wonderful thing, still too partial in an infinite degree to hve any meaning, however.

I've lost my point. It was to the effect that you can assert the existence of something - Being - having not the slightest notion of what it is. Then God is at a greater remove altogether - if God is the Author of Existence, what can it mean to say God exists? There is a problem in vocabulary...

From Gilead, Marilynne Robinson, p 203