booklogging

This is a good introduction to issues of ritual and worship from a perspective informed by the concerns that alt.worship practitioners hold dear. Personally I wanted more at a fuller depth but what it does it does well in helping the reader who is perhaps from an evangelical /charismatic background and has just started to 'get' alt.worship. It should help such a person get some useful handles on what it's about and ways to hendle it theologically and practically. I like Maggi Dawn's plea for a holistic approach to liturgy -which plea is wider h=than alt.worship, and in fact is probably the thing that alt.worship has been rediscovering. I found some good quotes in Jonny Baker's contribution and enjoyed Pete Ward's introduction to the individual in worship.

posted by Andii  # 7/26/2004 08:40:00 pm 0 comments

When I was an undergraduate, I spent an acadmic year abroad as part of my degree [linguistic science] and I went to El Pais Vasco and learnt Basque and wrote it up for my dissertation. So my interest in this book should be apparent. Indeed I found it helpful in making sense of events that were unfolding around me. There is a good but short history of ETA in here and a lot of Basque recipes. Food is important in Basque culture as is generosity.

It was also helpful in helping to appreciate again the Euskal Herria I lived among. ALthough the quotes in Euskara told me how much I'd forgotten too.

A nice trip down memory lane and reawoke in me a desire to revisit San Sebastian, Bilbao, Saint Jean de Luz and Biarritz ...

I was surprised by how I got into this book I got and how easy it was to read. I found that I cared about the characters [including the possibility that one of the main ones may have been murdered -though we never find out]. What I liked was the way that we see through each charater's eyes and so we develop a multi-perspectival view of events and we are chalenged, implicitly, toremember that other people are really people and not just two dimensional characters in the narrative of our lives. The Father -Reg- is a good case in point. He seems to be the demonised one and yet his redemption comes. The other interesting thing, for me, is the religious dimension in all of this. You can't get away from the God issue. However religion and spirituality are presented in a full way: no simplistic stuff here: there is good and bad and even the good and bad can vary according to where when and who.

I was surprised because this kind of literature is not normally my thing but it's well written and deep enough to keep my interest and the character and plot [in as far as plot is a good description] carried me forward.

I got this book having been browsing shelves and thinking about the mimetic nature of human cultural and social life in relation to original sin; this book seemed to be exploring what I'd been thinking and indeed so it turned out to be: I didn't have to re-invent the wheel. More usefully yet, it also did so by a thorough examination of Rene Girard's mimetology which is also womething I'm wanting to wrap my mind around a bit more.

I finished the book feeling that my thinking about original sin and mimesis was affirmed but not totally convinced by all aspects of Girard's thesis particularly interms of Alison's attempted integration with an original sin and analysis of the Wrath of God. I think that Alison's handling of texts etc here is unconvincing but I'm willing to look into it more, I suspect that there is more work to be done here in terms of synthesizing with orthodox Christian theology.

Perhaps I'm reflecting that fact that I'm convinced about the mimetic side of things but not so sure about the scapegoating mechanism, much though I would like to be.

This is a must-read for anyone serious about seeing more environmentally sensitive and sustainable ways for human beings to live and yet still be decentralized and for it to be possible for people to make a living and consolidate the benefits of technology. This isn't cranksville central, this is workable ways forward. There are a lot of examples of what is happening already to show that it is possible and works. There is a lot of good analysis of what needs to happen. The biggest theme is really about making sure that what accountants call 'externalities' are internalized; ie that costs that are currently borne by people or the environment that are not reflected in the price of things are actually brought to bear in the cost equations. So, for example, oil companies would figure the cost of cleaning up spills and political problems etc etc into their costs and so into our prices. There is also some looking at how planning processes and education can help in the picture: I found some of this stuff truly eye-opening and hopeful.

It is very wide ranging from sewage and sanitation to town planning, architecture, how accountancy proceedures can make sense of cost savings that energy efficient design delivers. I love the snippets of information like the buildings that process their own sewage through ornamental gardens and people never realise because the design is good, safe, efficient, clean and involves not only biomimicry but actually utilizes the appropriate biological processes of nature.

The cost savings of energy efficient design seems enormous and there is a goodanalysis of the economics of cost savings through energy efficientcy. I love the chapter on 'muda' -the Japanese concept of eliminating effort.

On the cover there is a quote by Bill Clinton "This is a huge deal". And he's right; it's no hype.

Detweiler, Craig, Taylor, Barry. A Matrix of Meanings: Finding God in Pop Culture (Engaging Culture) Paperback 351 pages (November 1, 2003) Publisher: Baker Academic ISBN: 080102417X

The various chapters set out different areas of popular culture to be examined with a Christian concern running. However it is not a simplistic kind of concern which is about identifying popular culture as a realm of evils to be exposed and denounced but rather as an arena where God-given desires and perhaps even the pull of the Holy Spirit are at work along with fallen-ness.

The tools of cultural analysis are well used and show a sympathetic account of how positive and Gospelly things can be found in various areas of popular culture. Sometimes these analyses issue in suggestions of threads that Christians might want to pick and trace along in engaging with popular culture. Sometimes we are given insights into the internal logic of the things looked at.

The authors write knowledgeably about their subjects and show an astute understanding of culture which is both appreciative and yet able to be critical. The critiques are, however, not shallow and dismissive.

I would like to have been able to push the authors to analyze a little more; from time to time I felt that the analysis was good but felt as if it was going nowhere very much in terms of uncovering gospel linkages. sometimes I think I would have liked more that could have helped me to unpack popular culture into worship, outreach and discipleship. However, it does give the tools to think through the issues and I think to make a constructive engagement with culture which honours that of God in popular culture; and that is a very important contribution especially to the USAmerican Christian engagement with culture.

Gray, John. 2002. Straw Dogs, Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. London, Granta Publications. 1-86207-596-4

I loved the breadth of evidence gathered: acting, New Age gurus, western and eastern philosophy and religion, cognitive science, Darwinian and neo-Darwinian thinkers, medical history, classics, and so on. I thought too that one of the basic theses was probably sound and needed hearing. It is a shame that it won't be heard because of some of the other things that are communicated in the book. The first part of the book proposes that the humanist faith in progress is misplaced. So far, so postmodern. However, the important point he makes is that, in fact secular humanism is parasitic upon Christian values and is unsustainable without an assumed backdrop of Christian-shaped perceptions. In this he seems to echo the critiques of people like CS Lewis and Francis Schaeffer and perhaps even Lesslie Newbiggin.

on p.77, bodily continuities are dismissively acknowledged, and I wondered; is this not betraying a kind of platonic dualism with language playing the Form part? What I'm missing is a fuller account of embodiedness and selfhood and I'm concerned that the dismissal of selfhood is ultimately reductionist, what about an emergent self? Just because you can see that there is an atomistic substructure doesn't mean that the emergent property is illusion. I'm not sure that Gray was saying this but I'm not sure he wasn't either.

On p.78 the I is said to be the 'primordial human error' yet it has been characterized as somehow Cartesian. Is this a contradiction? If it is the primordial human error, how come it seems that it only really comes into being in after Descartes or with Augustine or Plato, ex hypothesi?


I'm also concerned by the re-smuggled assumptions that appear, the exact thing that he critiques in humanism woith its smuggled assumption of Christian morality and philosophy. There is a tone adopted of criticism of Nazism yet [p.102-3] morality is shown to be fashion. “Justice is an artefact of custom” so while he shows a 'fashionable' disdain for Nazism, he undermines grounds for critique [p.107, eg] and perhaps implicitly gives succour to some of its ideas by allowing a sanguine view of violence and genocide. This is not to say that he advocates such things, merely that he gives up on the task of finding a basis for decrying them; rather the reverse. Admittedly [p.90] we have the assertion that conscience always speaks against cruelty and injustice but that sometimes it is not heard, but I am not convinced that this is true on the basis of the evidence he presents. And even so it is perhaps a weak basis for trying a Milosevic or Saddam Hussein. It is the world of Homer -wars and all- that seems to be held out as the natural human condition and he seems fairly laid-back in the book about war and violence as a normal human activity.

In claiming the morality is a sickness peculiar to humans [p.116] he undermines a basis for critique of the holocaust and also highlights that there is, after all, a significant difference between humans and animals. Perhaps morality, in Gray's terms, is one of those illusions we can not do without even if we cannot avoid the conflicts of our needs; but that is precisely the basis of ethical thinking. Though clearly he is trying to find a way past morality. Gray gives the appearance, then, of having grown weary with ethical agonizing, and so the Taoist way of living skilfully rather than living morally seems more attractive.

Concern also over the picture of Christianity that leaks from the cracks of this book. Christian morality as a way to insure against ill fortune [p.107] and as a rule-based morality. Does Christianity really commit us to seeing animals as radically different in the [platonic ?] way portrayed or as believing in the unitary Enlightenment Self? In Respect of the latter point, I kept on thinking how the portrayal seemed to lead away from Jesus's word about losing self in order to find it. I do think that there is an important challenge here for Christians facing the rest of the 21st century; to re-think our relationship with non-human creation in such a way as to honour properly the continuities and similarities that are becoming all too readily apparent in scientific discovery and thinking and are already clearly being picked up as important spiritual themes as evidenced in the growth of neo-paganism especially Druidism and shamanism and to some extent Buddhism.

Interesting quotes
In the world shown us by Darwin, there is nothing that can be called progress. To anyone reared on humanist hopes this is intolerable. As a result, Darwin's teaching has been stood on its head, and Christianity's cardinal error – that humans are different from all other animals – has been given a new lease on life. [Gray, 2002. p.4]

Cities are no more artificial than the hives of bees. The Internet is a natural as a spider's web. As Margulis and Sagan have written, we are ourselves technological devices, invented by ancient bacterial communities as means of genetic survival ... thinking of our bodies as natural and of our technologies as artificial gives too much importance to the accident of our origins. [Gray, 2002. p.16]

The humanist sense of a gulf between ourselves and other animals is an aberration. It is the animist feeling of belonging with the rest of nature that is normal. [Gray, 2002. p.17]

In fact, the postmodern denial of truth is the worst kind of arrogance. In denying that the natural world exists independently of our beliefs about it, postmodernists are implicitly rejecting any limit on human ambitions. By making human beliefs the final arbiter of reality, they are effectively claiming that nothing exists unless it appears in human consciousness. [Gray, 2002. p.55]

But once we have relinquished Christianity the very idea of the person becomes suspect. A person is someone who believes that she authors her own life through her choices. This is not the way most humans have ever lived. [Gray, 2002. pp.58]

To deny the existence of God is to accept the categories of monotheism. [p.126]

Contemporary capitalism is prodigiously productive, but the imperative that drives it is not productivity. It is to keep boredom at bay. Where affluence is the rule the chief threat is the loss of desire. [p.163]

Searching for meaning on life may be useful therapy, but it has nothing to do with the life of the spirit. Spiritual life is not a search for meaning but a release from it. [p.197]

Bauman,Zygmunt. 2003, Liquid Modernity. Cambridge, Polity. Original 2001. 0-745624103

I read this because it was a key text suggesting the title and
direction of Pete Ward's "liquid Church". It's a readable bit of
sociological analysis of late consumerist capitalism shading into
post-modernity. Very helpful in identifying the key effects in our
societies of the radicalized presumptions of consumer capitalism.

The argument is that individuals are now cut adrift in modern societies
to make their own arrangements and forge their own identities as
opposed to the era of heavy modernity when arrangements were in place
for people by virtue of their class or gender. Capital is now
trans-local and this has dissolved the bond between labour and capital
so that the idea of jobs for life is no longer a realistic part of a
life strategy. This leads to a foreshortening of expectations and so
erosion of delayed gratification, it also means that bonds of
commitment are devalued particularly in conjunction with consumerism
where satisfaction in the here-and-now is emphasized.

Interesting quotes.

What used to be considered a job to be performed by human reason seen
as a collective endowment and property of the human species has been
fragmented ('individualized'), assigned to individual guts and stamina,
and left to individuals' management and individually administered
resources. ... The emphasis (together with, importantly, the burden of
responsibility) has shifted decisively towards the self-assertion of
the individual. [p.29]

There is ..no shortage of those who claim to be in the know, ...
Such ... Are not, however, leaders; they are, at most, counsellors -
... The latter need to be hid and can be fired. Counsellors ... Are
wary of ever stepping beyond the closed area of the private. ... The
counsels which the counsellors supply refer to life-politics not to
Politics with a capital P; they refer to what the counselled persons
can do by themselves and for themselves ... Accepting full
responsibility for doing them properly and blaming no one for the
unpleasant consequences which could be ascribed only to their own error
or neglect. [p.64-5]

[Consumers] are also trying to find an escape from the agony called
insecurity. They want to be free from the fears of mistake, neglect or
sloppiness. They want to be, for once, sure, confident, self-assured
and trusting ... [Bauman, 2003, p.81]

People who move and act faster, who come nearest to the momentariness of the movement, are now the people who rule. [p.119]