Easy choice:
Brian Mclaren: a generous orthdoxy
Lesslie Newbiggin: The open secret
Lesslie Newbiggin: The gospel in a pluralist society
Evangelicalism can easily decay into Phariseeism: all about personal conversion, nothing about the world at large and as a whole. These books are the remedy.
Fiction?
That would be the Librivox recording of
William Makepeace Thackery: Vanity Fair
which I listened to by a swimming pool in Nice, during rainstorms in the Soul Survivor Christian festival (which was mostly rainstorms) and through many long insomniac nights.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Friday, December 05, 2008
Sinclair C5 spotted!
I spotted a Sinclair C5 on the road today -- that Cambridge-designed battery-powered personal transportation device that flopped in the 1980s. Like many of Sir Clive Sinclair's ideas, it was both way ahead of its time and of a slightly dodgy build quality.
It looked as vulnerable on the open road as it ever did in the 1980s. But it also looked absolutely perfect for a cycle path. I think the last 20 years in the UK has seen a huge expansion of cycle paths, and I couldn't help thinking of the parallel with the Internet.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee (whom I heard speak two days ago, incidentally), built a wonderful open infrastructure and a whole exotic ecosystem of products developed to run on it -- google and amazon and ebay and all the rest. Surely if we really systematically built a network of cycle paths in this country, that linked everything up, a similar exotic ecosystem would also arise: electric bikes and Segways and those wierd things Honda are making. And maybe some veteran C5s, rescued from garages, chugging along with their lead-acid batteries to the railway station, just as Sir Clive originally dreamt.
It looked as vulnerable on the open road as it ever did in the 1980s. But it also looked absolutely perfect for a cycle path. I think the last 20 years in the UK has seen a huge expansion of cycle paths, and I couldn't help thinking of the parallel with the Internet.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee (whom I heard speak two days ago, incidentally), built a wonderful open infrastructure and a whole exotic ecosystem of products developed to run on it -- google and amazon and ebay and all the rest. Surely if we really systematically built a network of cycle paths in this country, that linked everything up, a similar exotic ecosystem would also arise: electric bikes and Segways and those wierd things Honda are making. And maybe some veteran C5s, rescued from garages, chugging along with their lead-acid batteries to the railway station, just as Sir Clive originally dreamt.
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