(some more) awe

For me, the experience of sequencing the human genome, and uncovering this most remarkable of all texts, was both a stunning scientific achievement and an occasion of worship. (Francis Collins, Head of
the Human Genome Project)

Awe

If this universe is but a flower on the meadows of God's life, what must not God himself be!
F B Meyer

Polkinghorne on the soul and where my comic fiction fits in

(See previous two posts for the context to this)
John Polkinghorne dismisses the idea of the soul as a late divine addition to the evolving human primate. I think he thinks that idea inelegant. He notes the psychosomatic unity of body and soul, and the way that changes in the physical brain seem to affect the soul. He prefers to see this psychosomatic nature as having evolved.

However he still thinks we can use the word 'soul' coherently as the 'information-bearing pattern' or in Greek terms the 'form' of the body. (Aquinas developed this idea of the soul as the 'form' of the person; cf. the body as the 'matter'. The Greek words are eidos (form) and hyle (matter).) This pattern remains and develops through life and gives our lives a unity, even though the atoms in our bodies are forever being exchanged for others. He claims this soul as such is not immortal but after death it is held and even nurtured in the mind of God, until such time as God brings about resurrection. Thus in Polkinghorne's thinking, immortality rests not on a supposed nature of the soul, but on the faithfulness of God.

It is an interesting idea in fiction to see what this 'information-bearing pattern' would look like if incarnated in a completely different body. What would I look like if my soul were given the body of, say, a computer, or a car, or a colony of ants, or a tree or a planet?

My book Paradise - a divine comedy
and its upcoming sequel of course illustrate the 'information-bearing pattern' as landscapes.

Polkinghorne on the future

When we start applying Polkinghorne's idea of science and theology conversing, how does such a conversation apply to the future of people and the universe? Some notes.

Q. What is the Anthropic Principle?
A. This states that the Universe was set up in such a way that, though simple in its start, it was pregnant with the possibility of intelligent life. If the relations between gravity and electromagnetism were slightly different in any direction, stars would not burn long enough for life to arise. If nuclear forces had slightly different values, complex atoms would never have been created. Most presumed initial conditions for the Universe lead to sterile universes. Hence the Universe looks extremely finely-tuned in its initial conditions -- 'primed for life'.

Q. How does this then lead us to a paradox?
Science cannot offer hope, finally, in the light of what is going to happen to the Universe. However brightly the spark of intelligence shines, it must be extinguished eventually as the the stars burn out.

This is a paradox: 'a finely tuned and fruitful universe which is condemned to ultimate futility' (p27).


Q. How can theology help resolve this paradox?
By positing both continuity and discontinuity in the future of people and of the universe, modelled on Christ's resurrection. He got his body back (continuity: people knew it was him); but it was a resurrected body, never to die again (discontinuity, radically different from the old). A seed contains the genetic essence of the future plant (continuity) but it has to fall into the ground and die (discontinuity). So with people and with the whole Universe.

What distinguishes eschatology from secular futurology is this expectation of discontinuity, of resurrection. Science can only extrapolate, it cannot suggest something entirely new. This can only come from theology. Only theology can argue for discontinuity.

Theology can teach us that, though our existence is as temporary as chalk on a blackboard, our essence can be retained in the mind of the one reading the blackboard long after the board has been wiped clean; and whatever was written can have a further existence in quite other, and greater, realms. It is not that the soul is immortal so much that the faithfulness of God is entire.

Q. What might be areas of continuity between this universe and the next?
I suggest:
- diversity
- beauty
- a balance between change and changelessness; as in many parts of the world, seasons change but the fact of changing seasons never changes.
- laughter, joy, creativity, worship, conversation; all these relational joys.

Polkinghorne suggests:
-- process. Creation started simple but pregnant with possibilities and was free to develop under God's hand. It took time. Might New Creation be the same?

-- Relational: everything is part of everything else: matter, time, space; body, soul, community, mind, culture. We might expect New Creation to be similarly holistic.

-- Polkinghorne makes the point that the universe is mathematical. Yet maths (prime numbers for example) exist whether or not anyone has discovered them. Does maths exist in some 'extra noetic dimension' that is 'beyond the flux of time' (p20,21)? If so, what about other things that we humans feel exist beyond us imagining them: goodness, beauty, purity even.

Q. What might the end of the world and the 'four last things' (death, judgement, hell, heaven) look like?

A. Both Polkinghorne and Christopher Wright (who wrote 'The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative, excerpted in 'Perspectives on the World Christian Movement' (2009, p 27-33)) quote works by Richard J Bauckham. Bauckham understands 2 Peter 3:10 to mean 'the earth will be laid bare' i.e. exposed, purged, cleansed, stripped down of its evil; but not a completely new creation from nothing.

As for death: Science teaches us that death/rebirth has been going on since the beginning of time. So how does death enter the world due to sin? And when did the Fall of Man happen? Polkinghorne's answer is that the Bible is referring to spiritual death. He asserts that self-consciousness and God-concsciousness grew up among proto-humans, and that there was a turning from the God-consciousness (hence a historic Fall) which led to spiritual death.

Another answer to this might be that the Fall account is a kind of summary of the Christ-less behaviour of the entire 100bn-strong human species, all integrated together into one account.

Heaven: is much as Polkinghorne has already talked about in the sense of a new heavens and earth. As for the 'intermediate state' Polkinghorne speculates that disembodied souls can exist, and even develop, in a sense in the mind of God between physical death and the eschaton.

Judgement, Hell: In view of the long time scales, and slow development, and refining suggested by the original creation, Polkinghorne is unwilling to see judgement as a one-off moment or hell as a permanent state. He is attracted by the idea of further refinement/redemption after the eschaton.

John Polkinghorne on Science and Theology

Just making notes for my own reference.

Polkinghorne is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a priest and theologian, and winner of the Templeton Prize.

Q. How does he compare and contrast physics and theology?
A. He takes a 'critical realist' view of both. So, both disciplines are dealing with truth. (That's the 'realist' bit, and it's a faith stance.)  Both are integrating a way of knowing things: the scientific method is powerful but limited only to that knowledge which can be measured and repeated. Theology deals with a wider range of human inputs and experiences but (I would emphasize, though Polkinhorne doesn't) especially I-thou knowing, relational knowing, which is different kind of knowing from the I-it knowing of science.

Both science and theology posit unobservable things. Physics has confined quarks, never seen but assumed to exist; theology has an invisible God. Each is an invisible keystone in an arch of more accessible knowledge. Postulating the invisible helps us make sense of the visible.

Both science and theology can inform and shape each other, bringing as they do different aspects of the totality of human knowing.

Hand-picked book lists

Since there are around 8 million books capable of being catalogued and read, I appreciate some help. This site is rather snooty and exclusive, and all the better for it. It re-introduces what we lose when independent bookshops go the wall: the booklover's loving selection of the best.

Their lists are hand-picked and carefully scrutinized.  I think it will be useful as a source of further reading, or ideas for presents. Among the lists:

Barack Obama's favourite books
A journey through Asian stories
Funniest novels according to the British users of Abe books

Why I write novels

An article by James A Herrick in Christianity Today got me very excited. It's about how science fiction produces myths that supplant the (true) 'Christian myth.'

An executive summary
'Pop-culture fiction, not academic nonfiction, is now the cutting edge of public discourse on spirituality.'


Juicy bits from the article
'The culture-shaping force of science fiction storytellers may be more significant and more widespread than we imagine. That's because they trade in myth. By myth, I mean a transcendent story that helps us make sense of our place in the cosmos. This common definition makes the Christian gospel, as C. S. Lewis suggested, "God's myth"—not because it is fiction, but because it is a story that gives ultimate meaning. We live in an age in which new myths, born mostly of science-fueled imaginations, are crafted and propagated at an unprecedented rate...

'Ironically, the universe that science stripped of the supernatural is being resupplied with deities and redemptive purposes by science fiction writers and moviemakers. Apparently, we cannot do without myths...

'A discerning student of culture, Lewis answered modern scientific myths with daring retellings of the Christian story that integrated the patterns and language of the new myths. His science fiction trilogy provides an admirable model of storytelling that intelligently and artfully incorporates foundational truths from a Christian worldview...

'Human spiritual well-being, and thus the humaneness of civilization, depends in large measure on which narratives hold sway in our souls.'

Another reason, if I may suggest it, to buy my book. You know it makes sense.

The value of a college education

Well how super. My daughter tells me that in her first year geography course at her Russell Group university (total fee income for geography department, approx £1m per year), she will receive a princely total of 26 hours of total contact time between today (Feb 18) and Sept 26 2011.

Twenty-six hours' teaching in the next seven months. Become a lecturer.

In the bestseller list!

Amazon have a finally found a category so small that my book ranks as one of the best sellers in it.

Check out 'books -> fiction -> religious and inspirational -> classics'. Not far down from Screwtape Letters and Pilgrim's Progress ... (actually at No. 21) is Paradise. Look it up quick before it disappears...

Artists and theologians: What the Byzantines knew

The Eastern church famously enjoyed a couple of centuries of furious split as they tried to work out the place of images in worship. The argument was won in favour of the icons. The result of all the debate was that 'Greek theologians... raised the status of the work of art to that of theology and the status of the artist to that of the theologian.'

(C Barber Figure and Likeness, on the limits of representation in Byzantine iconoclasm, quoted in Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, p453)

Old ideas come back in new cultures, in new forms. Wonder if this will?

J K and faith

Been googling 'J K Rowling and faith', where you can find articles describing the more explicitly Christian inspiration to her books, including the Biblical references she puts on tombstones (death is swallowed up in victory; where your treasure is, there your heart is also), which for her 'sum up, almost epitomise the whole series.'

A church of Scotland churchgoer, she quotes approvingly Graham Greene, 'my faith is sometimes that my faith will return.'(See for example this article from the Daily Telegraph).

A year ago

One year ago I was lying in a bed in an acute cardiac ward in London, with my major organs starting to fail. For the best part of four years I had been trying to sell my novel.

Today I came off my heart medication, and this same day I received notification of my first payment from Amazon from sales of my novel.

My enthusiasms this month are pacemakers, ablation therapy, the drug amiodarone, the new world of publishing, and the goodness of God.

Physics in need of a revolution

It's a staple of the history of physics that:
(a) in around 1895 the subjects seemed almost complete, apart from the Michaelson-Morley experiment (speed of light is constant) and the peculiar phenomena provisionally called X-rays.
(b) The following quarter century was a golden age of fresh discovery: relativity and quantum theory arrived in a glorious rush.

Michael Brooks' book hints at a further explosion-to-come:
(a) We have no idea what 96% of the universe is made of
(b) The two Pioneer spacecraft, launched in 1976 and 1977 are being slowed down and no-one knows why
(c) The constants of physics might not be constant
(d) The universe is fit for life only because a certain constant (called omega) is exactly the size it is, not a thousand billionth more or less.

So we either are, or aren't in for an exciting time in physics, assuming someone has the cranial capacity to think round this stuff.

A further interesting message in light of current debates about faith and science is that science is a little more rickety, and less sure, than the aggressive atheists might totally wish. Great book.

Not a tame lion

Einstein to Neils Bohr at one of the solvay conferences of physicists (famously:)

'God does not play dice'

Neils Bohr to Einstein:

'Einstein, stop telling God what to do'

From: 13 things that don't make sense an enjoyable romp around the baffling edges of science by Michael Brooks.

Tell me something new: predictable newspapers

The day after the government spending review:

Axe Falls on Poor (Guardian headline)

Middle Classes to Lose £10,000 (Telegraph headline)

World population clock

Watch people be born and die, use oil, and increase the CO2 in the atmosphere:




Poodwaddle.com

The spirit of Tetzel lives on

Am reading an American Christian book.

While enjoyable and helpful in its way, so far it has mostly failed to deliver on its promise that 'I'll get' a thought-provoking look at God's heart and 'even better, you'll gain wisdom and tools for drawing closer to others in powerful, impactful ways.' Perhaps I should ask the (remaining) members of my family. Have you noticed me drawing closer to you in one or more powerful, impactful ways?

Inside I have opportunity to invest plenty more money in the church's resources. I can buy a series of 'transforming' Bible study guides that are 'filled with prayer, insight, intimacy and action' (according to the publisher), or better still, for a fee, ensure my church 'reaches its redemptive potential'. Does anyone believe this stuff? Does anyone, believing this stuff, buy this stuff? And why, if it's so good and helpful to the church, and has its origins in a rich local congregation, why don't they just give it away on the internet?

Empty nesting 101 (part 2)

So we drove her down to university, having offloaded the dog for the day. She had spent two days emptying her room and loading up the car. We clambered in among the pots, pans, books, clothes,  clutching her laptop and netbook. She's only an hour and a half away, for goodness sake.

We found the hall of residence and along with 500 others unloaded our stuff. I looked at all these parents around me. Were they all feeling the same thing? We walked to the high street and had a lovely farewell meal in a French restaurant. Our last meal. We looked in at her boyfriend's place in the same hall of residence and then went to the car. 'Let's just do this quickly,' said my wife, so I hugged this brand new student and we drove home. Just about the saddest, sweetest day of my life.

Empty nesting 101 (part 1)

This is an anti enthusiasm of the month.

We had known it was coming for a long time, and occasionally felt a little weight in the pit of the stomach. We had asked friends about it. 'It's like a bereavement', they told us. Sometimes I had noticed the passing milestones: her last school year with us, her final summer, her final month. Finally today, the final day. My wife cooked all our favourite stuff: dim sum, char siew pau, chicken rice, ice cream. We played a game of cluedo, then a couple of games of table football. (We have a table football table in our lounge.)

Now we can use the word 'riffola'

Commentary on new words added to the Oxford English Dictionary

'One surprise of this range was the fecundity of riff n.⁵ (and riff v.¹) in producing new nouns referring to the playing of catchy musical phrases. Besides riffage, this update also includes new entries for the whimsical riffola n. and the retro rifferama n. These words entered the English language amid an explosion of popular music journalism in the second half of the twentieth century, coined by critics who apparently felt limited by the staid predictability of riffing n. The three new entries are only the tip of a neologistic iceberg: OED's files also contain examples of riffery, riffdom, riffmongery, and riffology, among others which may eventually be considered for inclusion in future updates. (The OED)

The prodigal who didn't quite make it home

Rembrandt's Parable of the Prodigal Son  has the returnee resting his young, shaved head on his father's chest while the father's great rich cloak covers him -- an anguished baby, sleeping at last.  Marilynne Robinson's returning prodigal comes home to his father, is welcomed and loved, wants to love back, tries to love back, but never yet settles his head on his father's breast.

We try to love -- we fail to love -- we lose hope of ever loving -- yet in the trying and failing and losing hope love itself arrives: a hesitant presence. Nothing happens in this book: two letters, plenty of meals, a lot of gardening, a couple of visits to church, some games of scrabble.Yet breathing gets a little hard in the final few pages.

Reading Marilynne Robinson (#2)

Interesting to compare Mariilynne Robinson's Home and  Gilead with Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible.

Both are:

• Set in the 1950s or early 1960s
• Feature an American preacher and his large family
• Prizewinning, acclaimed books

The Poisonwood Bible has an evil, bigotted missionary, shattering the lives of wife, dysfunctional children, and society around him. This, it seems to me, is the default view of Christian ministers in modern thought.


Home and Gilead are more ambitious, and more startlingly fresh. They trace the puzzles and struggles and imponderables faced by good people, people who love and are loved -- funnily enough, a lot nearer 'truth' than the mad bully of Poisonwood.

Reading Marilynne Robinson (#1)

'For her, church was an airy white room with tall windows looking out on God's good world, with God's good sunlight pouring in through those windows and falling across the pulpit where her father stood, straight and strong, parsing the broken heart of humankind and praising the loving heart of Christ. That was church.' Home, p 52.

Shirley, a Victorian novel to avoid

I grew up about a mile from the 'Fieldhead House' of this novel and a mile in another direction from 'Briarmains'. The local council, in a fit of local pride, had called the local council estate 'Shirley', a fact that never struck me as odd until this moment. Equally odd is the truth that Shirley never was a girl's name until this novel.

You can strain out some nourishment. As a social history it reminds us that the past was just like the present, only more extreme (the unwashed Methodists,  holding prayer meetings; the mill owner shooting a rioter dead and then getting the ringleaders sent to Australia, magistrates taking a robust view of law-breaking among the lower classes in those days; the genteel women stitching for the Missionary Basket, designed to raise funds for overseas missions). Proto-feminism stirs: the book includes a discussion over a garden fence between two neighbours about the First Letter of Timothy, Chapter 2, for example.

There ought to be rules, however, that even Victorian novels should follow. Finely chisel your characters as you must, and you must. But don't show off your French. Don't write a chapter when a page will do. Don't have the plotting of a melodrama or a farce. (Gosh, my best friend's companion turns out to be my estranged mother! The male protagonist has a dishy brother! He's staying in the same house as the estranged mother! Now both girls can get married!) And don't, whatever you do, create a heroine whose main problem is that she sits around bored all day. It can give Victorian novels, not to mention housing estates, a bad name.

A Romanian bookshop

Eastern Europeans have a bit more of a reputation for things cerebral than the rest of us, hence families of chess-players like the Polgar sisters and playwrights-turned-president like Vaclav Havel and universities that turn out doctors and engineers rather than graduates in film studies.

Three days ago I visited a Romanian bookshop in the western town of Timosoara, home of the Romanian counter-revolution, and with buildings that still bear the scars from Ceaucescu's tanks back in Christmas 1989.

The first two books I saw were a collection of the writings of Schopenhauer and a box-set of criticisms of Freud. Edging past those with some trepidation, I found a happy sprinkling of the modern stuff modern stuff (Steig Larsson for example), but a larger collection of classics, 19th and 20th century, some in Romanian, some in English. The shop held only perhaps 2000 titles, plus a cafe where you could presumably discuss the absurdity of life and shrug a lot, though sadly not while smoking. Almost every title was worth taking the time to read (though the winter nights in Romania would have to be both very long and very cold for me to pick up the Schopenhauer.) 

Compare with a chain bookstore in  England where you squeeze past a front table piled with 3-for 2  biographies of Colleen Rooney and waspish memoirs by out-of-luck politicians plunging their heads one last time in the feeding trough.   We are victims of publishers' bribery and hype. Romania teaches me that bookshops should filter for greatness. Among our local fare only the great Topping and Co of Ely comes close.

The OED

My family didn't get this at all when I enthusiastically shared how I now had access to the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the definitive guide to the largest language in the known universe,  one of the great achievements of the librarian instinct that lurks inside human beings, and it hides behind a paywall. But I found I can access it for free by using my library card -- our local library subscribes to it.

So now when I want to look up:

hi-hat

or

scrip

as I needed to two days ago or discover whether the word 'luck' is derived from the word 'Lucifer,' I can. (It isn't).

It's like getting the keys to the linguistic universe. What a resource. What a discovery. So why do my family look at me so strangely?

A world of their own

Owl-eyed theologians, pale from too much time in the library, people who get pushed aside in bus queues, tell their students of 'wrestling' with theological texts.

Now a review of a history book from a history don in Cambridge:

'Experts are likely to be dissatisfied with what might seem too brief a treatment of their specialist period. But these are risks worth taking.' (BBC History magazine, June 2010, p 70.)

Raw courage, it seems--daring risk-taking, hazarding everything on a wild gamble--still thrives in Britain.

Definitely too many

There are 1.4 million books in print.

Reading one every three days would take you eleven and a half thousand years.

Elections

I appreciate politicians -- doing a job I don't want to do -- and I love elections. I could wish they had national ones every year.

There's an amateur core at their heart: a friend of mine was talking about how she and her 4 months pregnant friend, were once struggling to carry a polling booth downstairs ready for a 7:00am start, and then wedging it desperately against chairs to make it stand up. I love the way that we, the governed, get to speak back after four or five years of being spoken to. I'm grateful that I live in a country where leaders come and go because of the silent voice of a million pencil crosses, scratched in draughty village halls and chapels. I love the freedom of standing in that rickety polling booth, and in perfect confidentiality, voting for who the heck I like. 'Surely God was in that place, and we knew it not.'

Balance

'The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals and 362 admonishments to heterosexuals. That doesn't mean that God doesn't love heterosexuals. It's just that they need more supervision.'

--Lynn Lavner, comedian and musician

(Quoted in Just Sex?,a helpful but rather slow moving and over-footnoted appeal for Christian values, published by the Relationships Foundation.)

A mostly nice feeling

Have just been holding the first copies of my book Life Lessons: life changing stories for Christian growth. It didn’t take long to find the Great Big Hairy Audacious Mistake that publishers take pride in inserting, either on the cover or the opening page.

(This one? missions spelt mission’s on the back cover. Written, it says subliminally, by a greengrocer who also sells banana’s. Nice.)

Each of the nine contributors, friends and colleagues of mine from the mission agency WEC International, describe lessons that changed their lives for ever.

The idea is that learning from someone else’s mistakes is less painful than learning from your own. I edited this and also wrote a chapter, about what near-death experiences can teach about time management.

You can find it in Christian bookstores, order from any bookshop, or follow the Amazon link.

Published by Christian Focus Publications

ISBN 978-1-84550-555-4

God and John Polkinghorne

The physicist turned priest is a welcome voice of rationality in a subject dominated by the extreme and second-rate thinking of the creationists and the Dawkins-ists.


A general approach:

A belief in God offers a way of making sense of the broadest possible band of human experience, of uniting in a single account the rich and many-layered encounter that we have with the way things are (p 24).

The metaphysical net offered by science is insufficient to explain the whole range of human encounter. So: The impersonal is not to be preferred to the personal, the objective to the subjective, the quantifiable to the symbolic, the repeatable to the unique. All are part of the one world of our experience (p24).

Some strange, deep things about the fabric of the universe that are beautifully explained by a theistic faith, and much less elegantly explained by atheism:

1. Rational beauty: why is it that in fundamental physics, pure maths, developed or discovered with no eye on the universe, turns out to describe the universe beautifully? Why is it that the physicist's pursuit of the elegant has repeatedly uncovered truth? Why is the universe (to the eye of the physicist) so rational, so beautiful?

2. Finely tuned fruitfulness. This is the so-called anthropic argument. The constants of nature (gravitation, speed of light, strong and weak nuclear forces and on and on) more or less have to have the value they have. Change any of them in a tiny way, and you produce a sterile cosmos. Why then do we live in this finely-tuned universe that produces life? Is it because there are a near-infinite number of universes, so that at least one works properly?

Or is it because the cosmos is like those equations that are set in Maths exams -- carefully selected out of an infinite set of possible exam questions to suit that author's higher purpose.

3.A value-laden world. 'From the practice of science to the acknowledgment of moral duty, on to aesthetic delight and religious experience, we live in a world which is the carrier of value at all levels of our meeting with it'

and

'all these truly human experiences are at the centre of our encounter with reality and are not to be dismissed as epiphenomenal froth on the surface of a universe whose true nature is impersonal and lifeless' (p 19) (he claims).

4. The mystery of hope. We have a 'deep intuition of hope' that instinctively looks to meaning beyond our lives, life after death, hope of a new day and a new universe. Christian faith explains this; there may be other explanations too, but Christian faith is a compelling one.

Vision statement of the month

'Engineering excellence in waste container technology'

Spotted on a van in Central London, from a wheely bin manufacturer.

I think it's wheely good.

Fresh Expressions

Bishop Graham Cray gave the missiology lectures at Fuller Seminary last year. He provides a summary of the Fresh Expressions movement in the UK. For example:

• They know of about 3,000 fresh expressions of church in the UK. 90% of them have started since 2004
• The Church of England this year will do church planting training in 40 locations. No-one in the country will be more than an hour's drive from a thorough course in cross-cultural mission.
• A third of the UK population have never had any connection with a church and 'while we were busy doing church, the culture changed'. Reaching these is now cross-cultural ministry, pure and simple.

Absolutely fascinating way of whiling away a long journey or (as in my case) a sleepless night. Downloadable from the ITunes Store (for free): search for 'Graham Cray' or navigate to Fuller Seminary in I Tunes U.

FA cup third round

After six years of pain.

Good afternoon Man U.

It's important.

T-shirts

These T-shirt sellers definitely make the world a better place. Among their slogans:

Dyslexics are Teople Poo

Olaf Stapledon: The Star Maker

This is one of the most remarkable books I have ever read.

Philosophy is supposed to be a series of footnotes to Plato. In the same way, the science fiction I have read might be said to be footnotes to this work by Stapledon.

Arthur C Clarke called it 'the most powerful work of imagination ever written.' Doris Lessing (nobel laureate) and Virginia Woolf (uber establishment literata and name-check dream-chick) heaped praise on it.

It isn't really a novel. It's essentially an overview of a person's experience becoming more and more aware of all the life in the universe, and of the Star Maker himself. As such, it works like Russian dolls in reverse: each succeeding vision is larger than the rest. You wonder where the inventiveness comes from. You wonder if he's ever going to stop. You wonder what he was on when he wrote this.

Finally there is an encounter with the Star Maker himself, which, amazingly, doesn't disappoint.
Truly a classic.

Five faces of poverty

Rather intense blogging at the moment because I have time and health to try to think about the stuff I've been reading and thinking about when ill.

What is poverty? Pastor and writer Malcolm Duncan defines five faces of poverty:

1. Material poverty -- the face most obvious: low income, few possessions.
2. Spiritual poverty -- this is the one the evangelical missions and churches have focussed on: the lack of the knowledge of Jesus and his Kingdom. Of course spiritual poverty is in a sense the condition of all of us.
3. Civic poverty -- 'the lack of opportunity for the excluded and poor to shape their own future'. For example, I once knew someone whose life-savings had been snatched by the Marcos regime in the Philippines. 'The poor man buys a field; injustice sweeps it away'. Dealing with civic poverty has tradionally been the domain of politics, perhaps especially communism.
4. Identity poverty: the voices in the head that say we are worthless, won't amount to much.
5. Aspirational poverty: closely related to civic poverty and identity poverty, it is the crushing of hope.

This is from Micah's Challenge: The Church's Responsibility to the Global Poor, pp 151 - 163.

Creativity

Be steady and well-ordered in your life so you can be fierce and original in your work.

--Gustave Flaubert, quoted in Wired UK, Jan 10, p 84.

Children in 'care'

In Denmark (so I read) 6 out 0f 10 children in care go to university

In the UK, only 6 out of 100 do. Far more go to prison or become teenage mums.

Anyone who sits in Magistrates' courts will note what a high percentage of offenders come from 'care' backgrounds.

Let's save money by investing in social justice.

Blessed are the pacemakers

The main reason I haven't blogged much this autumn is I've been hospital, getting treatment for irregular (both slow and very fast) heartbeats. Part of the treatment was a pacemaker. I can't tell you the pleasure I get from listening to my heart-beat in bed, a steady 70 beats per minute, set by this machine embedded above my left nipple.

So much better than the horrible swooping feeling earlier when your heart appears to stop. Blessed are the pacemakers. A pulse is one of those things you never miss, until you haven't got it.

The poor: the missing jewel of the evangelical church

Have enjoyed working through Micah's challenge which talks about the church's obligations to the poor, and boasts a preface by Gordon Brown. Cunningly the publishers then presumably persuaded David Cameron and the atheist Nick Clegg to also write commendations to keep up. So it's a well-accredited book.

It's also very good, if demanding, reading. Some themes:

1. Working among the poor is integral to the kingdom of God. Preachers shouldn't say, ' read your Bible, pray, invite people to church'. They should say 'read your Bible, pray, invite people to church, and be good news to the poor.'

2. It shows how God hates structural sin (unjust trade, for example) as much as personal sin.

3. It shows how the kingdom of God advances -- in N T Wright's arresting phrase, 'The call of the gospel is for the church to implement the victory of God in the world through suffering love.'

Somebody needs to write a popular version. Highly recommended.

At last a 'Christian novel' that I wanted to read

I'm not at all sure about the idea of 'Christian fiction' as a genre. Much better usually to think just of 'fiction'. What Jesus did with parables, novelists who are Christians can do with novels: attack people's hearts, invite people to explore further. And so on.

My Name is Russell Fink by Michael Snyder is perhaps an exception to this rule. It is funny, agreeably dysfunctional, and peopled with entertaining characters. To those who would avoid 'Christian fiction' because (a) it's a peculiar idea to start with and (b) it conjures up books for homemakers in the American Midwest that mention the word 'prairie' a lot, this is a mould-breaker.

You could give it to your non-Christian friends with no embarrassment. Book clubs could read and appreciate it. It is a happy, light novel of a hapless photocopier salesman finding God (and a girl), and solving the puzzle of his poisoned dog. In other words, it is completely unlike, thank goodness, The Shack. I liked it a lot. I see Amazon resellers have it for as little as £1.35; got to be worth a punt.

Reasons to read novels #433

"Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read." Groucho Marx.

a chunk of goodness

It's chocolate week, apparently. Not a bad time to note that fairtrade consumption of the stuff in the UK has risen from £1m of sales in 1998 to £26.8m in 2008. The joys and power of consumer pressure.

According to the same grauniad report, Cadbury's Dairy Milk's conversion to Fairtrade --so welcome -- is thanks to a large farmer's cooperative in Ghana, called Kuapa Kokoo, itself nurtured over many years by the pioneers of the Divine Chocolate brand. Chalk up another unheralded advance for the Kingdom of God.

Restoring my faith in independent bookshops

Spent part of my lunch hour at Topping & Co, Bookseller in Ely. It isn't huge, but it does restore your faith in the bookselling business.

Unlike the big chains, the fiction shelves weren't crammed with the latest, ephemeral titles, prised into the shop by publishers as 3-for-the-price-of-2s.

I can't say I recognized every book on the shelves (that would spoil the fun). I thought I could pick the main theme though. Whoever buys for this shop loves good books, in all their idiosyncracy, stubbornness, contrariness, brilliance. Books, mostly, that will still be good books a generation from now. Today's publishers, in contrast, seem to worship me-tooism and celebrity and the moment.

They love hardbacks at Toppings, and good luck to them. I wish I had enough money to buy a hardback every time. They hold very frequent author evenings with your ticket price redeemable against the (presumably) signed, hardback price. Sometimes they hold the evenings in the shop, at others, at the local village hall, which (this being Ely) happens to be an 11th century Cathedral.

Books aren't products. People aren't consumers. Books are filet of mind and people are people. May this shop last as long as the Cathedral has.

I want one of these

Ah, technology

Reasons to write novels #34

You learn more profoundly if you have to work it out.

Here's St Augustine:

no one disputes that is is much more pleasant to learn lessons presented through imagery, and much more rewarding to discover meanings that are won only with difficulty.
(On Christian Teaching.)

(You could say much more about this quote. For example, Augustine also thought that a 'helpful and healthy obscurity' was a characteristic of the scriptures, and shouldn't be a characteristic of Christian teachers; those questions could be argued; but leave that aside for a moment, or imagine he is just talking about parables.)


Boccaccio in his Life of Dante (1374) made a similar remark about poetry:

It is obvious that everything that is acquired with toil has more sweetness in it than that which comes without trouble. The plain truth, because it is so quickly understood with little effort, delights us, and is forgotten. So, in order that truth acquired by toil should be more pleasing and that it should be better preserved, the poets concealed it under matters that appeared to be wholly contrary to it. They chose fables, rather than any other form of concealment, because their beauty attracts those whom neither philosophic demonstrations nor persuasions could have touched ... [poets] are profoundly intelligent in their methods, as regards the hidden fruit, and of an excellent and beautiful eloquence as regards the bark and visible leaves.

Both these quotations are lifted directly from the discussion on storytelling in Jules Lubbock's art history book, Storytelling in Christian Art from Giotto to Donatello.

The cannabis factories of Cambridgeshire

Here's how it works:

1. It's run as a business by Vietnamese organized crime syndicates. Chased out of Canada by aggressive policing, they've arrived here.

2. They find a nice detached house for rent in the kind of new-build neighbourhood where everyone has two jobs and is out all day; there are no neighbours looking out for each other.

3. They pay cash.

4. They invite in the first of the contractors, electricians who divert electricity from before the meter, feed it upstairs and set up transformers, timers, fans, and 600W lights. Each house uses £19,000 of electicity each year.

5. Next the whole upstairs is lined with polythene

6. Finally the cannabis plants arrive as little cuttings in rockwool, with plenty of compost.

7. They supply the needs for the gardener: a freezer full of meat, herbs and vegetables, a wok, a rice cooker, a TV.

8. In comes the gardener, often someone who has been trafficked. He lives in the bottom of the house. He isn't allowed to leave. Police often find instructions on how to raise the plants in easy Vietnamese steps. The people who trafficked him claim they will send money to his family.

9. The gardener never leaves the house. The downstairs looks normal; the upstairs, curtained off, with plenty of condensation, and a huge fire risk.

10. Cannabis plants are tender and not unlike tomatoes in their general cultivation. Normally they take a season to grow, coming into bud as the days shorten. However in the intensive, carefully planned care of the specialists, a crop can be ready in 10 weeks. Each room will produce about £32K's worth of cannabis (per year? per crop? I can't remember).

11. The cannabis is taken away for processing.

Cambridgeshire police are shutting down approximately one of these factories every week. The gardener gets 1-2 years in jail and is deported; the landlord gets a bill of perhapd £12,000 to rebuild his house. (£1000 for the door the police kicked in; several hundreds or more to be reconnected safely to the grid...)

How to solve the problem?

1. Police forces should talk to each other. Each force is only arresting the 'gardeners'. No-one is going after the serious professionals who run the operation.

2. Cannabis seed, though not seedlings, is legal to buy in the EU. You can apparently download seed catalogues that list the different qualities of each seed. The sees are genetically modified to produce female plants only, the ones that bud.

3. A national strategy could move the organized criminals on, just as happened in Canada. But it isn't happening.

Another one bites the dust

Telegraph chatters
A vote of no confidence
The Speaker, unplugged?

Tracking the sun, the old fashioned way

Solar panels don't move when the sun does, which is a drawback. Ideally you need some technology that moves them around automatically, so that they stay in the sun all day. The answer, as my daughter pointed out, is already to hand. Tie them to a dog:




There is an issue with rolling over, but otherwise, it's promising.

Political haikus

Was musing on uses for twitter and noticed that someone had mentioned how twitter's 140 characters is the perfect medium for the 5-7-5 format of a haiku. Clearly, we need a new breed of columnists, such as the political Haiku writer who brightens our days:

Home Secretary
Smith is In hot water but
has her own bath-plug

or

Boom and bust no more!
(according to Gordon); just
The wrong kind of bust

Too true

'Any fool can write a novel, but it takes real genius to sell it.' (the now late) J G Ballard

Persepolis -- the best book on Iran I've ever read

Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis is a insider story of:

• the Iranian revolution,
• the Gulf (Iran-Iraq) War (about which we in the West were so cruelly complacent),
• how fugitives to the West are mostly welcomed by the alternative cultures, not the mainstream ones
• Teenagerhood
• Freedom and its contradictions
  

and with a walk on part by

• God.

It's all told in cartoon form. It's the best thing I've ever read on Iran and one of the best books I've read about living under an Islamist regime.

(I also just finishedThe Reluctant Fundamentalist.
This novella also a lot of fun and well worth reading, but compared with Persepolis is a bit pompous and self-important.)

I found it the sort of book you have to put down while you walk around and try to think about it. Things like:

• Why don't we understand Iranians as victims of totalitarianism, quite as much as people in Mao's China or Stalin's Russia?
• How much teenagers need surrogate parents and grandparents;
• How people can end up on the streets; and get off them again.

What a gem of a book.

In praise of TED

TED is a series of conferences in which a stellar array of speakers are given 18 minutes to give 'the talk of their lives'.

Everything is available freely as downloadable video or audio. Everyone's there: Tim Berners-Lee, Al Gore, Billy Graham, Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond, Martin Rees (whom I nearly bumped into on King's Parade in Cambridge on Christmas Day), Bill Gates. There's Hans Rosling, the man who makes statistics dance, and scores of others.

Dare I say, the breadth of lectures available, it's even better than living in Cambridge.

The whole thing is the brainchild of someone called Chris Anderson who founded a series of computer magazines in the UK and then moved to the States, but is a different Chris Anderson from his good friend Chris Anderson who is also UK born and also moved to the states and edits Wired magazine and has already appeared in this blog. So good, God made two of them evidently.

Spotify

Legal access to all the world's music. Downloaded on the fly, not stored on your hard disk. Ad-funded, or you can buy a subscription. Build playlists. Only recently opened to non-invitees. I'm totally sold. Even a complete musical puddinghead like me. It's the utter business.

Some other Updike quotes

The little flourishing of John Updike quotes that has occurred in the press now he's died are worth filing somewhere:

On religion:

I am very prone to accept all that the scientists tell us, the truth of it, the authority of the efforts of all the men and women spent trying to understand more about atoms and molecules. But I can't quite make the leap of unfaith, as it were, and say: 'This is it: carpe diem, and tough luck.'


On writing:

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

Reasons to write novels #17

'The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion' (John Updike)

The meaning of life

Easily found in Sebastian Faulks' book Human Traces, which I've just finished with my reading group. The book, by the way, is beautifully done, its characters rich, its historical scenes and ideas vivid as it explores what it is to be human through the lives of two head-doctors. Such a fine writer.

(Digression: The jacket warns you that this book is 'ambitious' which means in this case that two extensive chapters are given over to psychological lectures, and is thus a publisher's aide memoire to give the author smaller advances in future, so that he doesn't spend quite so much time in the library for his next book.)

The main protagonist, Sonia (wife to one shrink and sister to the other), reflects on her life and losses and still concludes:

'Was it worth it? Was it worth the agony of loss? ...

'... it was enough, because nothing in any other world that might by chance have existed could have surpassed in majesty what she had felt; and she was transfigured by that joy, always, and even beyond death.'

Love is the meaning of life; simple really.

Parenting classes and social mobility

'There's an urgent need to improve parenting.

'The evidence base is now very strong indeed ... you can make mums (and it is almost invariably mums on their own) who want to be better parents. You can make them better parents but you need to train them.'

Martin Narey, Head of Barnados, and former head of the Prison Service, in a radio discussion on improving social mobility. (BBC Week in Westminster 1/17/09)

My books of the year

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.

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.

A chinese Christian analyses the West

Technological optimism and literary pessimism' is the conclusion of Carver T Yu.




The guy's Amazon sales rank is 2 million and something, even below that of Gordon's Brown's latest book, so rally round.

Not that I read him, of course: he was quoted in Lesslie Newbiggin

I'm really sorry, but I liked 'the Shack'. Eventually.

OK:

Robotic dialogue
Minimal characterization
Really a work of theology, not fiction (though the same could be said for Pilgrim's Progress)
'Like the sort of Christian leaflet I get shoved through my letterbox', said one shocked and unimpressed member of our book club. (None of the self-professed non-Christians in our group liked it at all. They hated it. One looked at the Amazon reviews and couldn't believe them.)

Worst, a cloying schlockiness that keeps trying to suck you in and swallow you forever.

This book is as easy to criticise as George W Bush.

But then you get to this artful picture of God and redemption, and the way sets off all kinds of chords in your heart. You note its nice pace, its filmic quality. You feel its freshness. You find yourself thinking about what it said long after you put the book down. You love the way the sheer volume of its sales has forced it into Borders and onto the bestseller lists. And it deserved to, not by being a literary masterpiece but by that insight and power that makes people choose it above better-written books and spend time with it. And you conclude ... OK, I liked it too. Eventually and partially.

Patient revolutionaries

Newbiggin calls Christians 'patient revolutionaries'.

Darcy, Lizzie, two ways of knowing, and the meaning of life

This is complicated but worth it.

I've been reading that theological polymath Leslie Newbiggin who reads so widely himself that you get an instant, distilled education into all sorts of hard books that you aren't brainy enough to pick up yourself.

He talks about two ways of knowing: 'I-it' and 'I-thou'. I-it is about knowing things; I-thou is about knowing persons.

You learn I-it stuff by reading, research, analyzing.

You learn I-thou stuff by humbling yourself, listening, being vulnerable.

What a deep principle this is, running right through the world and the heavenlies.

So (for example) in Pride and Prejudice Mr Darcy is a master of I-it. Rich, educated, powerful. He knows everything. But none of it works with Lizzie. She's only interested in I-thou. And of course, so, deep down, is Darcy. She meets a deep need of his heart, a need that no amount of I-it can satisfy. And so the story is about how he has to humble himself, listen, be vulnerable, and get launched into the exotic, tender world of I-thou knowing.

Here (to take a second example) is where the materialist comes unstuck. I have not read all of Richard Dawkins but I have read enough to know that his whole approach is I-it. Brilliantly argued, wonderfully convincing, construe it how you like, it's still I-it. But the God of the Christians is I-thou. All I-it pathways will bypass him.

Look (to take a third example) at how it splits up the world's religions:

Mainstream Islam? It's the straight path, the rules: I-it
Sufism? That's I-thou, but it's a counter-trend in Islam.

Christianity: where it's I-thou it lives, even if it's very deficient. Where it's I-it, 'even what you have will be taken from you'

If you want to know about truth, ask a quantum physicist

Physicists are, of course, rarely asked for sensible comments about anything. They make cameo appearances in the media where they are asked silly questions by journos who spend the time boasting about how little they understand science.

A pity. Here's the world according to the very quotable Neils Bohr, one of the founders of quantum mechanics.

You will note (this is an aside) how many of these quotes are actually statements of faith -- you need a lot of faith to get anywhere in quantum physics.

'Prediction is very difficult, especially concerning the future.'

'How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress. '

'The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth. '

'You are not thinking. You are merely being logical. '

I borrowed these quotes from here.

Spinning the Kingdom in new directions

I've really enjoyed this article, of which this is an extract:

There are no copies in creation, no cheap imitations. And this is not because God micromanages the world, but because God apparently loves freedom. God loves watching things grow. Is it any wonder that God enjoys cooperating with you and me to do his moral and spiritual work? Our choices, good and bad, constantly spin the Kingdom of Heaven in new and unforeseen directions. We are creative coworkers with the Almighty.

The drugs scandal

Some figures out today:

• 202,000 people had therapy for drug use in England last year from 150,000 tax-payer-funded employers in 'drug action teams'
• 7,300 people were discharged drug-free.

So:

• This is a policy with a 96% failure rate.
• We have 20 full-time members of a drug action team for every one person freed from drugs each year.

The UK's policy on drugs is so-called harm-reduction by parking heroin users (especially) on methodone prescriptions. The UK spends £250m a year on methodone and other similar drugs. Methodone is widely sold by methodone users.

Betel, the drug charity associated with the mission I work for, uses abstinence therapy rather than Methodone. In the UK, the tax payer only contributes Housing Benefit (which we are paying anyway). Betel currently has 0ver 1900 recovering addicts in communities in 75 cities across the world.

Vocation

Look for your calling in the place "where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."
(Frederick Buechner).

Nominative determinism

The head of discipline in my son's school is Miss Playfair

The head of sport in the same school is Mr Ball

Now I just heard that a senior manager at the supermarket Waitrose, the one they always interview when they want to do a piece on the rising cost of living, is Mark Price.

It's silly and it should be stopped.

In praise of Librivox

Have just discovered Librivox, which is doing for audio recordings of classic books what Project Gutenberg is doing for text files. Making them free and universally available, that is.

You can dripfeed your ipod with them chapter by chapter (not unlike how many of them were first written, in installments) or download the whole book at once. It's amateur and it's great. What a fantastic project.

What's not to like?

Well, American accents mostly. I'm listening to Vanity Fair at the moment and in the hands of the readers it suddenly transforms into an early American novel. Chiswick Mall is pronounced Chis-wick. I know, I know. But perhaps since the whole project is likely sustained by American generosity at many levels it's churlish to complain.

It's free, you don't have to use your eyes, and in the insomniac small hours it doesn't even bear comparison with Up All Night or the perpetually miserable Farming Today.

Pilgrim's Progress is even better, and the reader's accent smooth and soothing.

Midsummer

This seems a cheerful world, Donatus, when I view it from this fair garden under the shadow of these vines. But if I climbed some great mountain and looked over the wide lands, you know very well what I would see. Brigands on the high road, pirates on the seas, in the amphitheatres men murdered to please the crowds, under all roofs misery and selfishness. It is a really bad world, Donatus, an incredibly bad world.

Yet in the midst of it I have found a quiet and holy people. They have discovered a joy which is a thousand times better than any pleasures of this sinful life. They are despised and persecuted but they care not. They have overcome the world. These people, Donatus, are the Christians ... and I am one of them.
(St Cyprian to Donatus, 3rd Century AD).

Rough sleeping: it wasn't zero

There was a person sleeping in the doorway of Arbury Rd Baptist Church (see previous post).

But it was nearly zero.

Poverty: fighting the banana wars

Have just enjoyed Fighting the Banana Wars by Harriet Lamb, executive director of the Fairtrade Foundation. You actually do have to use the dread word 'inspirational' about this. It really is about small people, many wearing both beards and sandals, taking on the multinationationals for the sake of justice for the world's poor.

They're seeing a huge stride, from the days when Fairtrade coffee didn't even taste like coffee, to Sainsbury's fresh fruit buyer saying recently, 'I see Fairtrade as the gold standard for global sourcing from developing countries -- our preferred option wherever possible.' (p155)

Here's Bruce Crowther, Quaker, Oxfam campaigner, and the person who got his local town, Garstang, to become the world's first 'Fairtrade town', one of thousands of little actions that has moved the world, on why he campaigns:

'I don't think you can give up. Our children will look back and ask us how we can live in prosperity while over a billion children live in abject poverty -- including many who produce things we use every day. How could we know this and not do what we could to stop it?' (p44)


Harriet Lamb has some great stories -- a little kid discarding his football shirt because the people who grew the cotton didn't get a fair price. And the time they tried to sell the first-ever fair-trade branded chocolate -- Green & Black's Maya Gold -- to Tesco's. The Tesco buyer had sent the Green & Black's founder, the unlikely-named Jo Fairley, away, saying that he wasn't going to 'list a product just because it's backed by a bunch of Christians'!

'But it wasn't long before he changed his tune and was back on the phone saying, "You'd better get over here, we're being bombarded by telephone calls. From vicars!"' (p61)

Sustainability: the shape of things to come?

Wired Magazine on sustainability is (predictably) concerned with techno-fixes rather than banning polythene bags, which is a lot more fun.

Rebuilding Ely Cathedral

Ely Cathedral is ten miles or so up the road from our home. When it was built in the 14th century, towering among the hovels around it, it stood as a kind of metaphor of the medieval consensus.

In the Church were all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Here was where you found the best art, architecture, technology, music, thought, learning, creativity and skill.

The call on the Church today is not to increase its market share a bit but to have the ambition to build more cathedrals. How about, for starters:

• art that isn't ugly and nihilistic


• economics that is fair and compassionate as well as efficient


• science and technology tamed and embraced as the gifts of a good God.


• families rebuilt


• justice flowing


• fun that is innocent

... and all centred around worshipping communities.

Just conceivably, that's slightly too ambitious. Unless you read the Hebrew prophets, that is, who would tell you you aren't going nearly far enough ...

Tear fund: telling porkies?

Much as I am a fan of Tear Fund (and they've sold lots of my books), have they been caught telling porkies about climate change? They put out publicity in 2006 about a man who caught malaria in the Ethiopian Highlands because of climate change. Careful research showed that over the time they suggested, the mean temperature hadn't risen at all and the natural variability of temperature hadn't changed at all. Have a listen to this.

Rough sleeping: the day it was zero

Our free newspaper reported that as at the last count the number of rough sleepers in Cambridge was: zero -- down from 30 in 1997 and something that has not happened in living memory.

It seems to me this is:
* Mostly due to Zion Baptist Church, who opened Jimmy's Night Shelter in their basement
* Partly due to the (Liberal Democrat) council who helped join together different bits of homeless provision. (The person who takes the lead on this, interestingly, is a colleague of mine and a churchgoer.)
* Somewhat due to the Labour government, providing money for rough sleeper initiatives.

Politics is enjoyable at the moment. In scenes reminiscent of 65 million years ago, New Labour mastodons bellow to each other across the cooling swamps saying, 'We must listen and learn from that giant meteorite.'

Gordon Brown, like some giant wounded herbivore, topples over, mouth fixed in a last, glassy smile, pursued through the TV studios by raptors eager for his corpse. One raptor wants to go back to good old New Labour; the other wants a New Old Labour. Such is the quality of debate in his party as they all head for their future life as a peat bog.

I do believe, though, that (laying aside the 10p tax thing for a moment) no currently working UK politician has done more for the poor than Gordon Brown. Some of the money he provided, thanks to the churches, took every single one of the rough sleepers from Cambridge's streets. Some more bought bed-nets and forgave debts and upped the UK's international aid to about the best in the world. As he crashes into the swamp, never to rise, there are worse legacies.

Mission: the fringe is the centre

Took our youth group to a youth worship meeting last Sunday. It was organized by 16-year-olds, the band was more 16-year-olds, and the main speaker wasn't much older. They also showed one of Rob Bell's nooma videos, trendy post-modern talks set in a diner. About eighty people were present. At the back were a few grizzled youth workers, the usual suspects, old friends from small churches on the edges of Cambridge. (The big central churches tend to be more self-sufficient.)

I think God likes hanging round the fringes. I certainly do. I remember feeling similar when, years ago, I went to interview the leaders of Viva Network, which is an agency that tries to network together the different Christian groups working among children in crisis. They, too, were young, few, new, on the fringes of things, with a large vision.

Theology: So good we can hardly speak

Please be warned that this blog post has a high theological radiation count so feel free to skip it.

OK, it is a bit geekish and perhaps even a little sad to combine 'theology' and 'so good we can hardly speak' in one heading.

It's even more worrying that this blog recently has been all about stuff I've read, ie things going on in my head. Should I not get out more, meet people, do things?

Anyway. I've just finished reading

• A Generous Orthodoxy by Brian McLaren (modish theologian in the emerging church movement) and rereading

• The Open Secret by Lesslie Newbigin (whom I saw once, as a very old man, here in Cambridge).

Along with E Stanley Jones' book mentioned earlier, I can't imagine a better popular theological introduction to what the church should be doing in the world and how it should be doing it. These guys--I may say in a desperate attempt to show that I did get out more once, about a decade ago--rock.

The last few weeks I have heard the grind and creak of heavy furniture being moved around in my head.

The best thing I've learnt is that, through Christ, everything matters. Bednets in Africa matter. Fun and play matters. Adoring Jesus in a quiet room on your own matters. Dinner with my kids matters. Everything matters. Body and soul and community and creation all matter. I need to discard the Phariseeism that I have been schooled in (which says only spiritual stuff really matters). Body, soul, community, creation all die -- and are all raised, so they all matter, and they are indispensable parts of a whole.

What fun.

Famous for ten more minutes

Modesty almost forbids me, ahem, from putting in this link to this writing competition in Singapore. We were lucky enough to be named among the winners. We had to write about reasons to visit Singapore, and the prize was a trip there, wrapped up in Business Class flights and being filmed and photographed.

My singapore experience

Arthur C Clarke is dead

What a sad week: Terry Pratchett is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. No-one comes close as an F&SF comic writer and inspiration -- a pole star who says to me that (at least once) it can be done. Someone can write fantasy that's funny, shrewd, happy, with developed characters and crafted plots. The covers of his books lead you to expect some naff swords-and-sorcery romp; the insides persuade you are in the presence of a fine comic novelist. He too, by the way, like Clarke (and like me) trained as a physicist first.

Then Arthur C Clarke, aged 90, finally gives up his struggle with gravity and decay and leaves the planet by the conventional route. I read everything of his I could lay my hands on when I was a teenager. Like P G Wodehouse, Douglas Adams, and (to a lesser extent because I read him later in life) Terry Pratchett, his ghostly presence shapes what I do and how I think about how writing should be.

If not from him, where else did I get this:

• Studied physics at King's College London and then became a writer
• Was passionate about good, hard, accurate science and maths
• Was fundamentally optimistic about human beings and the future and the galaxy
• Saw technology as a navigable route to magic and wonder and aspiration

Clarke has left instructions for a strictly secular funeral. As a younger man he had a correspondence with CS Lewis which resulted eventually in a meeting in a pub. Each brought along a companion (Lewis brought J R R Tolkien). Lewis was the better theologian; Clarke the better scientist. Each adorned the worlds of fiction and popular apologetic. Each is so close to my heart. I am so privileged and enriched to have been able to drink deeply of them.

Mission: E Stanley Jones

Am rereading E Stanley Jones, missionary to India, friend of Gandhi and I believe several times nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. What a genius. Writing in the 1920s he anticipated, and answered, all the modern critiques of missions. And his book is soul food.

Are missionaries 'international meddlers, creed mongers to the East, feverish ecclesiastics compassing land and sea to gain another proselyte?' Or are we satisfying some 'racial superiority complex' (as many democracy and environment activists surely are today)? Is there 'spiritual impertinence to come to a nation that can produce a Gandhi or a [Rabindrath] Tagore?'

Jones replies that both East and West need three things: 'an adequate goal for character'; 'a free, full life'; 'God'. Christlikeness is the supreme goal for every character. Christ is life realized, not theorized. And Jesus is what God is like. Hence we speak.

Here are some of his juicier quotes:

'Jesus appeals to the soul as light appeals to the eye, as truth fits the conscience, as beauty speaks to the aesthetic nature. For Christ and the soul are made for one another, and when they are brought together deep speaks to deep and wounds answer wounds.'

'Religion is the life of God in the soul issuing in the kingdom of God on earth.'

The quotes are from THE CHRIST OF INDIAN ROAD

William Booth: who being dead, yet speaketh

Have been looking up some quotes from the 19th century reformer and founder of the Salvation Army, Gen William Booth:

“While women weep, as they do now, I'll fight; while children go hungry, as they do now, I'll fight; while men go to prison, in and out, in and out, as they do now, I'll fight; while there is a drunkard left, while there is a poor lost girl upon the streets, while there remains one dark soul without the light of God, I'll fight, I'll fight to the very end!”


“To get a man soundly saved it is not enough to put on him a pair of new breeches, to give him regular work, or even to give him a University education. These things are all outside a man, and if the inside remains unchanged you have wasted your labour. You must in some way or other graft upon the man's nature a new nature, which has in it the element of the Divine.”

Reading Tolstoy and improving my domestic relations

Am enjoying Anna Karenina and going occasionally weak-kneed at the range and depth of the old boy's characterizations. That's what keeps the pages turning, even during the bits on new theories of Russian agricultural productivity. He even tells you what the dog's feeling on at least two occasions.

Am struck by two other things:
1) If the character Levin really is a portrait of Leo himself, he can't have been an easy bloke to live with.

2) I rather like the Russian habit of referring to people by Christian name and patronymic. It seems to add a certain old-fashioned dignity to conversation. Suggested it to my wife as a way of boosting her domestic performance:

'Could you put the samovar on, Cordelia Paulova?'

But alas I feel I would get the reply

'Do it yourself, Glenn Michaelovich.'

Anna Karenina (Wordsworth Classics)

Poverty: Bono demostrates why rock stars are the new prophets

We are supposed to have a war on something, but it isn't 'terror'.

Bono at the NAACP awards

The emmaus community, and social entrepreneurship

Talked recently with the founder of Emmaus Cambridge, who has just been awarded a CBE. Emmaus is a community that offers work and accommodation for single men. Many of them are people who, otherwise, would be washed in and out of the Magistrates' Courts as regularly as if carried on the tides.

1.When Emmaus was being set up, apparently a junior planner was handling the application and made a long list of every planning reason why it should be turned down: they proposed to handle scrap metal on the site. It was on the flight path of Cambridge airport. A senior planner, however, apparently took the case over and was determined to use planning law positively and find every reason why it could be allowed. The plans were passed by a single vote.

2. Emmaus Cambridge cost £2m to set up but careful research has suggested it saves the government £600,000 a year.

3. Government is extremely weak at letting social entrepreneurs experiment with government cash. Only Northern Rock directors get to do that, and they took it all. Otherwise, perhaps, there could be an Emmaus in every town.

Writing: Not a normal life

1. Got the latest royalty statement from my publisher. Books sold in the last period: approaching 1,000. They're good books, too. Royalties paid: Not even near to £100. Cue half-hearted rant: wish I had an agent, what am I doing wrong, etc.

2. Yesterday got a phone call on a satellite-delayed line from Singapore. I entered a competition before Christmas organized by the Singapore Govt and they were telling me I'd won: one A4 piece of paper with marks on it translates into two business-class roundtrip tickets to Singapore plus a stay in a five-star hotel. It's all here

It partially makes up for being roughed up by publishers. I still want to get them back, though, by publishing a best-seller.

Poverty: Those wonderful funds

'Major global health financiers, such as the Global fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation are showing returns on their investments. In less than four years, financing through the Global Fund alone has resulted in more than 1.1m people receiving treatment for AIDS. Now, overall, more than 2m people receive AIDS treatment-- a tenfold increase in four years ...

'And more than 30m insecticide-treated bed nets have been distributed to protect families from malaria. The number of people saved from early death through these interventions is already 2m, and this increases by 100,000 ever month.

Michel Kazatchkine, executive director, Global Fund to fight AIDS, HIV and Malaria in The Economist publication The World in 2008. My italics.

Astronomy: my first non-disappointing comet

Went to the astronomy lecture and viewing at the
Institute of Astronomy last night with my son, and queued up with many others to see Comet Holmes, which has undergone some kind of terrible bad hair day and is half a million times more fuzzy than it was last week -- and now an easy naked eye object.

Fan of astrononmy though I am, I have to admit that most objects in telescopes are a bit of disappointment -- Mars, the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn are about the only really good ones. But this here comet Holmes was definitely the most non-disappointing comet I've seen. Here's some pictures.

Lived faithfully a hidden life

Just finished listening to an abridged version of George Eliot's Middlemarch. The abridgement didn't bring out all it could've -- especially the book's modern-sounding theme, that noble ideals sometimes lead to disappointing lives -- the noble outcomes being subverted by naivety, pride, mistakes, or unforgiving convention.

The abridgement kept Eliot's original ending in full, which was a kind of resurrection for this subverted idealism, and a lovely quote:

that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to
the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Science and religion: Polkinghorne at the Royal Society

I've listened to this three times. It's really good.


Here's roughly where it goes, from the introductory blurb to the lecture.

'Science and religion are both concerned with the search for truth, attainable through well-motivated beliefs. The aspects of reality they investigate are different - in the case of science, the impersonal, physical world; in the case of religion, the transpersonal reality of God. Neither can tell the other what to think in its own domain, but their insights have to bear some consonant relation to each other.

'Science tells theology about the structure and history of the universe and, in particular, emphasises its evolutionary nature.

'Religious insight can set the laws of nature in a more profound context of understanding, so that their deep order, rational beauty and anthropic fine-tuning become intelligible features and need not to be treated as brute facts.

'As a consequence, there is a vigorous and enlightening intellectual exchange between the two."

Spaceflight: The beagle is grounded

Went to a lecture by Prof Colin Pillinger last night. All the times I've seen and heard him, I never realized that he was disabled, hobbling around on two sticks. What a fighter.

• He did Beagle not because it was easy but -- in the Kennedy-like cliche -- because it was hard
• The UK is the fifth richest nation on the planet, but spends on space like we were the 17th richest
• Two-thirds of probes to Mars have failed. The Public Accounts Committee told Pillinger that they didn't want British taxpayers' money involved unless a project was 99% likely to succeed (so why did they let us go to war against Iraq?)
• Beagle II aimed high, briefly caught the imagination of a nation, fired up a new generation of scientists, and increased the £5bn contribution that space already makes to the UK's GDP. Not bad for a failure that cost us less than a quid each.
  
• The folks at the European Space Agency said they'd help pick up where Beagle left off. The date of this proposed mission has shifted from 2007, to 2009, to 2011, to 2013 and now to 2015. ESA, by the way, criticized Pillinger's management skills.
  

On the other hand: one elderly, crippled, eccentric scientist, against all the odds, nearly pulled it off -- nearly put a probe on Mars, nearly dug into its soil, nearly got to a point where it could have made the greatest scientific discovery of them all.

Beagle cost £55m. When I got home, I read that Cambridge County Council has just put a bid in for over £400m of government money, in order to improve Cambridge's congested traffic.

I am beginning to think I may not walk on the moon, after all.

Rolling Back Malaria (not)

The British Medical Association (back in 2004):

"We have the three tools we need to curb malaria deaths—bed nets, effective combination treatment based on artemisinin, and insecticides. What we urgently need to do is make these tools much more widely available to affected communities, which are almost always too poor to pay for them themselves."

"But even with Roll Back Malaria's best efforts [This is a World Health Organization campaign, started ten years ago], only about one in seven children in Africa sleep under a net, and only 2% of children use a net impregnated with insecticide."

State giving to Roll Back Malaria is running at about 10% of the $1bn or so needed per year that would have halved malaria deaths between 1998 and 2010 (and now won't).

Here's how we can buy and distribute some bed nets, at the bargain price of 10 for £27.

Social Justice: The importance of early years

Just read that

'A child’s education developmental score at 22 months can accurately predict educational outcomes at the age of 26.' (Source: the Social Justice Policy Group report Breakthrough Britain set up by David Cameron, overview, p 8.)

So if you assess a 2 year old, you can predict whether in 24 years time they'll have no qualifications at all or just be tidying up the final draft of their PhD.

Here's some data from the same source about marriage, cohabitation and the welfare of very young children:

• Nearly one in two cohabiting parents split up before their child’s fifth birthday,compared to one in twelve married parents
• Three-quarters of family breakdown affecting young children now involves unmarried parents
• If you have experienced family breakdown, you are 75% more likely to fail at school,70% more likely to be a drug addict and 50% more likely to have alcohol problems.

A thanksgiving prayer for the ability to urinate

Not found in common books of liturgy, I reproduce it here with thanks to the peerless Neal Stephenson who puts the prayer into the mouth of Samuel Pepys. (Lithotomy is of course the removal of a gall stone.)

'Lord of the Universe, Your humble servants Samuel Pepys and Daniel Waterhouse pray that you shall bless and keep the soul of the late Bishop of Chester, John Wilkins, who, wanting no further purification in the Kidney of the World, went to your keeping twenty years since. And we give praise and thanks to You for having given us the rational faculties by which the procedure of lithotomy was invented, enabling us, who are further from perfection, to endure longer in this world, urinating freely as the occasion warrants. Let our urine-streams, gleaming and scintillating in the sun's radiance as they pursue their parabolic trajectories earthward, be as an outward and visible sign of Your Grace, even as the knobbly stones hidden in our coat pockets remind us that we are all earth, and we are all sinners. Do you have anything to add, Mr Waterhouse?'

'Only, Amen!'

(Neal Stephenson, The Confusion, p500)

I am reading Stephenson's vast Baroque Cycle, made up of the books Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World, historic novels based around the people and the times of the Scientific Revolution -- and I've been reading them for several months -- with something approaching sheer delight.

Humour: anagrams, continued

Here's a couple more:

The London Olympic games = Logical to spend money? H'm.


The Department for Education and Skills = Daft kids learn, on hated Intel computers

Humour: the fine game of nil

I am enjoying some of these wonderful anagrams from this site:

The countryside = No City Dust Here

Astronomers = Moon starers

Evangelist = Evil's Agent

The cockroach = Cook, catch her!

The Morse Code = Here Come Dots

Slot Machines = Cash Lost in 'em

Conversation = Voices Rant On

Software = Swear Oft

Eleven plus two = Twelve plus one

The Meaning of Life = The fine game of nil

To be or not to be: that is the question, whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. =

In one of the Bard's best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten.

and some of the names:

William Shakespeare: I am a weakish speller

Tony Blair, MP = I'm Tory plan B

Virginia Bottomley = I'm an evil Tory bigot

Florence Nightingale = Nigel, Fetch an Iron Leg