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