London as you've never seen it

This blog is devoted to mapping London. Loved the map of London by most common surnames: an ark of Patels, interrupted by a large community of Begums, next to a Jones, and with a few Williams-- all in sea of Smiths.

Bernard Lovell on the limits of science

Sir Bernard Lovell, inspirational founder of the Jodrell Bank radio telescope, was realistic about how far his subject did and didn't reach:

"I am no more surprised or distressed at the limitation of science when faced with this great problem of creation that I am at the limitation of the spectroscope in describing the radiance of a sunset or at the theory of counterpoint in describing the beauty of a fugue" (This was in one of his Reith Lectures)

He was a church organist for 40 years as well as a Physics prof, writer and scientific entrepreneur. I met him a few years ago, shook his hand and had the pleasure (for me anyway) of telling him how he'd inspired me as a boy.

Oscar Wilde on Jesus

Have just finished reading De Profundis, written by Wilde in Reading Goal and an enlightening, if predictably unorthox meditation on Christ. Like all Wilde's works, it's available free.


Wilde does say that:

I need not tell you that to me reformations in morals are as meaningless and vulgar as Reformations in theology

and

... there were Christians before Christ. For that we should be grateful. The unfortunate thing is that there have been none since.


So he's unlikely to be asked to share his story in a Billy Graham crusade. But having got that out of the way, Wilde's genius and brokenness is worth a read. Such a beautiful writer.

On his own ruin

I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand ... Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.

I became the spendthrift of my own genius.

Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion.

I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop.

I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and I did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace.

On suffering    

Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world.

Out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain.  

If the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man,  for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. 

On Christ

There is still something to me almost incredible in the idea of a young Galilean peasant imagining that he could bear on his own shoulders the burden of the entire world; all that had already been done and suffered, and all that was yet to be done and suffered ... and not merely imagining this but actually achieving it, so that at the present moment all who come in contact with his personality, even though they neither bow to his altar nor kneel before his priest, in some way find that the ugliness of their sin is taken away and the beauty of their sorrow revealed to them. 

His miracles seems to be as exquisite as the coming of spring, and quite as natural. 

He was the first person who ever said to people that they should live 'flower-like lives' ... He took children as the type of what people should try to become. 

The conversion of a publican into a Pharisee would not have seemed to him a great achievement

Christ was not merely the supreme individualist, but he was the first individualist in history. People have tried to make him out an ordinary philanthropist, or ranked him as an altruist with the scientific
and sentimental. But he was really neither one or the other. Pity he has, of course, for the poor ... but he has far more pity for the rich, for the hard hedonists, for those who waste their freedom in becoming slaves to things ... Riches and pleasure seemed to him to be really greater tragedies than poverty or sorrow. 

Out of the Carpenter's shop at Nazareth had come a personality infinitely greater than any made by myth or legend.

On the gospels

Of late I have been studying with diligence the four prose poems about Christ. At Christmas I managed to get hold a Greek Testament, and every morning, after I had cleaned my cell and polished my tins, I read a little of the Gospels, a dozen verses taken by chance anywhere. It is a delightful way of opening the day. Everyone, even in a turbulent, ill-disciplined life, should do the same ... When one returns to the Greek, it is like going into a garden of lillies out of some narrow and dark house.

With a width and wonder of imagination that fill one almost with awe, he took the entire world of the inarticulate, the voiceless world of pain, as his kingdom, and made of himself its eternal mouthpiece.

On the power of love

When I was brought from my prison to the Court of Bankruptcy, between two policemen, ___ waited in the long dreary corridor that, before the whole crowd, whom an action so sweet and simple hushed into silence, he might gravely raise his hat to me, as, handcuffed and with bowed head, I passed him by. Men have gone to heaven for smaller things that that.

Everyone is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling.

What novels are for

I'm not so wedded to physical books as this, but it's a lovely quote:
When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life's subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book Julian Barnes in his pamphlet My life as a biobliophile

The city hen weekend is back in

'Bridal magazines,' said my daughter, dumping a stack of them in my living room. 'I bet you read them because you read everything.'

The city hen weekend is back in. I didn't know it had gone out, or where it had gone, or what had replaced it, or who said it had gone out and what authority they had over its going out and in. Fortunately the all-knowing writers and editors of the bridal magazine did know and could say and now it was back.

Serve your canapes in personalized wooden seed-trays.  Must write that essential tip down for the big day in a year's time.

You too can lose 20lbs in 6 weeks. This was accompanied by a photo of two grim-faced brides running across a beach in a strong wind with a parachute tied to their backs.

Social scientists and religion, not a good brew

Have been enjoying sociologist Rodney Stark's book on the rise of Christianity. Something of a pioneer in his field, he applies social science theory to how the church grew in its first few centuries and it's enlightening stuff, even if you think, as I do, that a display of maths is only as good as its underlying assumptions and often social science's underlying assumptions aren't very good.

But Rodney Stark also has the insight to say about his fellow practitioners what many of us have often thought (or possibly hoped):

... until recently, the social scientific study of religion was nothing of the sort. The field was far more concerned with discrediting religion that with understanding it. This is clear when it is realized that only in the area of religious belief and behavior have social scientists not based their theories on a rational choice premise. Indeed my colleagues and I recently showed that antagonism toward all forms of religion and the conviction that it must soon disappear in an enlightened world were articles of faith among the earliest social scientists, and that today social scientists are far less likely to be religious than are scholars in other areas, especially those in the physical and natural sciences (Stark, Iannaccone, and Finke, 1995).

The difference between literature and life

Literature is mostly about sex and not much about having children and life is the other way around. (David Lodge, The British Museum is Falling Down).

(This is from Uncommon Sense by Joseph Telushkin, from which  you can see some fantastic further quotes on Google Books.)

Lovely science/religion blog

I just found this lovely science/religion blog which is worth bookmarking somewhere:

http://www.elliotnelson.net/

F B Meyer on 'the great silence' of waiting for God

I am reading a series of devotional books by F B Meyer (1847 - 1929), one page on each chapter of the Bible.  From an entry on Psalm 62:


'[Abraham] was left waiting till nature was spent... till all that knew him pitied him for clinging to an impossible dream. But as this great silence fell on him, the evidence of utter helplessness and despair, there arose within his soul an ever-accumulating faith in the power of God...


'This is why God keeps you waiting.'

The West's 'killer apps' and the ending of poverty

Around 1800 the wealth of Europe,  then the whole of the West, suddenly began to grow faster than that of the rest of the world. Apparently economic historians call this 'the great divergence'. Historian Niall Ferguson, in his TED talk suggests 6 'Killer apps' of prosperity:

1. Competition
2. The Scientific Revolution
3. Property Rights
4. Modern Medicine
5. The Consumer Society
6. The Work ethic

He calls them 'apps' because they look simple, are complex, but are universally applicable -- a universally applicable solution to poverty. As they are taken up around the world, the great divergence ends; mothers and babies live, nobody starves, life gets easier. Nice.

Conflicting stories of creation

The scientific account is of destruction, extinction and re-creation or recycling-- true of stars, elements and species. Finally this story of death and physical suffering reaches the point where humanity arrives on the earth; and suffering and death continues.

The Christian account is of an ideal world and perfect humans subsequently corrupted as a result of human rebellion against God: through sin, death entered the world.

How can both accounts be true?

School level maths shows us how to measure complicated things by resolving them into two dimensions. The kicked football rises in the air and then falls as gravity pulls it down; it also moves horizontally towards the goal. You can arrive at the true account of its path by studying it in its two dimensions, and then putting the two together.

Perhaps the same is true with these stories of our origins. These complementary accounts can both be true, each filling out the gaps in the other.

The book of Jonah as an example of 'Christian Storytelling'

Park for a moment the question of whether Jonah is a novel or a true account. How does it do as a story?
1) It talks about God, but it does so in a consistent way. God isn't jammed in as an afterthought. He is part of Jonah's worldview from the beginning.
2) Jonah is a plausible human character. The comedy of this book comes from the humanity of Jonah trying to cope with the determined mercy of God.
3) The book is open-ended, leaving Jonah sulking even while God appeals to him. It doesn't see the need to press home the moral lesson.
4) The book is quirky and unexpected.

How does it do as a model of 'Christian' storytelling?

1) You don't have to believe in God to enjoy it. All that's needed is that you believe in Jonah: Jonah the human being who believes in and has to cope with, his God.
2) It's a lot of fun.
3) It's fresh, not the predictable re-telling of a morality tale.
4) It does pose the reader big questions: what if God is like this? What if he spoke to me? What am I to make of this story?

*
Update: Interesting though this may be, it believing it can kill you. In 2014 an Iranian psychologist called Mohan Amir Aslani was hanged by the state. His offence? Teaching that the story of Jonah in the Qur'an may have been symbolic, not literal.

Why stories? A summary

• Awakening longing
• Goes with the grain of the culture
• It's how we learn
• 75% of the Bible is story, narrative.
• It appeals to heart rather than head; story is a person's 'heart language'
• We learn how our story intersects with the story we're reading, and the story we're part of.
• Story-lessons can sneak up on us
• Stories are concrete, not abstract. A lot of people have problems with abstract; I don't know anyone who has problems with the concrete.
• Stories (esp. parables) are capable of moulding themselves in multiple ways to our stories; they are fractal in that sense, universal and local
• They are personal, under the skin, where we really are at.
• Engaging in beauty is engaging in the Kingdom

Notes:

Jesus taught, awaken longings, scatter seed, wait and see what happens
This is exactly what he did

Every myth is 'a splintered fragment of the true light' (Tolkien to C S Lewis, reportedly)

Tom Wright: Surprised by Hope

Suprised by Hope by N.T. Wright

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book examines Christian hope for the future. The former Bishop of Durham robustly defends the bodily resurrection and from it works out a useful and useable theology. He emphasizes 'life after life after death', a new heavens and earth to which Jesus returns, and helpfully criticizes the fuzzy and low-res views of heaven and hell that most of us Christians default to. A renewed Universe in actual bodies is our future, and there's continuity with the present earth as well discontinuity with it. This has consequences for how we live now: nothing we do here is wasted. In justice, in beauty, in evangelism, in everything, we can build for the coming Kingdom.



This is a remarkable, radical, and eye-opening restatement of Christian hope, post-modern in the sense of criticizing modernism, and it makes me go back to the Bible to find out if what he is saying is true. Mostly I found him persuasive, and his fresh statement has many consequences. A simple gospel is one: A new Lord, Christ, has been installed in the world. His new rule is already among us. You can join in or not. What are you going to do?



As well as inaugurating a new creation, Wright claims the resurrection inaugurates a new way of knowing. Thomas starts by asking 'show me the evidence' but after encountering the risen Christ says 'My lord and my God'. Wright calls this 'an epistomology of love': science and history can get us a long way, but the resurrection breaks out of these categories of knowing and demands a new one. It's heady stuff, to my mind building upon the work of Leslie Newbiggin. Taken to heart, I can see it revitalizing the Christian message.



The downsides of this book?

The editors at SPCK appear to have gone AWOL and could have usefully been employed crossing out unnecessary sub-clauses, querying the odd tone of intellectual arrogance, and delousing the MS of tics like 'This won't do' and 'No, it's not' which grate when repeated as often as they are. It's a shame: Wright is brilliant, original, relevant and groundbreaking; he has written 50 books; but no-one has the editorial cojones to tell him he could write a lot better than he does. The more excited he gets, the more he over-writes and the worse it is to read.



But it's still worth it.



A smaller niggle is, unusually for such a carefully researched book, Wright makes the unverifiable statement that half of the human race is alive today. There is a lively debate about how many people have ever lived, and the estimates I see guess around 100 billion; so only 7% of the total population are alive today. In any case the book would be better without unthought-out asides like this.



Still. This is a landmark book that I think will change the way I think and act. Praise God for it.



View all my reviews

The gospel in Sufi poetry?

Here are some excerpts from a devotional manual popular among South Asian Muslims, picked out by the Christian scholar Kenneth Cragg.

Lo, I am Thy servant at Thy door ...
O Thou Helper of them that seek for help.
Thine anxious one is at Thy door,
O Thou Who dost lift away the care of all the careworn.
And I, Thy rebel, O Thou Who seekest for penitents, Thy rebel who acknowledges his faults is at Thy door.
O Thou Who forgivest sinners,
One who confesses his sin is at Thy door.
O most merciful, he who has erred is at Thy door
O Lord of the worlds, he who has wronged is at Thy door
Have mercy upon me, my Lord.

***
I have nought but my destitution to plead with Thee for me.
And in my poverty I put forward that destitution as my plea.
I have no power save to knock at Thy door.
And if I be turned away, at what door shall I knock?

(Source:
--> Kenneth Cragg and Marston Speight, Islam from Within (2000: Belmont, CA,

Wadsworth)

Shaping a story by the 'rule of three'

Here's an article on writing novels that I found extremely helpful.

It's a way to combat an over-active creativity by keeping a novel focussed on the simple progress of its story, rather than on fun and interesting side-alleys. The three things to steer by are simply (1) a protagonist (2) a conflict and (3) a setting.

It's interesting to see how this plays out in giving books unity and narrative force. For example:

The entire Harry Potter series: (1) Harry (2) Voldemort's struggle to take over the earth (3) the magical world.

The Bible: (1) God (2) Reconciling himself to his errant creation (3) the whole canvas of heaven, the universe and eternity.

I think some stories break this rule by doubling it. So:

Pride and Prejudice: (1) Elizabeth Bennet (2) Overcoming pride and prejudice to marry Darcy (3) Eighteenth-century aristocratic England

--and--
(1) Mr Darcy (2) overcoming pride and prejudice to marry Elizabeth (3) as above


Similarly the parable of the prodigal son has two rules of three:

(1) Younger son (2) Returning to the Father (3) the Father's farm

--and --


(1) Older son  (2) Becoming further estranged from the Father (3) the Father's farm.

Either way, sticking to these simple outlines has to give a story narrative energy and stop it wandering off...

The railway man: Eric Lomax

'If I'd never been able to put a name to the face of of one of the men who had harmed me, and never discovered that behind that face there was also a damaged life, the nightmares would always have come from a past without meaning. And I had proved for myself that remembering is not enough, if it simply hardens hate. (last page).

A quietly-spoken true story of astonishing suffering and scarring, taken to another level by the attempts of two old men to bridge their mutual wounds through forgiveness. Lovely, moving book.

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A candidate for the Pretentious Persiflage award

The builders adding a new classroom block to the school outside our house labour under this mission statement: 'Developing high quality education facilities so that children and young people achieve their potential'.

Polkinghorne on miracles

Quoted by Francis Collins in The Language of God:

'Miracles are not to be interpreted as divine acts against the laws of nature (for these laws are themselves expressions of God's will) but as more profound revelations of the character of the divine relationship to creation.'

The embarrassment of the big bang

Francis Collins (the language of God) quotes astrophysicist Robert Jastrow in 'God and the Astronomers' (1992, p107):
'At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.'