Not entirely relevant

I'm craving some secular stuff in here. So here goes Faithless:

I love the way you're so deliberate,
How you light your cigarette
Head on one side as you pull, you look almost regal.
I'm digging it, on your mobile, one eye closed
Blue smoke curling out your nose
Wearing one of my shirts and what some call panty hose
Cause you look wicked in scanty clothes,
Long legs like an antelope
You're my antidote to city life, my pretty wife
Hooked up the year before
Together thirteen outta twenty four
And you would never guess
I wanna miss you less and see you more,
See you more, see you more, see you more

And when I kiss you I'm never sure
How do I get to miss you less and see you more?

Miss you less, see you more, love to know you better!
Miss you less, see you more, love to know you better!
Miss you less, see you more, love to know you better!
Miss you less, see you more, love to know you better!

I can gauge your mood, from your approach to food
You use ya rude red shoes to accessorize your attitude
Desensitized to my roving eyes, and ready smile
I get loving that's versatile,
Worth that extra smile lying next to me
Your textured voice whispering,
I'm listening with my whole skin
Holding onto the moment for all its worth
How could I continue to be the sky without my earth

And when I kiss you, I'm never sure,
And when I kiss you, I'm never sure,
And when I kiss you, I'm never sure,
How do I get to miss you less and see you more?

Miss you less, see you more, love to know you better!
Miss you less, see you more, love to know you better!
Miss you less, see you more, love to know you better!
Miss you less, see you more, love to know you better!

In the former USSR, Part II

The members of the family I was staying with had worked for decades in a Kolkhoz. Private property had been seized during the revolution and redistributed to all -bourgeois or peasants- more of less fairly. Religion had taken on an incredible force because repression had forced people to become reflexive about it, so it carried on from the past, never becoming "liberalised".

In the nineties the rouble collapsed. The state practically gave up and nearly ceased providing services. It became so useless as to be seen by all as irrelevant to their lives. Yet, the solidarity between people was exceptional and (in the countryside) nobody really lacked anything. Indeed people from the countryside supported the urban-dwellers.

In the noughties, neoliberalism broke in. People were eager to learn what confident westerners wanted to teach them about entrepreneurship, to study economics, to enrol in business schools. Everybody wanted a job in the real economy, everybody wanted the hope of a better future. Some had "made it" abroad. Girls left their country only to end up working as prostitutes. Mein Herz brennt.

We will not be activists

"Il ne s'agit pas d'être militant. Le militant par son coté d'ascète est un repoussoir. Il vient justifier chez l'individu son inaction, son impuissance car son militantisme lui parait inaccessible, trop difficile. Les militants entretiennent, par leur valeur exemplaire, l'idée que seule une petite minorité prête à se sacrifier (temps, loisirs, famille, vacances) peut agir et confirment en retour, par leur distanciation, le consentement à l'assujettissement."

We will not be activists. "Ascetic" activists only serve to repel. Their level of militancy seems inaccessible and paradoxically it serves to justify the inaction and powerlessness of observers. By their sheer heroism, activists cultivate the idea that only a small minority who is prepared to sacrifice much (i.e. their time, leisure, family and vacations) is apt to take action. By distanciating themselves from the rest of the population, they only enable its resignation and its consent to remaining subjected.

(via Indymedia Paris)

Picture: from the movie "Dangerous Beauty"

Robbing Peter to pay Paul

Again, just thinking aloud here. At the moment I'm just throwing bits of ideas into this blog and some of them may be really bad ideas. I'm not inspired all the time, I just think too much.

Thank you very much for your kind offer to start supporting our activities financially. Unfortunately, we are unable to accept money which does not come accompanied by a statement of the donor’s other commitments towards social justice. We are trying to incrementally set up a fairer economy by getting more and more people to help effect the switch. This means that, at the moment, we don’t really see the point in robbing Peter in one part of our life to pay Paul in another and we are led to question the validity of working in the capitalist economy while giving some of our surpluses to causes we like.

More than money, we need people’s commitment to being the “Wilberforces” of our century and we would like to know what people do, at their level in their workplace and in the public place, towards achieving a better quality of life for human beings everywhere. In a sense, we aim to be modern Zaccheuses: we don’t offer just our resources to God; we aim to offer up our reformed lives. Again, thank you very much for your interest in our activities. The statements of past and present supporters can be found online, we would love to be able to add yours to the list.

Painting by Aaron Douglas

Trading with anyone?

In 2001, a few months after graduation, I was invited to live in one republic of the former USSR for a little while, staying with a friend's family. The experience totally changed my life and I would very highly recommend it to anyone. See, in a largely subsistence economy, money was practically irrelevant. The rouble had collapsed and had instantly wiped away everyone's savings. In any given year, the family I was staying with would spend less than 20 dollars. Everything they needed, they either produced, or they neighbours would produce it and they would just depend on each other.

Say your cow was pregnant: your neighbour would supply you with milk, without thinking, and without keeping precise accounts. Come summer if you had lots of cherries, you'd share them with the whole village. While money practically did not exist, people felt very rich and shared with people poorer than themselves. Jesus was king, no contest: to everyone this was evident. Anybody who did not know this was obviously a bit backward. That or the poor soul had never received a proper schooling. It was criminal to raise a kid without this knowledge, and without them having access to God. All the time I sat back while my neurone-connections were slowly getting rewired by their way of life. Mostly, I was amazed.

Admittedly, that's a rather lengthy introduction for the one idea which I wanted to introduce in this post. The people of that country did not understand capitalism! It's the weirdest thing in the world! We went to the market once and I saw a musical instrument which I wanted to buy. I could afford 100 times the asking price but they would not sell it to me. Uh? What? Even if I offer a relatively huge price for it? What's wrong with you?

It turns out that they would not sell it to me because (a) I could not play it, (b) they had put lots of work into it and it was not getting turned into a souvenir for some young French girl and (c) they wanted to sell it to a local person like themselves whom they knew was doing some honest work and to whom it would be valuable: they wanted to know where the money was coming from that would buy their musical instrument. It was a "no", and a very firm "no" at that.

When we got back to my friend's home he told me that he was ashamed of my behaviour. Hours afterwards his face was still red with shame when we discussed it. I really wanted the instrument so I had offered more and more money, to convey that I wanted it, that I valued it. In my mind I was saying: "it's a great instrument, I would pay lots to have it". I did not understand the language or the culture well enough to realise that it did not work like that.

Earlier today, I was thinking: Wesley, Wesley, Wesley... The problem is that if you want to give a lot you have to earn a lot, and no matter where you earn your money from, it's always from somewhere bad. I have a public sector job, but the taxes that pay for it were generated by big businesses, so it's hardly an ethical option. The people that sell us ethical coffee and organic cotton T-shirts are getting paid by this very same money of dubious origin.

That's until we start thinking like our guy, until we refuse to trade with just about anyone. Until we want to know where the money that pays for our goods and services was generated and how. Just how countercultural is THAT?

(And here for an interesting historical reference)

A beautiful quote...

The tragedy of life is not that we die, but is rather, what dies inside a man while he lives. -Albert Schweitzer

Painting by Henry O. Tanner. Click for larger picture.

A great quote...

"Fighting crime by building more jails is like fighting cancer by building more cemeteries."
-Paul Kelly

Disempowered students

I just got back from teaching two classes (first years). In one of them, I was very tempted to ask two students to stay back at the end of the hour and tell them that (a) they were my weakest students, and (b) they were not doing the reading and that I was not going to take this crap. I would have done so nicely, in the understanding that they are not "weak students" per se, but that they are allowing themselves to fall behind.

I'm worried about their "can't do" attitude. I feel like I need to reinforce the two girls in some way: it is my duty to "catch them" now. I think I can do that in a way that is insightful and sensitive but I don't quite dare to. The likely result of my inaction is that they might carry that disempowered attitude into the rest of their studies, and I won't tolerate disempowererd students on my course (especially not girls). They're my kids, they're brilliant and none of them does poorly at university.

My students are usually full of ambition and idealism. They shine out like the glorious young things that they are. In class, they share their dreams, their hopes, the crackpot theories they've been making up while in the shower and this is wonderful. Their essays are inventive and a joy to read. I love to challenge them, I would cut off pieces of paper with outlandish statements on them, give these out randomly and "force" them to argue for that statement with no preparation, to make sure they're always sitting on the edge. It works really well, the class is always full of laughter but they work bloody hard.

I pretty much demand that they stay on top of the material and warn them that if they don't, the consequences will be very dire in their second and third year. By then, they won't be able to catch up. I warn them all the time and I do this because I also teach finalists who have fallen behind, don't know what Neoliberalism is and have no confidence in their own ability to succeed.

In class, most of them play along. I'm not asking them to know everything, I'm asking them to try, to jump in the deep end and yes, make fools of themselves! Hell, I make a fool of myself in front of them sometimes and they sure love to point that out! I'm really just coaching them, they're the ones coming up with the ideas.

They're great students, they're doing amazingly well so far and I make sure they know that. I'm proud of them: they're going to do better than the rest of their cohort, and they're going to leave university happy, empowered, and as shiny as the day they first came in. I'm also proud of the way our classes work. But I do wish I'd asked the two girls to stay behind. I won't have any disempowered students on my team. Sorry girls, I just don't do disempowered.

Le droit a la paresse

Affamés, ils portent les gerbes... (they carry the sheaves, but still go hungry) Job 24:10

"M. Bonnet, here are your working women, silk workers, spinners, weavers; they are shivering pitifully under their patched cotton dresses, yet it is they who have spun and woven the silk robes of the fashionable women of all Christendom". Paul Lafargue, in The right to be lazy (1883). Highly recommended. Although, to be honest, Lafargue's prose is much better in French -and come to think of it, so is the Bible.

This is hilarious!

You peace-lovers out there, I've just come accross this on Tantalizing if True:

"Announcing the first massively multiplayer online role-playing game for Amish, Mennonites, and other historic peace churches":

Islamic banking: some ideas

Principle: the lender must share in the profits or losses arising out of the enterprise for which the money was lent.

"Islam encourages Muslims to invest their money and to become partners in order to share profits and risks in the business instead of becoming creditors. As defined in the Shari'ah, or Islamic law, Islamic finance is based on the belief that the provider of capital and the user of capital should equally share the risk of business ventures, whether those are industries, farms, service companies or simple trade deals. Translated into banking terms, the depositor, the bank and the borrower should all share the risks and the rewards of financing business ventures. This is unlike the interest-based commercial banking system, where all the pressure is on the borrower: he must pay back his loan, with the agreed interest, regardless of the success or failure of his venture. The principle which thereby emerges is that Islam encourages investments in order that the community may benefit"

From this website.

Ethical trade: shape up or we won't buy your stuff!

Just thinking aloud here. Shops in France and Britain rely heavily on both (1) the Christmas season, and on (2) the sales season. The nine o'clock news will often broadcast interviews of shopkeepers expressing their feelings about how good (or how bad) the season has been for them. Those two periods of the year really make or break their yearly income.

What's more, the general public generally resents Christmas consumerism anyway. So if we start off at the same time as the Christmas Carols with a well-planned campaign of recruiting the general public to the "I don't buy this shit" cause, that would really annoy the retailers, i.e. force them to pressure their suppliers into implementing standards.

I would have been in favour of warning them in advance in a friendly letter, the point is not to damage their sales, it is to get them to re-think their value chains. Still that would just give them plenty of time to come up with their own glossy propaganda.

Alternatively, they could just come up with a grossly overpriced fairtrade line of products in which their profit is even more substantial than on mainline products. This means that the value chains are not tilted one bit in favour of the producers and "Fairtrade" remains an expensive luxury, not the norm.

There was an old post on Mark von Steenwyk's blog on which the ever-inspired Espiritu Paz commented that a real solution could be to create a whole Fairtrade Wal-Mart. That would be mint of course, because everyone would just end up shopping there. Can't we get some entrepreneurial genius to do just that?

In Britain, lots of folks are buying fairtrade tea and coffee, and even the right-wing tabloids have started attacking The Gap every second week or so. Maybe we're ready for a bit of action here. Obviously, I would have to think some more about this, and about who will end up being affected. I just re-read Zola's Germinal, so I'm erring on the side of caution.

Wesley + Ethics

For the last couple of weeks, I've been seriously racking my brain over Wesley's maxim: “Earn as much as you can. Save as much as you can. Invest as much as you can. Give as much as you can.”

Seriously, even the nicest idealistic ventures need money that has somehow been generated somewhere within the system. I have no intention of running out of boiled eggs, but then I don't want to make the money for the boiled eggs through a system that generates so much misery. While I'm attracted to the frontline, I also realise that frontline communities need to be funded somehow and that even church donations were originated somewhere. Besides, if frontline communities are joined only by a tiny minority of people, they stand no chance of altering the broader system.

All the time I think "ethical standards". Wesley + Standards. I can't think beyond ethical capitalism. Frederic Jameson once stated that it was easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. On days like these I'm ashamed of my (high) level of education. Still, even the profs at my university don't seem to know much better than Wikipedia. Please Lord, I'm begging you, please give us an understanding for our times, don't let us be so stupid and clueless.

Painting by Gustave Caillebotte

And now for a cheesy midi tune!

Against the early invasion of (bad) Christmas carols, o may thy soldiers, faithful, true and bold, fight as the saints who nobly fought of old...

For all the saints, who from their labors rest,
Who Thee by faith before the world confessed,
Thy Name, O Jesus, be forever blessed.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

Thou wast their Rock, their Fortress and their Might;
Thou, Lord, their Captain in the well fought fight;
Thou, in the darkness drear, their one true Light.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

For the Apostles’ glorious company,
Who bearing forth the Cross o’er land and sea,
Shook all the mighty world, we sing to Thee:
Alleluia, Alleluia!

For the Evangelists, by whose blest word,
Like fourfold streams, the garden of the Lord,
Is fair and fruitful, be Thy Name adored.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

For Martyrs, who with rapture kindled eye,
Saw the bright crown descending from the sky,
And seeing, grasped it, Thee we glorify.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

O blest communion, fellowship divine!
We feebly struggle, they in glory shine;
All are one in Thee, for all are Thine.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

O may Thy soldiers, faithful, true and bold,
Fight as the saints who nobly fought of old,
And win with them the victor’s crown of gold.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long,
Steals on the ear the distant triumph song,
And hearts are brave, again, and arms are strong.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

The golden evening brightens in the west;
Soon, soon to faithful warriors comes their rest;
Sweet is the calm of paradise the blessed.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

But lo! there breaks a yet more glorious day;
The saints triumphant rise in bright array;
The King of glory passes on His way.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

From earth’s wide bounds, from ocean’s farthest coast,
Through gates of pearl streams in the countless host,
And singing to Father, Son and Holy Ghost:
Alleluia, Alleluia!

Krugman's "In praise of cheap labour"

Please feel free to get mad at me in the comments, but I think that Krugman has a point when when he says that: "As long as you have no realistic alternative to industrialization based on low wages, to oppose it means that you are willing to deny desperately poor people the best chance they have of progress for the sake of what amounts to an aesthetic standard--that is, the fact that you don't like the idea of workers being paid a pittance to supply rich Westerners with fashion items". Full article here.

Um, we do need some credible alternatives... The fate of the lumpenproletariat is a very real concern and maybe "bad jobs at bad wages are better than no jobs at all". Do we really place our hopes in the moral fibre of capitalists, states and consumers?

Zizek's "Nobody has to be vile"

"According to liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity: charity is part of the game, a humanitarian mask hiding the underlying economic exploitation. Developed countries are constantly ‘helping’ undeveloped ones (with aid, credits etc), and so avoiding the key issue: their complicity in and responsibility for the miserable situation of the Third World". Nothing new here, but some of it is worth re-stating. Full article here.

And here's another one: Resistance is Surrender. It's a bit messy, not very innovative and not as well thought-out as some theology out there. Still, at least it takes on the right issues and reviews some resistance approaches, so I thought I'd still link to it.

Maybe I don't like Zizek, I only like the topics he writes about and some of his (occasional) strokes of genius.

Voices form the past

I picked up both English (as language) and my first solid grasps of philosophy in a highly unusual manner. At fifteen I sent a postcard to a death row inmate in California. He wrote back… a lot. In no time, we were writing twice to three times a week. Rob was very interested in my philosophy classes, so I ended up translating all of my lecture notes for him, perusing through the Robert and Collins dictionary.

My grades in both English and Philosophy went right through the roof. Indeed, at one oral examination, I was given the topic of “determinism vs. free will”. This topic had interested Rob very much because of the stories he could tell of the people he was sharing life with on death row. I sailed through that exam, making the absolute highest grade. It sort of made up for my lousy grades in Chemistry, Physics and Maths and got me into the University of my choice, but I divert.

In my first year of University, Rob and I were still writing pretty regularly. I was your typical activist and had joined all the campaigns on campus, even running the Amnesty International society at some point. Rob and I did fall apart after a while. It was not a major disaster since Rob was corresponding with quite a number of people and I was jut one of the lot. Around that time, some of my friends had to actively pull me out of the Human Rights agenda. I was living and breathing the stuff, I was writing all my essays on the topic and spending all my summers interning with activist organisations. I had disappeared behind the cause. I practically talked about nothing else.

About a year later, I picked up Sr. Helen Prejean’s book. I cried through the whole thing. Before reading that book, I had been an isolated French girl with a friend on death row. It was so weird to read my thoughts in somebody else’s book. At some point I wanted to travel to Paris to hear a conference that she was giving. Still, back then, I wasn’t used to crossing the country at a moment’s notice so I ended up not going.

Twenty minutes ago, I got an e-mail telling me that she is coming to Newcastle this Saturday and that our campus’ Cathsoc is going to attend her talk. It caught me a bit off guard, as I’m currently quite busy with other stuff (like finishing a &*$%£* dissertation). But suddenly, all of that surfaced again.

I don’t usually like speaking tours. One of my pet peeves with Human Rights organisations was their habit of demanding that the people we had gotten out of horrible situations come and give talks all around the country every year. Okay, we were not successful that often and we probably did need some success stories. And still I thought that this was brutal. I mean honestly, how many times do we expect these folks to talk about the torture their body suffered to a roomful of people who barely care? Leave them alone! Don’t trap them in the past, don’t define them by what they had to go through, and don’t fucking expect that they will be available to speak to your half-assed activists for the rest of their lives.

So while I don’t like speaking tours I’m still going to that one. It’s going to be weird. Oh and before I forget, if you ever thought that my punctuation was pretty bad you could write to Rob to complain about it.

Polanyi's "evil freedoms"

I admit it, I'm too lazy to start reviewing some proper social science in order to start contributing to the debate from the perspective of one who (supposedly) knows political theory rather well. So in the past week I have started out by posting some intriguing quotes. Maybe I'll graduate to writing book reviews, and even fuller thought pieces. I'm getting tired of all the cutesy posts on this blog.

So anyway, here's another quote, Karl Polanyi's four evil freedoms: "(1) the freedom to exploit one's fellows, (2) the freedom to makes inordinate gains without commensurable service to the community, (3) the freedom to keep technological inventions from being used for public benefit, or (4) the freedom to profit from public calamities secretely enginered for private advantage". This fellow was defining neoliberalism back in 1944 and he's a pretty exciting thinker, so I may share more of his thought in here.

Picture: Karl Polanyi

A great quote

"Theory is necessary to figure out what’s really going on. People always want to be a saviour for the community. It’s like they see a baby coming down the river and want to jump in and save it. We need to stop being so reactive to the situations that confront us. Saving babies is fine for them but we want to know who’s throwing the [...]damn babies in the water in the first place." -Michael Zinzun

(I removed a bit of the swearing to keep this more or less kosher, these social scientists are a bunch of freaking pagans!)

You don't know what love is

Feeling slightly dysfunctional. I think my mental health has deteriorated by 100% between yesterday and today. I can’t say I dislike it. It’s great to revisit old wounds and to notice that they don’t really hurt that much anymore. Each time I let go of a dream I still feel that something is staying with me. It’s quite a substantial something too. I’ve grown to love it. Maybe I really was on to something with my basil leaves.

(Ah rats, Radioblog gives me a file error when I seek to embed that song so I'm including an old fashioned link instead.)

Claiming joy

"The earth was radiant with the presence of God, and in the light of it the community of the disciples could walk the roads, share the lives of their land, and await the future with confidence. It was this joy, this sense of being within the life of God, this source of inward gaiety and outward fortitude, which stirred the stem and disillusioned world of Rome to wonder [...]. Here was surely the light that illuminates every man and is his life. Jesus had come unto his own; and at first they recognized him". -Charles E. Raven

Lovely quote heh? I live and worship in the city centre of Durham. We’ve got some cool Harry Potter bookstores within the precincts of the cathedral that sell books full of quotes like these. I personally find the characters who purchase these books a bit sinister and I avoid them like the plague (instead of loving them as I should). So why would I include this quote in here, among heart wrenching videos and more serious concerns?

Quite simply because if you attempt to claim that joy without changing your life, it will kill you. The more you seek to experience it in the comfort of your own stylish home, the less you will relate to it. You may try to turn up the volume, listen to the world’s greatest music, hear the most inspiring preachers, it will never work. At some point you will long for a genuine emotion, you will go on pilgrimages to holy islands. You will feel less and less. You will be gone.

This is the joy of Francis, who would give away his only blanket just so he would never lose this joy. This is the joy of those who long for Christ to dwell among them, no matter what it will cost them. And it is possible to experience this joy while at the same time wishing for the welfare of Bangladeshi workers. The point is, you want them to share in it so much that you just can't sit still and you mind goes in overdrive trying to find solutions. This is the joy of those who want to claim it now, for everyone.

Joy is explosive. If you're not ready for it, don't seek it. When you meet joy, it either kills you, or it changes your life.

Painting by Alonso Cano

Come as you are

About a week ago, Naked Pastor published yet another stunning cartoon. Through it, NP was stating that you really cannot start out by disliking who people are. As a response to this, some of the commenters argued that we needed to be more ambitious for our churches and start envisioning what could be, instead of simply loving what is.

Today as I re-read the fairly socialist stance of my previous posts, I was reminded that Christians hope not only for the liberation of the poor, but for the liberation of the rich also. Our hope is that Christians in the West will wake up to their responsibilities as Christians and start being the church.

Yet, if we consider that dependence on the Western system is a form of addiction, then affluent Christians need to be loved as well. We tend to think that it’s okay to bawl them out because they "can take it" and they really need to be scared into action. Still, I believe that not all of them are self-righteous hypocrites. Some of them need to be loved into trusting God and the community of believers. Some of them need to be shown ways of living out the gospels. Above all, some of them need to be trusted with it, much in the way in which Andre Trocme trusted his congregation.

This is where I really love Shane Claiborne’s voice. There are instances in which I find him plain annoying (e.g., recycling bath water), but I really admire the way in which he relates to middle-class folks without an ounce of judgement. By being genuinely fond of people while remaining consistent with the demands he lays out, he quite simply makes the gospel attractive to them. And I could not agree more with the message behind Naked Pastor’s cartoon.

Pham Binh on Terrorism

"When Marxists talk about terrorism, we mean violence conducted by a small group or individual on behalf of the masses. We are against terrorism of this sort for many reasons. As socialists, we think that the motor of history is class struggle, action by the masses on their own behalf. The central idea of Marxism is that "the emancipation of the working class has to be the act of the working class itself." We don't think indivuduals or small groups, no matter how well-meaning they are or how shocking their violent acts, can substitute for the working class fighting for itself. This kind of terrorism belittles the role the working class can and must play if capitalism is to be overthrown. It reduces them to being passive spectators, rather than active partipants, or, if you will, actors on the stage of world history. Not only that, but terrorist acts - assassination of government officials, for example - strengthen the repressive machinery of the state. Every act of terrorism serves as a pretext for new invasive laws, shortened court procedures, and a heavier hand in dealing with any opposition, terrorist or not. In this sense, terrorism is reactionary - it serves the enemies of the working class".

Quoted from this website.

Pham Binh on the "vegan diet"

"Instead of trying to organize the working class to collectively seize power from the capitalists (as Marxists do), many try to buy food that is not from corporations, practice veganism, and so on. Others focus on establishing "affinity groups". Either way, they are compromising with the status quo; the ruling class is not trembing because people are eating their all-natural veggies. If we want a society free from hunger and oppression, we have to take the society we do have as our starting point. We can't just "skip" over reality as it stands today and pretend that by eating a vegan diet will somehow overthrow the capitalist class and win workers' power".

Quoted from this website.

Made in France

At the end of a Quaker meeting, we ended up chatting about our varied denominational background. Most were Church of England, one is a liberal baptist and I'm a catholic. It had been a while since I got to reminisce about this background, but when I did I felt quite sad. I realised that the tone of my faith had changed and that I was leaving stuff behind.

I was leaving behind the happy memories of squeezing Church between piano lessons and ballet every Wednesday. Moving away from a whole lot of traditions tacked onto church culture by the countryside I grew up in. I loved every instant. It will always where I'm from. But from my current vantage point my own culture feels slightly odd.

One of the things I like most about Europe is hopping from a country to another, spending some time in each and tuning in to the tone which Christianity has taken there. I never really cared whether we were being particularly true to the hebraic meaning of the Bible. We were not first century jews. We were the European churches, grown here over the centuries, flourishing into hundreds of different expressions. We were the churches God loves.

This picture was taken at St. Peter in Chains Church in Rome by Michael Du Bruiel. I hope he doesn't mind me reproducing it here.

A beautiful quote

"Regarding those who deserted him, those who betrayed him, not a word of resentment came to his lips... he prayed for nothing but their salvation. That's the whole life of Jesus. It stands out clean and simple, like a single Chinese ideograph brushed on a blank sheet of paper. It was so clean and simple that no one could make sense of it, and not one could produce its like."

So far I have read only a couple of quotes extracted from Shusaku Endo's "A life of Jesus". Both of them breathtaking. I can't wait to get into that book. Endo's "Silence" will be the topic of Martin Scorsese's next movie. Rats, I was sort of hoping to keep this author to myself. I'm going to hate the buzz.

The garment industry: a video clip is worth a thousand words

I'm leaving this link (hidden face of globalization) in here just so I don't lose sight of things. And we're "fighting" to get in the shower at some point before 10.30 am? Fucking hell!

You know you live with a bunch of Christian graduate students when

... the only day on which you fight to get in the shower is Sunday.

She decided she could spare a hard-boiled egg

"The voice of a child cried to her “Auntie, please Auntie”. The cries are so incessant that it’s easy to miss them; they’re background noise. Courtney did not have enough to give to all who cried out. The little she had she reserved for only the most desperate, so she continued. But so did the voice of the little one. When she finally turned to tell the child that the food was only for those who were sick, she saw instead that the child’s pleas were coming from a man of about twenty whose body had degenerated to next to nothing, and who was clothed only with rags. She decided she could spare a hard-boiled egg." (Scott Bessenenecker, The New Friars, p.127)

I’ve been meaning to blog about this quote for a while, or ever since I came across it, a couple of months ago. Somehow the picture of the hard-boiled egg stuck to my mind. The horrible picture of having to reserve one’s limited resources only for the most vulnerable, of having to ignore all others. One some days, I must admit that I’m really tempted by the Bill and Melinda Gates brand of activism. I’d rather be part of something big than have to deal with the type of powerlessness described in this passage. I had always been attracted by big top-down solutions. And in many ways, I still am.

Mozart's Clarinet Concerto

"When you painted on Earth -at least in you earlier days- it was because you caught glimpses of Heaven in the earthly landscape. The success of your painting was that it enabled others to see the glimpses too." C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce.

I can never quite forget that Mozart completed this piece as he was dying and while also working on the Requiem. There is such peace, such subdued joy in this work, it is truly amazing. Grace (and our responses to it) are both unfreezeable, but if you're going to try, do it well! So I'm posting this just for pleasure and also because I'm thrilled about this radioblog thingy.

(I've also edited this post)

Zoecarnate

This might be one of the best websites I've come across in months. It's things like this that make me happy I never got near a formal theological education, because I'm pretty sure that everyone who did would have known about this website in their first week of university. Well, I didn't. And boy, you should see the sheer look of excitement on my face right now!

There's something great about finding something when you've been looking a while. One of our profs over in the social sciences expressed this very well in the opening pages of a great textbook. While his book provides a wonderful framework through which students may fully "appropriate" the discipline, he argues that such a resource is probably best used by finalists. The book assumes that they had already picked up quite a lot of concepts in their previous years and now just needed to learn to see the whole. He'd rather provide lots of disjointed bits of information in the early years rather than start out with an empty framework "to be filled". He finds that imposing a framework on the students' minds at eighteen is a brutal way to teach. He'd rather they reached their third year, their minds brimming with interests and questions, desperate to know more, desperate to understand.

I think I'm unusually fortunate in this respect, because my curiosity on all things "God" is intact and (so far) boundless. I'm just desperate to find out more.