September 2011 – For the fainthearted . . .

More meetings

Returning from time away, the post has accumulated. Much of it is of little interest, circulars from numerous charitable bodies looking for support (how do they afford such glossy material?); a handful of bills from utilities intent on spending money on administration despite being paid by direct debit; and a pack about the diocesan synod. The synod pack contains ballot papers for elections to various diocesan bodies; by some strange rule, the name of every cleric on the diocese is listed on each paper and, the diocese being so small …

Sermon for Sunday, 2nd October 2011 (Trinity 15/Proper 22)

‘I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom’ Matthew 21:43

Jesus’ warning was forgotten by the church. The church forgot its status as a tenant in the Kingdom and came to believe that the Kingdom was its own, that the rules and decrees and the dogmas of the church were to be treated as if they came from the one who was the true King.

Like tenants that got above themselves and started …

Combined sciences

Having both children at the same university should be convenient, though the worlds they inhabit seem so far apart that one would wonder at times whether they were in the same city. One a fourth year computer engineer, the other a first year medic, their timetables are filled and their paths rarely cross, though one did say the other had phoned today.

Their both being there would have been a great source of conversation with the lady, a woman student there in the 1930s when women were a rare presence. …

Separate space

Reading Dennis O’Driscoll’s ‘Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney’, words from Heaney’s description of his early childhood resonate. He describes his early years as being lived in a ‘space that was separate’. The firstborn of a family living on a rural farm surrounded by adult companions, the sense of separateness must have run deep.

Heaney’s recall of life on a forty acre farm in Co Derry seemed not so different from life on a farm in rural Somerset in the early 1960s – there was even still a horse working …

Editing history

Watch television dramas set in Britain of the 1920s and 1930s and a certain impression of the times is easily created, whether it’s the dramatization of Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Brideshead Revisited’, the detective adventures of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, or most of the other pieces of the period, the picture of the time is predominantly one of comfortable affluence (the one exception that springs to mind is the BBC’s ‘When the Boat Comes In’, set in a poverty-stricken community in the English North-East of the 1920s). There is …

Zuckerberg or the Inquisition?

Reading Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You on a French autumn afternoon when the temperature was touching thirty degrees Celsius, lines cited from Langdon Winner’s 1986 article, ‘Do artifacts have politics?’ seemed applicable to situations far removed from the advanced technological hierarchies considered by Pariser.

Pariser believes Winner’s critique of urban development and industry has deep relevance to the way in which the Internet has become structured by the giants that now dominate it:

Consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or inadvertently, societies choose

…