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Showing posts from September, 2016

Recycled Earth Ball

In keeping with our ecological theme for our Harvest weekend at Belfast South Methodist, including a very successful mini-conference/conversation yesterday entitled "Enough is Plenty" organised in association with South Belfast Friends Meeting, I have "recycled" a piece I posted some years ago, a screen shot of an animation based on Olaf Skarsholt's prose-poem “Earth Ball.” Shalom

A Psalm (?) for Sunday

The following is the responsive psalm we used to begin our 11am service today - although of course it isn't a Psalm at all but an adaptation of words from Deuteronomy. Listen, O heavens, and I will speak; hear, O earth, the words of our mouths. Let my teaching fall like rain and my words descend like dew, May they be like showers on new grass,  like abundant rain on tender plants. I will proclaim the name of the Lord . Oh, praise the greatness of our God! He is the Rock, his works are perfect, and all his ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is he. From Deuteronomy 32:1-4 Selah

A Suitable Saint for 2016?

I've never seen a stage production of Shaw's St. Joan before, I did a dramatised reading of it when I was 19 at about 2 o'clock in the morning as part of a sponsored play reading... and I have seen Otto Preminger/Graham Greene's somewhat bloodless film many years ago (probably on a rainy Saturday afternoon when there was no decent sport on Grandstand and it was showing on BBC2)... As such I was not awake to the powerful resonances that this play has for the world in which we now live... But the production in Belfast's Lyric which I saw last night on it's first night brings them alive... The director Jimmy Fay and adaptor Philip O'Sullivan have radically cut the play from a dramatis personnae of around 22 to one that could be handled by a cast of 7... However, they largely kept the structure and language of Shaw's play, choosing not to do it as an ensemble/agitprop piece a la the recent National Production, but they did loose the epilogue with its d