Virtual Methodist

OK... so, for the entertainment of all three of you sad people who are reading blogs or are trawling through facebook during the Christmas break, here are the VM Awards for things out there in the real world... Starting with some of the stuff that appears in the sidebar of the blog... Best Read of the Year: This may have changed since Christmas, depending on whether I get any of the books on my wishlist from Santa, but I've vowed not to go near the computer for a week (a sort of pre-New Year resolution), so I've written this before the big day... Whilst it wasn't written or published this year, I was a bit slow in reading Stieg Larsson's " Girl with a Dragon Tattoo " but until recently it would have been my favourite read of the year, despite it's unremitting grimness... However, it was toppled at the last minute by C.J. Sansom's " Heartstone ", which was published this year, the latest in his Shardlake series which I reviewed a couple of da...

For obvious reasons (being a Methodist minister) I don't get to watch much TV or listen to a lot of radio on a Sunday, but happened to tune into a number of interesting things today, before and after church... Before charging out to an early meeting I did manage to listen to a bit of William Crawley's Sunday Sequence , which began with an interesting piece based on a survey by Ship of Fools. I would regularly check in with this site myself, but haven't done so much recently, but under the heading of "Chapter and Worse" they've been having a poll of some of those puzzling, perplexing and downright disturbing verses and passages in scripture... Its worth a look, and might perhaps be a good point for jumping off in a series of Bible studies with a more thoughtful group. Then, honouring the 25th Anniversary of Powerpoint, the programme went on to cover similar ground to an earlier blog , and indeed one of those I cited, Alan in Belfast , was a prominent co...