Virtual Methodist

A bumper bonanza issue of the supplement due to a two week backlog of stuff I'd compiled... (you can save some of it for Bank Holiday Monday if the weather's bad and you have absolutely nothing better to do!) Ongoing Fun and Games ...not a reference to the World Police and Fire Games, which seems to have been a great success, but to the fact that after the fun over the flag at Christmas and the annual riot-fest around the Twelfth... this year we had the added bonus of a right royal ruckus in Royal Avenue in response to a Republican Internment Parade... This has led (among other things) to much activity in the virtual sphere... A few of the more interesting pieces include: "What does the Outside World Think of Us" - this is a question I ask myself all the time given that I have spent a fair proportion of my ministry interpreting the Northern Ireland situation to visitors from the US and elsewhere, and my FB is usually filled with questions and concerned com...

After announcing my groundrules for Lent (ie. keeping it positive) things have gone a bit quiet here on the VM blog, prompting one way to suggest that I was finding it difficult to maintain a positive demeanour...  But no... the problem has been that in the run up to my sabbatical I had so many meetings and so much admin to do (it felt like I was having to do 10 week's work in 10 days) that I had neither time nor energy left to devote to the blog... But I've still been reading lots, and so here is a link-dump of the pieces that have caught my eye over the past 10 days or so... I've tried to weed out the pieces that are now out of date in this ridiculously fast-paced world, and those that don't fit my "keep it positive" criterion (on that basis I am keeping two in cold storage for a few weeks!) Given that I am exhausted trying to get ready for sabbatical, and have spent a ridiculous amount of time since getting off sitting around in what some call "...

I've written a couple of pieces on chaplaincy recently ( here and here ) and so it was interesting to have this piece on hospice chaplaincy brought to my attention by a former intern. Meanwhile, reflections on Fabrice Muamba and his ongoing recovery have continued in various corners of the interweb, but the most interesting for me was Kevin Hargaden's comments on the ill-conceived  challenge of a group of cross-party MPs to ASA ban on advertising faith-healing . Their particular crusade (and I use that word advisedly) is part of the developing war between conservative Christians and militant secularists... Hardly a day goes by without coming across a link concerning the "persecution" of Christians in secularist Britain, usually via the Daily Mail or the Christian Institute/Voice and featuring some quote or other by George Carey, or, on the other hand, some campaign by Dicky Dawkins and his merry band of fundamentalist atheists. Indeed I could include many of...

As most of you know, I've been trying to stick to a Lenten discipline of "thinking on what is good" which isn't always easy when reading the news or picking up stuff on the internet. However, the a series of photographs and quotes on Steve McCurry's blog , put a definite smile on my face... especially the photo of the guy in Afghanistan carrying the 2 icecreams... Certainly a different image of that land than we usually get... including the devastating loss of 6 British soldiers this week . Thanks to Fred Vincent for posting it via facebook in the first place. Carrying on a theme from last week's "supplement" , Richard Dawkins' crusade against Christianity (lets face it, that could be a theme every week), Zoomtard wrote an excellent piece on the engagement between Dawkins and Rowan Williams last weekend. This next story also emanates from Oxford and concerns an  ill-conceived election campaign by one female student to become Union Librarian ...

I don’t know what I’d do without internet search engines these days… When I'm in a hurry I generally use the ubiquitous Google, but if not I use Easyclick, which pushes a fraction of a penny towards our community project DFCI every time I use it. It's a long time since I've used Ask Jeeves , although it was the one I used most at first. A couple of weeks ago I came across an article about the 10 most unanswerable questions on Ask Jeeves … Perhaps my favourite was number three, which is “Do blondes have more fun?” Now, I ask you, who puts that sort of a question into a search engine and expects any kind of an answer… Or at least any kind of any answer which doesn’t lead you to decidedly dubious websites (and no, I haven't tried it). But many of the questions are much more profound. Number 8 asks “What is the secret to happiness?” while 7 is “What is love?” I’d suggest that both of them are tied up with the top two questions, number 2 being “Is there a god?” and, number 1...

This is not about a singer of songs and his critics, but the bioethicist Peter Singer at Princeton, and his many critics, of which I regard myself as one. A friend sent me this article from Christianity Today on some of his views. It is, as my friend wrote to me, "Worth a read." In case you haven't come across Peter Singer before, he is a quietly spoken, polite yet unabashed utilitarian and as I said in a reply to my friend, his views are broadly reflective of the development of Darwinian thought that ultimately produced Nietzsche, and would be held by many of my old biology lecturers… quietly content with the idea of nature red in tooth and claw applying to modern human biology. I do think that the article takes a bit of a cheap shot in closing by saying that he is the rare example of an honest atheist. An atheistic evolutionary approach does not necessarily lead to the twin poles of advocating both animal rights and infanticide. Dawkins, for example would argue that th...

As well as being the 500th Anniversary of the birth of John Calvin this year it is also the 200th Anniversary of Charles Darwin , and the 150th Anniversary of his publication of his " On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection " (a snappy title if ever there was one!). A Methodist studying Calvin's Institutes may be a strange phenomenon, but some would believe that an evangelical studying Behavioural and Evolutionary Genetics, which was the the subject of my honours dissertation in my primary degree, is even more bizarre. I am increasingly dismayed by the tendency within evangelicalism (particularly in America and Northern Ireland) to hold to literal belief in the Genesis creation stories (even though the accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 are "literally" contradictory) and "scientific" creationism, as a touchstone of "soundness". Add to that the tendency of evolutionists such as Dawkins (whose "selfish gene" theory was cor...