Virtual Methodist

I posted the most of this yesterday on the Flixster site which posts via facebook, so apologies to those who seem to be experiencing deja vu... However, I suppose that's how I felt watching Les Miserables on Saturday night. Despite my love of theatre I have never yet seen the stage show, and the book has taken up a substantial section of shelf space for decades without being read (I now have it on my kindle as well, just incase I have a free 3 weeks on a train some time). But because various bits of the plot have been used as sermon illustrations for years, and a few of the songs have become standards on various "songs from the shows" events I have been involved in, I knew most of the plot before entering the cinema to see it...  Did I enjoy it? Well, as I said to someone yesterday morning at church, after mulling it over for a night, "enjoy" is a word that wouldn't really come into my comments about it. There have been a lot of begrudging , and funnil...

Most of the pieces that have caught my eye this week follow on from some of the pieces I pointed to last week... First and foremost being ye olde flags issue... 9 weeks and counting... It must be serious in that even Seamus Heaney, has said something , despite his self-enforced rule of "whatever you say, say nothing." He argues that the whole thing was unnecessary and badly handled, but I would be wary, as some have done of taking from his words much succour for the unionist/loyalist cause, without also hearing his critique of the Unionist "caste" system. One of the pieces on this subject I highlighted last week came from a former youth worker at the East Belfast Mission, while this week one of the best was by the Director of EBM's Skainos project Glenn Jordan, on Crookedshore where he points to this as possibly the end of a political era and, perhaps the emergence of a new one with new voices and emphases. Meanwhile Jude Hill, UTV reporter and the driving f...

It's been a while since I did a round up of interesting things wot I found on t'interweb but was spurred on to do one this week on the back of two strands that have come out of the current "flags" issue in Belfast. Both are by people who previously worked with the two Methodist missions in Belfast: former East Belfast Mission Youth Worker, Harriet Long, and former club culture outreach worker with Belfast Central Mission Dave Magee. After a couple of posts on her own feelings about the protests and how they were impacting on East Belfast, Harriet then started a short series giving voice to some women in that area coming at the issue from diverse perspectives, concluding with this one from a girl in the Catholic Short Strand area . Dave has, for many years now, been working on peace-building and non-violent responses to problems in loyalist communities, particularly in North Down, and the flags protest prompted him at long last to start blogging from his experien...

"If I, even for a moment, accept my culture's definition of me, I am rendered harmless." When Peterson makes this statement in "The Contemplative Pastor" he is specifically referring to pastors... but is it not true of everyone? In response to my post last week offering an operating manual for ministers, one friend (and wife of a Methodist minister) suggested that it was not just ministers who needed such an operating manual, but teachers, doctors, lawyers and other professions who are frequently faced with unrealistic expectations... My response was that not only was that true, but applied to those outside of the traditional professions too. I'm actually very wary of special pleading on the part of ministers especially when it comes to their long working hours and busy schedules (more on that with my next post based on this book), given that we live in a world where so many people are subject to tremendous pressure and unrealistic expectations. We as mi...

As I've posted a couple of times now, we have a "Good Book Group" at church which looks at different "theological" books from time to time. Anyone can come along (though it now seems to have settled on a fixed constituency) so we publish the date, venue and book for the next meeting in our church announcements. Given the authors of a few of our earlier books, some participants were handed other books and magazine articles by some members of the church, challenging the theological "soundness" of the authors we were reading. They never handed me any of the books. Clearly I'm a lost cause, if not a lost soul... Well, the book we studied this time was "Walking with Gay Friends" by Alex Tylee , and it had been on our "must read" list for some time, but I baulked at it, wary of the response of some outside the group when the title appeared in the announcements. But recently I've explored with issues of sex and sexuality in our Bi...

My good friend and colleague in exile Barry Sloan posted a link to this piece by Victoria Coren in the Guardian . I'd half heard a reference to it earlier in the week on some discussion show or other (can't remember which) but was interested to read the article in full... Especially as I have the same sort of intellectual crush on Victoria Coren as she has on Rowan Williams... her quiz show on BBC4 " Only Connect ", is an oasis of intellectual challenge (together with Paxo and "University Challenge" immediately before it on BBC2) in a wilderness of reality TV, soaps and quizzes for the illiterate or money-grabbing (or frequently both). I'm sure we've all had fanboy/girl embarassing incidents in our day... Mine involved some simpering infront of Brian Cox years ago before he was famous (the actor not the astro-physics popstar)... although the thought of trying to extricate yourself from an embarassing situation with the Archbishop of Canterbury using ...

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...