Virtual Methodist

I was sent this book specifically to review after I responded to a post/tweet on facebook/twitter (can’t remember which) at a time when I was seriously thinking about the role of social media in society in general and my life and ministry specifically. It is a relatively short book written in bite-sized blog-like chunks, or, given the subject matter, perhaps that should be byte-sized chunks. Despite its brevity, it packs in a lot of scholarship and reflection, indeed at times it reads like a literary link-dump, citing other larger works that have a more specific focus, but it builds a good case for how all communications technology, including contemporary social media, are not simply neutral tools, but serve to shape individuals’ neurological function and human society in general for good or ill. It is not a luddite rejection of technological development and its often unintended social effects, but rather, is a measured appraisal by someone who uses these tools, but is seeking to ...

Today's offering on God Morning Ulster's "Thought for the Day", my last for a wee while... Have you ever said “There aren’t enough hours in the day” or “there aren’t enough days in the week”? Well now there aren’t enough weeks in the year… Because at the moment we are apparently in the middle of, not only the well publicized Christian Aid Week and Community Relations Week , but also, Choose Charity Shops Week - a nationwide campaign to encourage people to donate goods to charity shops; Dying Matters Awareness Week , aimed at encouraging individuals and organisations to take simple steps that can make a big difference to people when they are dying or bereaved, and International Food Allergy Awareness Week , an initiative of the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Alliance … a group name that was a significant challenge to say live on radio at 6.55am… All of these are important issues but it does speak to me of a world where, despite the proliferation of ways of commun...

To keep you going incase you have nothing better to do on a Saturday here are a few links to material that has made me think this week. First on the whole "Fasting from Facebook" malarky, Steve Stockman went off on one... I posted the link in a comment earlier in the week, but incase you missed it, here it is again . Here in Northern Ireland there were three big news stories in the past week. 1) The death of Frank Carson - who, whilst he seems to have been a genuinely nice man, I was never really a fan, so I didn't really follow up on any of the stories, 2) The effective collapse of a £6 million "Supergrass" trial against loyalist paramilitaries, which has generated a lot of ill-informed ranting on all forms of news media, but doesn't fit my current "whatever is good" filter, and 3) The passing of permission to build a golf course near the Giant's Causeway. This too has generated a lot of comment across the board, and frankly I have no p...

A number of my friends and colleagues have decided to opt out of facebook over Lent... a highly laudable discipline on their part, but while I admire and will miss them over the next 46 days I will not be joining them... I hope I won't be on facebook so much, but that will not be because I'm giving it up, but because I intend doing more positive things... Including more physical exercise, more reading and giving more attention to this much neglected blog... So, throughout Lent I plan to blog daily again, but, for the most part to offer positive reflections and resources for other's reflection and worship, rather than my all-too frequent vituperative rants. One of the consistently most popular posts on the blog over the past couple of years was a brief post at the beginning of Lent 2010 entitled "It's not just biscuits" . I was always slightly puzzled by this as it was a relatively flimsy piece... For some time I thought it was because people were looking fo...

Readers of this blog will know by now that I do a monthly stint on a local independent radio station, offering reflections on the Sunday newspaper headlines and a "Review of the Week" as part of an early morning religious magazine programme, which in its latest incarnation is called "Dawn Reflections". Today the headlines covered three broad areas depending on what papers you looked at. The Irish nationals (eg. the Irish Independent and Irish Times ) had stories critical of the past and present Irish governments' handling of the economic crisis, and reflected a spirit akin to Fraser from Dad’s Army telling us “We’re all doomed!” The erstwhile broadsheets of Britain , meanwhile, filled their front pages with photographs of a beturbaned Saif al-Islam Gaddhafi, who was captured yesterday trying to flee Libya... (Although the Observer also found space to highlight a letter from Church of England Archbishops and Bishops critical of the current indescrim...

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...

I only became involved in facebook because of my son Owain. He was wanting to find a way of hooking up with his friends easily while we were on an extended exchange in the USA a few years ago and signed up for Facebook, on the understanding that I would sign up too as his "friend" and thus be able to keep tabs on what he was involved in. However, he rarely used his account, and I didn't touch it at all for the first 2 months... then whilst checking my emails in the US, one day there were 4, then 14, then 20 then over 70 emails arrived in my inbox with the senders asking to be my friend... I was very discerning about my acceptances, restricting them to people I actually knew... whether they were friends, or I'd even talked to them, in the real world was only a secondary concern. My wife, coming later to the party, is much much more discerning... if you are on her list you're part of a relatively select band. Whether these can REALLY be termed friendships, however, ...