So What?

Lent Sequence 2010

Over Lent, I will be preparing a sequence of 47 posts, between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday.  The theme will be writers who have influenced me.  They will include writers about

• spirituality, eg Anthony de Mello, Christopher Jamieson
• theology, eg Karen Armstrong, Walter Wink
• radicalism, eg Gerrard Winstanley, Saul Alinski
• science, eg Stuart Kauffman

as well as writers of

• hymns, eg Ebenezer Elliott, Sydney Carter
• novels, eg James Joyce, Terry Pratchett

I will keep these posts short.  There will be three paragraphs plus one image:

1. a quote from a work by the day's writer
2. an account of how the writer has influenced me
3. a reflection which might be used for prayer
4. an image or video related to the written material.  

Usually I will highlight a phrase which relates to the image or video.  Sometimes the image will be an aid to prayer or understanding and sometimes it might be a more tangential comment.

Please comment on any post that appeals to you, perhaps sharing your experience of the same writer.  If one of my posts reminds you of a writer who has influenced you, please share the details and perhaps a short extract.

We'll All Bake Together When We Bake

So what is this new blog for?   After several months of worthy blogging about ecumenism, I am finding the constraints do not allow me to write on certain topics.  So here is a new blog which will:

Ask questions.  So What? is one of them.  We live in a world where public statements seem increasingly bizarre.  If they’re not wrapped up in jargon they are redolent with unspoken assumptions.  Politicians, church leaders, the media - they all do it.  So what are they actually saying?  Who benefits?  Who loses out?

Local and global perspectives.  The world of a half-employed, aging radical:

• My place is perhaps called Pitsmoor, a multi-cultural, cosmopolitan, highly contentious inner city area of Sheffield, England ...
• My faith is Methodism - a branch of Christianity specially set aside for genteel eccentrics.
• My politics are Green with a reddish tinge perhaps – sadly red is the new blue these days ...
• My profession is development work in community, in and between churches, anywhere that will put up with me ...
• A one-time scientist - doctoral thesis about activated sludge since you ask - and I'm not going to blog about it ... this background does inform my views on the great atheist / theist debate - there's something to look forward to ...
• My music is classical opera, jazz and anything that appeals to me ...  there will be videos!
• My prejudices include (in no particular order) trainers, political extremists of all hues, fundamentalists, people who don’t look where they’re going – are these really prejudices? – I’ve been around long enough to know what they’re like.

We’re all in denial.  The world we have lived in for the last 20-30 years, maybe my whole life (so make that 55 years), is coming to an end.  (I'm not talking about the end of time but of our modern oil dependent civilisation.)  Are we all suffering cognitive dissonance?   Still, it goes against my instincts to be censorious.  We’re all in this together and even Methodists are playing their small part to screw up the planet.  Essentially we are living through absurd times and it falls to me and others to point out we're all rowing the same boat to oblivion, whatever direction we're rowing in.

So, I will point out the absurd.  I don’t want to laugh at people so much as point out the sense we have all been caught with our hand in the cookie jar (or biscuit barrel in English English). 

Some will think all this has been said before.  They would be right, here is one example, (I love the rhyme for ICBM):