postmodernbible

Methodist Conference and so on...

The last few days have been a bit busy with travelling around the country and being involved in a few things.

Last Friday I visited a couple of mission teams, one in Swindon and the other in Saltash.  The drive down was through all that rain and thunder.  I set off from Cliff in the sun and approached Birmingham into what could only be described as an apocalyptic gloom.  I wasn't too surprised to hear what was happening down in Glastonbury!

Eventually got to Swindon and met with the team - most of whom were soaking wet!  The drove down to Saltash - entering the blessed realm of Cornwall once again.  Had a good time with the team.

Popped into Plymouth on the way home and walked down on the Hoe.  I pondered why it was that I always feel so at home in Plymouth.  I only lived there for five years before we moved to Lancashire.  But every time I go to the city, I feel like I am coming back to somewhere which is just so right.  I had a chat with a few people about this over the next few days...still not got to the bottom of it.  More later perhaps...what would church be like if we had that sort of allegiance to it?

I then came home for a couple of days - well 1 and a bit days.  We had friends round on Saturday although I spent the evening running around with Sam trying to find a doctor who could prescribe an asthma preventer.  We went through NHS Direct which was clearly chaotic and ended up at a new form of doctors out of hours thing in Chesterfield.  The doc decided he had a chest infection and so it was good job we took him.  He's better now.

Sunday was Matt Finch's ordination service in Taunton and Theresa was due to come down with me.  With poorly kids and Grace with a broken leg(!!!), we decided I would do the trip on my own and stayed south for a couple of days.

It was good to be with Matt and Yaz for their special day - and to see other friends - Phil and Zoe, Bart and Rachel, Peter Barber and so on.  However, I have to say that I found the ordination service to be dull as ditchwater!  Why can't we use spirituality which is rich, deep, meaningful.  Why can't we use symbols, senses, visuals?  Why are the only two ingredients in our worship words and the blessed organ?  I'm sorry but that is simply not good enough.  It belittles worship and fails to show the congregation how important ordination is.

After the service, a few of us went off to Pizza Express for a meal - lovely time of fellowship and probably a much deeper sense of worship than in the church!  Doing Par Cours on the way to the meeting was great fun!  And if you don't know what Par Cours is - nor did I!  Apparently it is 'street running'.

Stayed with friends for a couple of days and spent Monday afternoon on the beach at Charmouth with Matt and Yaz.  We collected fossils (probably Methodists!) and talked about the future, about emering church, about blogging and everything else.  Yaz is thinking of starting a blog (PLEASE!!!!) and was asking what I thought.  Well, I think my blog is basically a diary with a few comments thrown in.  Don't think anyone reads it really.  But it is good for me to write some stuff down.  One day I might lose my memory and then what would I do!

Blogging can be sharing newsworthy items (Paleojudaica? NTGateway); sharing wise thoughts (tsk; Jonny Baker; Maggi Dawn?);  family based musings (???); or a complete farrago of all of these (mine?).  I don't know what blogging is for and so I am not sure whether what I do is right or not.  So hard to advise Yaz about what to do with hers - Just do it Yaz and see what happens!  It will be worth it.

Matt and Yaz are wonderful people and we had a great time - and the ice creams were wonderful - Mango something or other...mmm.

Tuesday morning drove down to Torquay for the Methodist Conference.  I was there to introduce a report called Growth in Ministry.  I had been on a working party which wrote the report and so they felt I was the right person to speak to it.  In fact, this meant meeting lots of people during the day and standing up in Conference and making a three minute presentation!!!  Long way to go for the speech, but a good opportunity to see loads of old friends and be involved in making a change to the way Methodist seeks to offer professional development for its ministers.  I believe in what I was saying and presenting.  And they liked it too!  Passed without any problems.

Eventually after much greeting, tea drinking and chatting, I set off back to Cliff.  I ended up driving through TEN thunderstorms!!!  It was manic.  I wished I could stop half way but decided to push through.  Got home about midnight and was very very pleased to be home...it's been a tiring few days.

Better stop...long blog...I will try and reflect upon this some other time...

Pete

Done

Today was the Examiners Meeting here at Cliff.  Lots of paperwork to get ready, rooms to prepare, running around correcting marksheets and so on.  We got through the whole process pretty well.  It's more complicated than normal because we are halfway between Manchester and Sheffield - but the decisions made today make the move towards Manchester more and more firm.  It was good to see students' work honoured and see how people have really moved on.  Some less so...but most have worked so hard.

To some extent today is the end of the academic year for us...and it marks a very hard academic year for me.  It's been frantic at times, and probably the most difficult for me professionally/personally.  Things still aren't sorted either.  Not sure where that aspect will be sorted - probably never.

I hope that I can now get some things cleared up over the next few days amidst visits to mission teams, Methodist Conference and Graduation and then spend some time doing some writing.  That really is what I need to be doing/want to be doing.

End of the day...tired...night night.

Pete 

BLAH in Manchester 26 July

From Ben Edson at Sanctus1 in Manchester - this looks really good - hope to be there!!!

“AGGREGATION: The Emerging Church According to Manchester”

We are delighted that Andrew Jones (AKA Tall Skinny Kiwi) will be joining us for the  second blah...manchester.

Andrew has ministered around the world for the last 20 years and has pastored churches in Australia and USA and is currently living of the Orkney Islands.  He is the Project Director of BOAZ, a Consultant for BGCT and an Associate of DAWN Ministries. Andrew blogs at http://tallskinnykiwi.typepad.com/

He will  present “AGGREGATION: The Emerging Church According to Manchester”

blah...manchester is a series of conversations hosted by  CMS in partnership with The Church Army and Manchester Diocesan Board of  Education in 2005 on mission, worship, church and Christianity in today’s  rapidly changing culture. It’s a time to keep listening, chatting and  reflecting as God beckons us into the future.

Tuesday 26 July     6:30-8:30pm     Drinks and  refreshments provided     Admission free

Drinks  served from 6:30
Input begins at 7:00

We have a limited number  of places.  It would help us to know in advance if you're coming, so please book a place and turn up!

E-mail Ben Edson on:  [email protected]

Venue:  Church House Training Suite, Fourth Floor, 90 Deansgate, Manchester, M3 2GH.

(For directions  see www.multimap.com)

Please forward this e-mail on to anyone you think  may be interested

Loadsa Stuff

What a fantastic weekend!!!

Spent the day on Saturday in Manchester Uni at a Postgrad Research Day.  Hugh Pyper (spelt right this time) spoke in the morning.  He explored the links between popular culture and Christian interpretation of the Bible - I think .  It was an interesting ramble around so many interesting areas - from how to start your dissertation through to Christian wrestling, and whether the Bible is an appropriate book for kids to read. 

Four 'images' from Hugh's talk have stayed with me especially - one was a Haiku which he was going to write on the board but didn't.  It went something like this:

"Book three to the left of book you think you should read contains the real questions" 

I loved the sense of anarchic intertextuality in this haiku.  It feeds into a kind of Barthian/Riffaterran sense of literature as "L'Intertexte" - a kind of organic, living, developing matrix where one 'text' leads to another and another in a network of hypertextual alleyways - and of course Robert Frost - one day I took a path less travelled by and that has made all the difference.

The second was the whole wrestling thing - Hugh introduced his talk by  referring to Armaggeddon 2003 and to a huge wrrestling event in Manchester this weekend.  WWE and so on use a lot of Biblical imagery in what they are doing - and Hugh moved on to explore the violence in the Bible and violence in portrayal of the Bible as well.  If people are turned on to the choreographed violence of wrestling, does the Church respond by its own choreographed violence - hence Christian wrestling, blood washed Africa and all that - or do we set a different paradigm?  See below on "Saved".

The third was "The Bible is buried and alive in us" - the sense that the Bible is buried within us but is still alive and active.  'Us' of course can mean both ourselves and our culture.  I am listening to X&Y at the moment - there is so much biblical imagery in the CD and I think I might need to write something about all that over the next week or so...get it out of my system.  But this sense that the Bible is alive and active within the very heart of our society.  Just because it has been repressed and held at bay does not mean it isn't there, working away, exposing the fallacy of commercialism and so on (this is me not Hugh, I think).  What would it mean for that living word to exposed, revealed, unmasked for our society?  I remember the kind of experience I had with the students at the Tate Modern - where is God - not here - oh yes, go and look.  When they came back the world was a different shaped place for some of them.  What does it mean to unveil the living word at the heart of our culture - popular, vulgar culture not just middle class pseudo-reality?

The fourth was the whole sense of whimsy with footnotes.  I am not so sure that Hugh's talk was all that deep - or that it was meant to be deep.  One thing that annoyed me (?) was the sense of being over and above vulgar culture.  We got onto a discussion of the youth bible in the question and answer session - and the pietistic blurb which sometimes dominates the biblical text.  Hugh asked what it meant to do that to the Bible - why can't we leave kids/youth to read the text unadorned.  Of course, there are huge issues about bridging hermeneutical gaps and so on.  But what interested me was what mileage we were trying to get out of the whole whimsical exercise?  What do we think people have been doing with the Bible all this time?  Do we think that the vast majority of people over the centuries have been reading the Bible as academics or as Patristic scholars.  Not at all.  They have been the vulgar readers - the ones who find in it the pietistic, the call for miracles, the blue collar readers.  The Church today, at last, is beginning to be dominated by non-Western churches where the reading of the texts is non-Western, non-Academic, vulgar.  Of course, there are some there who read the text like we academics do.  But I am not certain that imposing academic reading patterns on the Bible will ever allow the buried but living word to be unveiled.  I think things are just a bit more primal than all that.  I don't know...

In the session after lunch, George Brooke suggested seven questions about our research which Hugh's paper prompted:

1. Are you in the right starting place?
2. Is there enough creative juxtaposition?
3. Are you questioning assumptions?
4. Is there a sensitivity to language?
5. Is there enough risk - are you asking what is not suitable?
6. What is your cultural position?
7. What's the relevance?

We used this to talk about developing and writing research - a great afternoon.

It was good to be there on Saturday - also met some great people from Nazarene College who are doing PhDs on John - one on water imagery, one on vine imagery and one on festivals and collective memory.  Also met another PhD student doing Bakhtin and Mark (I think!) and there was film in there as well.  It's great to get together at these kind of events and kindle the academic flames a bit.

Got home in time for Doctor Who - last episode.  I thought it was absolutely fantastic - so much so that me and the boys watched it again last night on BBC 3 - as well as the mini-documentary they do after it about what different things mean and what was important.  I loved the sense of things going wrong - of the brutal horror of the daleks which, despite years of mockery as tin cans on wheels, actually seemed scary.  When they appeared at the window behind that girl  - Edward was behind a cushion in one second!!!  I loved the sense of my boys being scared - of them interacting with a drama and feeling the tension.  They are jabbering on about the next series and the Christmas special already.  Inote the new Fear Factor section to the BBC website - kids talking about fear...

Of course, who didn't pick up the whole theological issue about what it means to be a god.  Russell Davies seems to think gods only create - I wondered about the whole Hindu sense of the Destroyer - of a more polytheistic approach to gods of death as well as gods of life.  The Emperor was clearly playing the part of the psychotic demiurge to Chris Ecclestone's ignorant Messiah and Billy Piper's rather splendid 'Metatron' - the avenging/rescuing all-powerful angel emissary - god-incarnate?  Juicy stuff in any case!  Someone said earlier they had given up on Doctor Who - sorry, I disagree this has been the TV event of the year!  So much better than Big Bother (not a typo!!!).

Yesterday, Fathers Day - got a 1GB MP3 player, Black Eye Peas new CD and some Yorkie Bars - thanks kids!  Walked to church with Sam listening to Coldplay X&Y and BEP's Pump it - we shared headphones - me with one and sam with the other.  Cuts down the quality but doubles the sharing!  The sun, the grounds of the College, the music, the sense of all being right in God's world, was very, very powerful.  After Church we had a BBQ at the house with some friends - kids running like mad idiots all over the garden, me playing with fire, nice food, nice drink, loads of sun.  The kids had a wild water fight and the dog got drenched - which she loved - she has taken to jumping in the pond when she gets too hot - not good for the pond, for the fish or for her!

Watched Dr Who (as above) and a huge thunderstorm - I love the huge windows and the fantastic views from our front room - and eventually got the kids to bed and after completing the ironing (21st century man, me!), Theresa and I sat down to watch "Saved" - a DVD about a group of American Christian School kids who are confronted with some of the real dilemmas of life as a normal human being.  Fantastic satire, brilliant portrayal of what Christianity is all about and what it is not about!  We are going to watch it again tonight.  Thanks so  much Matt and Yaz for putting me onto it and for Phil who's copy we all borrowed!  I've bought it now and will be using it regularly!  Cheesy beyond belief, teenage trash without doubt, American/Canadian (can they be connected with a slash?) certainly.  But watch it and enjoy the irony!

LONG BLOG!

I need to get on with some paperwork.  Coldplay have been singing their hearts out on WMP!  I love Message - "My Song is Love, Love to the Loveless Shown" - any intertextual references for you?  Just a few for me...Paperwork!!!  Gotta do it!!! 

God Bless

Pete   

Argh Networking...

Found a random wireless network node which offered me free access for a month and so thought I would put it to good use.  I'm at Manchester University at a postgrad seminar.  We've just done the introductions and now people are running around talking to one another - three people I've got to talk to at lunch about John's Gospel.  I hate networking though.  I'm such an introvert - I just want to sit in the corner and listen!

Hugh Piper is about to speak...so I better listen to him.  Might blog later!  But that would be far too many bloggings in one week!

Pete

Powerpoint Confusion

Having spent this morning preparing for a little talk on study skills this afternoon and putting together a little presentation, I was a little disconcerted to see Mark Goodacre's blog reference to The Pain of Powerpoint.  There are some great links to other reading...and these have blessed my life for the last few minutes.  I particularly like the Missing Link presentation/tutorial which you can Download attentionspam.pdf  from their site.

I agree with Mark that technology can kill a presentation - and there are so many hassles about getting the technology to work and making sure the projector is powerful enough and so on. 

However, I am not so sure that I agree with all the negative hype about powerpoint.  If it is based on Ludditism - i.e. I don't need all this trendy computerised stuff - an hour's lecture never did me any harm - then read your 'how people learn' textbooks, guys. 

Secondly, i just wonder whether anti-powerpointism goes the other way of this snobbish reaction - to appear to be one better than everyone else.  "Bullet-points?  O dear, they are so last season!  Didn't you know we're into the visual now!"  Well I can see the point and the missing link session made me think even more.  But at times, it is really helpful to have the information up there on the screen - not least because sometimes speakers are so random that it is the only bit that does make sense!

I have to say that at Cliff we use powerpoint in conjunction with interactive whiteboards on which you can also show videos/dvds and surf the net and so on.  This has really helped in the film/arts-based units I am developing since we can watch some clips and then slip over into a powerpoint about some aspect of Christology or jump to a Gospel parallels website or go to a whiteboard (usually green board to help eyesight...) and start a discussion running or highlight aspects of the powerpoint presentation or the movie or whatever.  This interactivity is great fun and avoids the need to be so down on the technology.

Of course, the issue is to use visuals rather than words - the tutorial suggests only six words per screen at most - somewhere else suggests writing telegraphically - £1 a word!  On screen less is more because what you need to sell is you - the presenter - and the message you are presenting.  The powerpoint mustn't be your cue cards.

But at last year's SBL meeting, PPT was a useful tool for so many.  Although at Spring Harvest, where it is also used so much, I saw Gerard Kelly using it mostly for visuals - he would find a visual representation of his message and leave that up - it drew the eye, made connections and left the verbal input to Gerard and his talking.  It was effective.  Perhaps I have been too scared to leave the words behind - caught up in the trap of thinking that lots of words on the screen is a good policy.

Dunno.  Perhaps I might be a bit Luddite myself in my response to the marketting revolution unfolding against PPT?  I suppose the problem is it is so Microsoft and so so universal.  Perhaps if it wasn't ubiquitous it would be more enthusiastically embraced - familiarity breeds contempt?  ...and presumably also loss of effect.  I think I need to spend some time and some energy using presentations as visual aids rather than information dissemination techniques - leave that to the handouts - which I always give out at the end of the lecture anyway, just to annoy the students!!! (Joke, honest!!!)

Pete   

Life

Is manic at the moment.  Examination processes; changing universities and all the bureaucracy associated with that; trying to get new students for next year.  At present we have a 100% improvement on last year!!!  That's good but there is also a new influx of enquiries post-Festival.  Things are looking better.  Quite a few students are also thinking of staying on for the FT MA and so on.  Once here, people don't seem to want to hurry away.  Might be a problem for some but I think I agree with most of the decisions. The book is finally being 'transmitted' - whatever that means.  I had to cut some words and so the appendix of classical texts has had to go and some minors references here and there.  However, I have managed to update some of the intertextuality stuff with reference to Iser's Prospecting and especially the Genette/Eco stuff in my Limerick Paper.  Apparently Eco's latest book is not one of his best...a shame...he seems to have let intertextuality become a little too much the driving force.  Following a hint from Sean Winter in Manchester I picked up Richard Hayes' Echoes in Paul - a great book and I couldn't believe it was written so long ago.  I have been so involved in Johannine stuff that the whole world seems to have passed me by!  So trying to read that and Sandra Schneiders Revelatory Text and still keeping up with the emerging church stuff.  Too much to do and too little time to do it in.

Here's a pic of Grace on Blackpool Beach!  We decided that over half term we would spend a day there...

Here's me and the kids as well - same beach.  We had a great day - although I have to say that Blackpool seemed more charming when I was little.  The candy floss was OK and the walk on the prom long but not really fulfilling.  The Pleasure Beach was no pleasure - especially not to my pocket! And Theresa had to sit outside with the dog while I watched the kids spend a small fortune on nothingness.  They laughed and loved it all, of course.  Promised to do Alton Towers sometime this summer.  I much prefer the Yorkshire Coast - Bempton and the Gannets calls! 

Grace is a star...she is also super dog!  Here is another pic - almost airborne!  I really enjoyed the day - it was great to be with the kids and Theresa - but the kids are growing up so fast.  I wish it was slower.  Life travels too quickly.  Work and work and work...things to do and things to be done...their life goes almost as quickly.  And in the meantime, they are all grown up!  That's life.  I just need to get it into my head that that is what life is actually all about and not all this manic work stuff.  How do you get the balance?  I want to write - stuff to get off my chest about things...academic and non-academic - things I want to explore...time to spend reading and delving into the texts...students to work with and listen to and...

Been struck by God's grace again tonight at a service at College.  He is just so awesome.  I remember when I was on one of my first missions - we stood in the kitchen of this little Methodist Chapel praying with the team leaders...all of a sudden there was a heaviness in the air...none of us dared to look up...I still don't understand what it was all about - I did understand something of God's glory was there, of the weight of his presence, of his awesome majesty, of the overwhelming 'is-ness' of his being.  Life is with God....heavier, more profound, more rich, more real.  Martyn, our Principal is off up north for a few days...Northumberland...and I want to go to Lindisfarne again...where everything is heavy with God's presence....the beach, the sky, the clouds, the hills, the sea, the river, the castle, the abbey, the town, the moors, the people, the cows, the trains, the grass, the farms, the houses, the villages, Dunstanburgh, Alnwick, and the miles and miles of gold...

Evidently I've been listening to far too much of Coldplay's X&Y!

Pete

Update

You don't need to worry.  I am still alive.  This time of the year is marking, examination meetings, festivals and so on at Cliff and all manner of things that have kept me so far from ths blog that I have wondered about abandoning it all together.  Someone said the other day that blogging was an addiction.  If so, I have not caught it!

We went to Stratford yesterday to see the Dream - fantastic performance.  Wonderful.  Got back to see Dr Who and thought it was probably the best episode so far - love this Bad Wolf thing that has developed...a really good touch.  More and more people are talking about Dr Who and its effects on kids and adults.  This is good...really good.  Something is connecting.  And of course there is so much material in it all.

I promise to blog soon.

My intertextuality paper is being published in a collection...and I am still trying to work through the book issues...too much to do!!!

God bless you all, Pete

p.s. I have told you that we've got a little puppy - she is so so so gorgeous - pics coming...she's a little west highland terrier called Grace.  Sorry, Yaz, your fault you don't like dogs...you need prayer!