Two January Synchroblogs

There are two January synchroblogs that other bloggers may be interested in.
1. Interfaith Synchroblog on “Religion and science”
There will be an interfaith synchroblog on the general theme of “Religion and science” on 8 January 2008.
If you would like to take part put up your blog post on 7th or 8th January, and as soon as [...]

Death of “Clash of Civilizations” theorist

clipped from www.nytimes.com

Samuel P. Huntington, a political scientist best known for his views on the clash of civilizations, died Wednesday on Martha’s Vineyard. He was 81.

Mr. Huntington argued that in a post-cold-war world, violent conflict would come not from ideological friction between nations, but from cultural and religious differences among the world’s major civilizations.
He identified [...]

Christ co-opted by culture – the huckster Jesus

In a series of images intended to illustrate H. Richard Niebuhr’s 5 models of Christianity’s interaction with culture, Wanderings of a Theological Vagabond chooses to represent Christ by an image of Christ as huckster, a view of Christ as completely coopted by capitalist culture. Hat-tip to What’s the deal with stuff for drawing my attention [...]

A generous orthodoxy

A number of people, several of them Orthodox, have asked me what I thought of Brian McLaren’s book A generous orthodoxy. I’ve now, at last, managed to get hold of a copy of the book, and I’m busy reading it so I thought I would write some preliminary impressions. Though it is possible that I [...]

More forgotten ways

I studied church history at the University of Durham and the University of South Africa, and both had a very heavy Western bias.
In one sense one can blame St Luke for starting the trend in his Acts of the Apostles, which begins with a wide vision (Jerusalem, all Judaea and Samaria, the ends of the [...]

Edinburgh 2010 mission conference themes

The International Missionary Conference held at Edinburgh in 1910 shapped Protestant mission thinking for the rest of the 20th century, and one of the spin-offs was the formation of the World Council of Churches.
Now a similar gathering is being planned for the centenary, and the following themes have been proposed:
Following are the suggested titles for [...]

The terrorists you hear about

The terrorists you hear about… and the terrorists you don’t hear about.
If you ask which group was responsible for most attacks on civilian aircraft in 2001, most people would probably think of Al Qaeda, with hijacked aircraft crashing into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.
But in terms of the [...]

How you too can participate in the financial crisis

Lastest news from the financial markets: most shares may be down, and production is dropping in many industries, but snake oil production is up, and snake oil shares are booming.
Bishop Alan’s Blog: HBOS: Personalised Credit Crunch:
Welcome to the share offer that enables you to have your very own credit crunch at home this Christmas. As [...]

Finding interesting stuff in the blogosphere

People are writing lots of interesting things in blogs nowadays, while other internet forums, like Usenet newsgroups descend into banality and flame wars.
Of course there are lots of banal and boring blogs out there too, so how does one find the good stuff?
Three years ago, one of the key tools for this was Technorati. It [...]

Hobbits, heroes and Jesus – TGIF

This morning Jim Paul of L’Abri Fellowship spoke at TGIF on “Hobbits, heroes and Jesus”, an exploration of Christianity and myth.
I went along because I’m interested in the topic, and have written about it several times in this and other blogs. I thought Jim’s presentation was pretty good. He pointed out that most myths have [...]