Byrnesys Blabberings

Absolutely rushed off my feet at work today but managed to read this excellent Zizek quote which was related to Christian Consmerism in an excellent post by Ben Myers in his review of "Rapture Ready!" 

As Slavoj Žižek has observed, the logic of late capitalism presses towards the commodification of a niche identity for its own sake; the Christian merchandise I buy is not itself the desired commodity, but it is merely an ephemeral signifier of the real commodity, which is my identity as a particular sort of Christian. In this case, the product I am really purchasing is radically non-material, wholly spiritual; I am purchasing religious meaning and belonging, religious “community” (since the merchandise allows me to participate in a specific market niche). Here, any neat separation between my “faith” and my “consumer culture” is simply fictitious. To change the latter simply is to change the former.

• I am full of Earth
• My late Good Friday post and maybe my whole easter address
• Finking about Fasting

Some intresting thoughts here on whether reformed christians are more likely to be introvert whilst ‘missional’ types are more likely to be extroverts.

Let me know what you think about that?

Something I have been thinking about recently is how when we disect the Church we sound very much like we think secular sociology explains and in fact defines reality more authoratatively than an account more informed by a purely Christian narrative.

Are there any problems in this, or should we welcome secular theory interpretting the Church?

• Confrontation - the truth in love?
• The issues in Christian Political Alignment Part 2
• The Shaping forces of Evangelicalism

Tearfund have begun publishing Daily prayer podcasts, though somehow whilst moving house last week I lost my iPod!

Trevin Wax writes well on the subject of being ecumenical.

A new free (ish) UK service called freesat is being launched which offers digital HD broadcasting and a good number of channels, even to those areas (like up here in the depths of Scotland) where you can’t get freeview.

Had I not recently broken my canon SD300 I would be doing this in a second, lifehacker have featured free software which you can load onto your point and shoot canon through the memory card to use functions (like RAW files) that normally would require you to spend £600+ on a DSLR. Lifehacker have a good how-to and screenshots.

More excitement from the new 3G iPhone release, Mac Rumours picked up an internal memo from AT&T which asked workers not to take holidays between certain dates in June and July due to them expecting "heavier than normal customer traffic". Also Steve Jobs has lined up a keynote for June 9th. As exciting as it all is, the 3G release of the iPhone is a little like knowing what your christmas present is in August, there is no buzz and no surprises in keynotes these days, sigh.

Though not much of a gamer the playstation website released screenshots of how they were recreating inner city London for the game, it is really quite incredible!

TSK links to the first review of the new narnia movie (out in the UK in July I think). The reviewer Bob Beltz makes a good point: "The release of Prince Caspian provides another opportunity for churches and ministries to utilize a resource that cost nearly $200 million dollars to produce.  The awareness of the general public about the film is at the 95% level, which means almost anyone you talk to knows about the film.  Go use it for the kingdom!"

EatBible gives some commendable tips on how not to waste your summer if you are a student, I especially recomment the first two, and would add, travel and enjoy life.

John Piper encourages you to find people interesting, I can definatly Identify with this, I can only effectively evangelise when I choose to take interest and invest in them, trying to ‘take scalps’ never works.

A great story of how a mac store employee used a remote desktop connection to take a photo of the thief who’d stolen her mac!

If your a US college student or alumni grab Office Ultimate with 90% off!

If you dont want to spend your hard earned money on Microsoft Office then Open Office have just released a native Mac version of their freeware office suite. 

Abraham Piper makes an excellent point for all bosses: "You simply can’t pay committed employees commensurately. So treat them like they’re doing you a favor, not like they owe you something."

Jim Martin writes excellently on how to live in the present moment instead of constantly looking back, or indeed forward as I spend much of my time doing. Jim also introduced the great idea of ‘easing’ to places, I think its something Ill try and use.

Inhabitatio Dei has a great post on Mark Driscoll called ‘Who Can Mark Driscoll Worship‘ which articulates a lot of my recent thoughts on the whole Christian masculinity movement. Especially like this quote: ‘His Jesus is a kaleidoscopic amalgamation of Chuck Norris, Bruce Willis, and a cadre of mixed martial-arts welterweight champions. If Jesus is not an ass-kicking man’s man who changes his own oil, wins bar fights, and ropes cattle, he certainly is not worthy of Driscoll’s worship.’

 The Cans Festival of Banksyesque stencil art is now on at London’s Leake by name, leake by nature, street, there is a pretty good flickr tag here which encompasses peoples photos from the exhibition. I have always quietly enjoyed the subversive nature of this kind of art, but read an interesting blog from the Guardian about how it has become everything it stood against?

Blackberry Bold is out in the open and I cant wait to get my hands on it, once the curve is due for an upgrade, which maybe a while yet. The specs are pretty fancy too, HSPDA, more processor power than my first desktop cimputer, 1GB of disk space, GPS photo geotagging, get the full info from crackberry who bought a pre-release off of ebay for about $800!

A new book about Zizek and Theology should make for an interesting read, somehow Amazon can sell it for cheaper than the publishers and for the first time in History Abebooks isn’t the cheapest place to pick it up.

And That is the marathon which is mid week round up over, free ice cream to the person who has the best suggestion as to how to ‘condense’ these round ups, is there some excess fat I could trim? What type of stories do you just flick past?

• O2 slash 8GB iPhone to £169
• Mid week round up
• Start of the week from the End of Week Round up

As my other posts are loosing steam, and the list of HT’s are getting longer than one post, I flailingly post this excellent quote from John Howard Yoder: 

The relationship between the obedience of God’s people and the triumph of God’s cause is not a relationship of cause and effect but one of cross and resurrection.

- John Howard Yoder, Politics of Jesus cited in Hauerwas’ Obituary of Yoder

• Just war/Pacifism - Hauerwas engages the context
• Blogging - a noble pursuit?
• Ergonomics and Revelation

"We’ve all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."

• Engage
• Wifi Shirt
• Radiohead fans are Cheap

We had dinner with our friends Graeme and Kate Young the other day, it was nice to catch up with them. Graeme is probably one of the most ‘experienced’ Christians I know, if that is indeed a catergory distinction and is one of the few Christian ministers who has taken seriously and continues to explore Jesus’ statement in Luke 18:

16But Jesus called the children to him and said, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.

Graeme has currently been working on a commentary on Luke which should be a very interesting read, he descibed it as a commentary which works the same way as the old Children’s encylopedia, completely accesible for Children (above 8) but still containing the truth and facts of the things it is explaining. Graeme does a great job at presenting childrens resources which aren’t like so much other material, watered down and patronising, his website is here, although it could maybe do with some stylistic updates there is some great stuff on there and Graeme’s resources are superb.

The Youngs have shared with us in some rough times over the past few years and when we came in, on the table were copies of this:

People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered;
Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have,
and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.
You see, in the final analysis,
it is between you and God;
It was never between you and them anyway.

I was really encouraged to read it, it renews the call to live for Jesus not for men or the praises of men, and it echoes Matthew 25:40 - ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’

Hopefully this will centre your focus today as it did mine when I read it. 

• Our little neighbours
• Cinema and Pro Evo
• Online Treasure Chest

I have the day off work today which is great except I am in the library studying Barth’s soteriology and have been the whole weekend, but I shoudl hopefully be finished today as I have to spend the rest of the week packing up the house and moving down to Aberdeen.

Today the first post of Scot McKinghts series on Wisdom from Pastors by Kent Anderson, pastor of a Covenant church in Naperville Illinois:

"the one thing I would make sure of if I was starting over again is this – read the Bible…Why do this? In every other element of my position I know that there are people in the church who know more about leadership and vision casting, finances, building construction and maintenance, pedagogy and the care and feeding of copiers. But I need to know the Bible. I need to know it intimately, its themes (large and small) the people who populate it and its flow. I need to know it personally to be able to carefully use it professionally. The more I read it the more I am drawn to it. And I discover more about myself in reading the Bible. "

• Vision #2
• Monday Morning
• The Church in the Global South: Cultural contrasts in Christian Practise

Hopefully you’ll find something of interest here:

- Johnny Baker flagged up a couple of interesting ebooks about management for people in creative jobs and related that church planting can be considered within this field. 

- Jamie wrote the best sentences Ive read all week in one of his posts about Francis: "We must never forget that our words, while important, have only the level authority to which our lives, through the power of the Spirit, lend them credibility."

- Scot McKnight is starting an excellent series called Pastors Wisdom which he will be the result of asking a series of seasoned pastors this question: If you could start all over again, knowing what you know now, what would you focus on?" I’ll be trying to listent with all ears.

- Abraham Piper has written a brilliant introduction to RSS and the wonder of Google Reader, if you don’t know what those two things are, and you read plenty of blogs then you need to read Abrahams post.

- Moby is offering free music for independent film makers and students called MobyGratis HT: Johnny Baker

- I still try and keep up with Lost even though the community of watchers have all moved in their respective directions (in fact one of them is even in Hawaii, though not as a direct result of watching Lost and wanting to live out the dream it should be pointed out) here is a very interesting and complex theory about the nature of the Island if you are interested enough HT: Trevin Wax

- Somehow I managed to stumble across this, a good overview of my current lecturer, John Webster’s Dogmatic sketch of scripture it’s written by masters student Alex Abecina over at regents in Vancouver, so thanks Alex. He broken it in to four parts here(1), here(2), here(3) and here(4)

• Lost: Wow I missed this!
• MacBook Air: Others in the blogosphere commenting
• End of Week round up

Here we are again at the end of the week, I had a slightly premature move last night into the flat I’m moving into from my house, my flatmate Willy (good scottish name) is going away for the weekend and I have a mountain of work to do for uni and need to spend my weekend on it.

The flat is a lot closer to Uni than my house and so I took the oppurtunity to bring some boxes over and move in for the weekend. It’s alerady paid divdends as I watched match of the day highlights with Willy which enabled me to have a half decent football conversation at work, a subject which I am normally entirely ignorant on.

I would really appreciate any of you who do, to pray for me this weekend as I have somewhat of a fake deadline to do some uni work for as I have to move house next week and don’t have anytime off.

• If not busy enough already…
• Not so short bulletin
• Sinking

I have to be honest, recently I have been pointing and shooting with digital cameras, I have been choosing quantity over quality, when it comes to photography less has definatly not meant more.

I really enjoy photography but with the age of cheap digital memory I have discovered the ability to take cheap shots (thanks, I thought thatup all by myself).

I found this site about Kenneth Parker today, a large format photographer who takes almost the exact opposite approach:

Most of Parker’s photographs are captured over the course of 5-10 day backpacking excursions hauling 75-85 pounds of large-format camera equipment as he becomes immersed in a profound sense of place. Often several days are spent contemplating the changing light and intimacy of a composition before completing a single exposure. Usually only one or two distinctive images will result from one of these journeys.

His photos as you can see here, are unbelievable, I wonder if for all we have gained with digital photography, the ability to edit, delete, and re-take shots, whether we have lost something, that is the ability to take photos thoughfully.

Of course there are always situation where we want to capture something of a place in a short space of time, and for that point and shoot is great and shouldn’t be demonised, but if we get to used to that ability we can loose the ability to really be artistic with photography in the way in which Kenneth Parker is able to be. 

• Because Im Busy its Quiz time
• Snow, Snow, Snow
• Photo Blog