Social Justice Series: Caritas Aotearoa New Zealand is a series of booklets looking at the eradication of poverty. Really helpfual material with NZ examples. I've been reading the fifth book in the series "The Digital Divide: Poverty and Wealth in the Information Age" as I think about cyberspirituality.

How does the proclamation of the Kingdom of God, in both word and social action, interact with cyberspace, technoculture and its effects? How should we live in a world where we are, in William Gibson's words, "wrapped in media"?

The books are really cheap ($2-$4 each) and its worthwhile buying them all. I plan to use them to start discussion questions in class and with house groups etc.

Having spent the last year looking at the image of God, Christian anthropology and its development over the last 2000 years I'm somewhat encouraged to see this. All this dying and going to heaven as spirits borders on Gnostic and neo-Platonic thought a lot of the time. Personally, I can't wait to see creation restored and to be able to physically enjoy it as God meant it to be.

ic Newcastle - Bishop risks row over new book

Feel like my head is going to explode. I've got about 10 different competing ideas running around about this topic for Saturday - each of which I think are interesting and relevant. Some include:

1. The use of Teilhard de Chardin's work to describe the Internet/cyberspace as the evolution of a "global consciousness"


2. Groups who include IT technology into their rituals and practices (e.g. technopaganism)


3. A Christian spirituality that is faithful to the gospel and contextualised to Western technoculture


4. New "religious" stories, such as transhumanism, that seek transcendence of the human condition via technology


5. Issues to do with social justice, the "Digital Divide" and how that relates to the Kingdom of God


6. Ecological consequences of technology and its relation to the image of God and stewardship

Hopefully it will be clearer in the morning. (And I can figure out how to include a "Babylon 5" reference into the work).

I'm working on a couple of things at the moment relating to techno- or cyber-spirituality and I've posted a brief bibliography (with web links) in the resources section. The references here are to take you beyond the "how do I get Powerpoint into worship?" and "our church needs a web site" stages and to get you thinking about how those sorts of technologies actually shape faith and its practice.

What does it mean to be the people of God in a technocultural world? And what challenges and opportunities do technologies like the Internet offer to religion and spirituality?

A great site dedicated to Outlining software (especially older versions). Covers both Mac and PC (DOS & Windows) with downloads. See Outliners.Com: Welcome to Outliners.Com!

Sure you can do outlining in Word but I'm a big fan of many small, different, efficient and dedicated pieces of software working together to get the job done (as in the "Body of Christ"?). Must be the UNIX background coming through.

For those of you using Macs but not Mac OS X then Acta, one of the earliest outliner programs is available here. Acta, the easiest outline processor

Snappy and still very useful.

I love outliner software. Just the way I think and organise my information. Came across this gem the other day that is both an outliner and an image map generator. So a quick (and limited) outline of my web site and we get the following graphic with hyperlinks. Cool.

The software is called myMind, it's for Mac OS X and it's free!. You can pick up a copy from: Sebastian Krauß | Software

"How many people are on the Internet? By stunning coincidence, the total turns out to be exactly the same as the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin." [Paul Andrews, Seattle Times, 14 Jan 96]

I'm speaking at the following on cyber/techno-spirituality along with some other speakers . Both using it for spiritual purposes and wondering if technology has it's own spiritual agenda. Rachel and Steve are also speaking and you can visit their blogs under the Wayfarers menu on this page. (Note to self: Must check if Kirsten has a blog.)

You are invited to join a group of IT and theological professionals
meeting:
On: Saturday 1st November 4pm-6pm
At: Carey Baptist College, 473 Great South Rd, Penrose, Auckland.

The objectives of the group are to facilitate discussion of issues at the interface of IT Church and Culture; to network and to discuss projects of interest.

The November 1st meeting will discuss four presentations:
Kirsten Abbot: Wrestling with the (hyper)text: Gen 32
Rachel Cunliffe: CensusAtSchool
Steve Taylor: A postmodern monastery: the catalytic earthing of an "open-source" spirituality
Stephen Garner: Techno-spirituality

In The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams described the "Total Perspective Vortex" - a devices that allowed you to see exactly where in the universe you fitted in. Of course, when you realised how insignificant you were then it blew your mind.

Over at TouchGraph they have something similar. Just enter in the name of your web site or blog and their Java applet will draw a map of how your site links with others in Google's cyberspace directory. Sometimes the oddest links have been made by people.

Check out TouchGraph GoogleBrowser V1.01

In a lecture the other week a student asked me in a lecture whether I felt any pressure to write blog entries. Did I feel incomplete or stressed if I hadn't posted anything for a day or so? My answer was, in good lecturer fence-sitting style, "yes" and "no".

I don't think that I need to post things in order to be. Sometimes I read blogs and think that the person is simply filling in the gaps to prove to others and themselves that they still exist - "I blog therefore I am." So, if like for the last week, life is such that posting is inconvenient or impossible then I don't lose (too much) sleep over my blog just lying here in cyberspace.

On the other hand blogging helps me collate information and ideas as I come across them. It's like a diary or journal (my first blog was called "Web Wanderings", a travelogue). The danger being that you can hang yourself out far more publically than in a diary.

When Paul talks of "praying without ceasing" I imagine that has a lot in common with blogging. In fact prayer might be thought of "blogging with God". Daily ramblings, concerns, joys, hopes, disappointments all written on a divine web log. With space of course for a comments field :-)

Maybe I should be more concerned when that blog has no entries for a few days.

"Technology is the knack of so ordering the world that we don't have to experience it." (Kim Stanley Robinson, The Martians)

Newsgaming.com is a group based in Uruguay producing video games with a political edge. They argue that the medium is useful for communicating and exploring issues based on current events.

Certainly their September 12th game is disturbing, with its exploration of collateral damage in the war against terror.

When I wrote up my masters thesis (a long time ago) I had a JRR Tolkien calendar on the wall. The picture for the hardest and darkest month was of Frodo and Sam at the top of the cliff in the dark wondering how to get down. Recently I've found Dave Pritchard's Lord of the Rings: an allegory of the PhD?

It begins

The story starts with Frodo: a young hobbit, quite bright, a bit dissatisfied with what he's learnt so far and with his mates back home who just seem to want to get jobs and settle down and drink beer. He's also very much in awe of his tutor and mentor, the very senior professor Gandalf, so when Gandalf suggests he take on a short project for him (carrying the Ring to Rivendell), he agrees.
(see link for the rest)

If we follow the plot so far I've made it to Rivendell. Only the hard stuff to go.

The Dept. of Theology at the University of Birmingham, UK have a useful web portal to

a range of web resources that are relevant to the study of religion, theology and popular culture. Some of these websites are for academic journals, or for research projects based in academic institutions. Other sites are aimed at a more popular audience, but can be useful sources of information and can illustrate how religious groups interact with different forms of popular culture.

You can find it at: Theology and Popular Culture Gateway

Saw this the other day. I've been thinking (& lecturing) about the imago Dei recently and its implications for humanities relationship with the world and this seemed helpful possibility if they finish it. And it has an Antipodean flavour.

From their web site at: Earth Bible

The basic aims of the Earth Bible Project are to

1. develop ecojustice principles appropriate to an earth hermeneutic for interpreting the Bible and for promoting justice and healing of Earth;
   
2. publish these interpretations as contributions to the current debate on ecology, ecoethics and ecotheology;
   
3. provide a responsible forum within which the suppressed voice of Earth may be heard and impulses for healing Earth may be generated."
   

Been finishing off my poster presentation for Auckland Uni's Exposure03 event next week which has been hard work. There's nothing like trying to take your theology into the marketplace to get you reexamining your assumptions and how you present it to a different audience. How will it stand up against medicine, science, engineering, law and arts presentations? Should I even be concerned about that and just let it stand on its own merits? I think they're important.

Typically posters have the scientific: aim, method, results (graphs etc.), conclusions model. Works well if you're into experiments - does not work well if you spend most of your time reading dead theologians etc.

Will post a copy of the poster when it's done.

Back to the lecture prep.