Still in at Starship with Philip (Kim stayed in the first night and me last night). Just slipped across the road to Uni to check my email. Hopefully he'll be coming home tomorrow when he's off the oxygen and is not wheezing. He's getting better (enought to be grumpy with having to stay there) which is a relief. Kim's mum came up from Kawerau to look after the other three for a few days which is great! Thanks for the support (real and virtual).

Spent the day at Starship Children's Hospital with my baby, Philip. Took him in to the doctor expecting to be told that I was overreacting, that it was viral and to give him paracetamol and let him rest. Instead she put him on oxygen and called an ambulance. He'll be there for at least two nights while they sort his breathing out. Kim's in with him tonight and I'll probably be there tomorrow night. Very stressed. Thank God for all the friends that helped out handling the rest of our kids for us.

If you happen to talk to God in the next day or too please mention Philip to him.

I've been reading the local library's copy of Blog On: Building Online Communities with Web Logs by Todd Stauffer. It's a book for introducing people to blogging and covers most of the different options that were available when it was published (Oct 2002). It's pretty good at doing that covering free and commercial systems as well as three chapters on how to go about installing and configuring Graymatter, Movable Type and pMachine on your web host. Even though I've installed each of those I still found it useful for it's references to third-party sites and add-ons to blogging.

If you have someone who wants to get into blogging then this book would be helpful to them.

Following up the ongoing discussion on Maggi's, Jonny's, Lilly's and Jen's blogs here are a couple of articles that I found helpful for me.

Reality. Issue 24 - '90s Women Talk About Their Place in the Church by Diane Benge

Reality. Issue 24 - Was Paul a Sexist? by Chris Marshall (Different Chris Marshall to www.chrismarshall.blogspot.com)

I've seeen a couple of people refer to Andii Bowsher's blog Nouslife and decided to have a look. There's some really interesting stuff there covering church, environment and social justice. Well worth a look at on a regular basis.

Recent postings include topics such as an economic approach to theology of the Lord’s Prayer, global warming, freedom of religion and some stuff relating to culture jamming.

Long weekend this weekend as it's Auckland Anniversary. (Prodigal's off to the beach with mutual friends: Prodigal Kiwi Blog: Whangamata & Midsummer Murders) So Monday is a holiday in the top half of the North Island and then it's the first day of the new school year on Tuesday when three on my children head off to kindergarten and school and the days become more structured.

In case you didn't know in NZ each province celebrates its own anniversary with a public holiday (normally attached to a weekend). The list of dates is at: New Zealand HolidaysI think in South Canterbury they celebrate two! (but I could be wrong about that).

Anyway a long weekend is a nice way to prepare for the rushing about of next week.

If you're into a bit of constructive tweaking of Blogger you can get it to generate an RSS/XML feed. But you need to be using Blogger to publish to your own site. Here's the link" hit-or-miss.org: How to manage your site with Blogger, PHP, and XML

I see also that Blogger has just announced support for Atom to handle syndication. Check out: Syndication. It's not RSS but some of the RSS aggregators support it.

Just started reading Nancey Murphy's book Reconciling Theology and Science: A Radical Reformation Perspective and I've been enjoying it so far. I notice that in the section on Theology and the Social Sciences there is a section on the New Zealand experience of Restorative Justice. Quite unusual for a US book to notice something down here in Godzone.

Most science & religion books are pretty esoteric, dealing with issues at a theoretical level, but this one seems grounded in the reality of having to live in this world. Murphy claims that

Christianity has primarily to do with real life, here and now. It is only secondarily about life in the hereafter; it is more about changing the world than interpreting its “meaning.” Doctrine is important in that it constitutes presuppositions of the way we live.

She works to bring themes such as anti-violence from the Anabaptist and other radical reformation traditions into dialogue with the science and theology debate. Should be an interesting read.

With a headline like this how could one resist blogging the link. I especially liked the reference to Michael Moore who writes librarians are "one terrorist group you don't want to mess with". (I guess my posting ends up in some CIA database now).

New Zealand News - Technology - Shelley Howells: The secret life of tattooed and bellydancing librarians

But wait there's more!

If you click here you get the new, improved scrolling version - just right to leave running on the desktop.

Wait a few seconds (5-10 on my computer) after the window has popped up for it to start scrolling. Move your mouse into the frame to pause scrolling. Clicking on a link opens it in a new window.

So I'm waiting for my hosting provider to turn on a few things so I can install Movable Type how i want it and I start thinking about how nice it would be to have all the blogs I read on a single web page with their latest headlines. So I'm thinking RSS/XML aggregation but on a web page I can access from anywhere in the world not just using a reader on my iBook.

The result of this is the: GreenFlame Blog Portal. A quick bit of HTML and PHP tinkering with the help of zFeeder and it's all done.

(I know that MT has a nice plug-in for doing this sort of thing but I was bored - and it may be weeks (months) before I get MT up and going to my liking)

No, not the rugby team but a deep sense of being a stranger in a strange land. And it seems to have been getting worse over that last six months. Owen Marshall's "South Island Prayer" seems to fit the bill for me,

God
Don't let me die in Auckland.
Rotting in the heat before your
eyes are closed: a greasy take
away after the soul is gone.
Jesus, no.

Let me go with the old Southerly
Buster: river stones in the grey
flecked sky and that white wind
to keep your chin up.
Christ, yes.

In town yesterday I picked up a second-hand copy of Flock: The Best of the Mutton Birds and it has their song "Wellington" on it which starts

I wish I was in Wellington, the weather's not so good
The wind it cuts right through you and it rains more than it should
But I'd be there tomorrow, if I only could
Oh I wish I was in Wellington

And my trip to Christchurch last year made me long to head south.

Anyway, enough moroseness. The CD also has the song "Dominion Road" on it (Auckland song) which I like and made me think about what other songs are there out there about NZ places - there must be heaps (though maybe not about Hamilton :-) ) A good example is Taumaranui on the Main Trunk Line by Peter Cape. So I'm on the hunt for a list - any clues?

I discovered this the other day. The Internet Archive is "building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public."

What is does provide is access to music and video material that has been placed out there for people to view and use - just right if you're looking for a video clip or music segment for something. (When accessing an archived page, you will be presented with the terms of use agreement for that material). Helpful for Alt.W people looking for text, sound and video.

My current favourite video clip is: Horses on Mars from the SIGGRAPH Animations Library.

3.6 billion years ago, A microbe is blasted off its home planet from a meteor impact and embarks on a journey through the inner solar system. After spending time on other worlds, it decides home is best and tries to return - only to head in the wrong direction by mistake. Unable to ever return again, it has a stunning vision of home - and what lies ahead for it. The imagery mimicks the look of electron microscope imagery. Created on a Dell workstation donated by Intel. Maya and Maya Composer donated by Alias|Wavefront. RenderMan courtesy of Pixar.

Enjoy!

I use Endnote to handle all my thesis references and bibliographic data - in fact I'm note sure how I'd live without it as an academic writer. But it does cost a reasonable amount (unless you're covered by a site licence like at a university where it's normally available for students and staff for a minimal fee while at the institution).

In today's TidBITS newletter I see that Research Software Design, makers of PAPYRUS are offering for free their bibliographic and notes software that runs under MacOS 7+ (Classic for OSX) and for DOS/Windows. So if you're running an older system and doing academic writing have a look and see if it helps.

Steve Taylor (e~mergent kiwi: traffic) and Maggi Dawn (which one's Evil: power point or church? ) have been commenting on the use of PowerPoint on their blogs (esp. within church). It's a medium that I both love and hate - it never quite does what I want it to, I always end up with both an electronic presentation and my printed out slides in front of me (with extra handwritten notes on them because the notes field is too small), but I like being able to update my lecture slides quickly (as opposed to having slides that are out of date). I'm still waiting though to see an effective use of PowerPoint to augment preaching or worship-leading though. (Although I have seen some effective things when people step outside the "normal" ways of doing it - just note within traditional forms). I've also sat through some excruciating student presentations where there is no content just "bells and whistles" (Institutions could do well to define a standard templates that students use so less time is spent on presentation and more on content - unless the mode of presentation is the content!)

What I really want is a piece of software that combines a decent outliner, mind-mapper and presenter.

Wired carried a couple of interesting articles on the "angelic" and "demonic" nature of PowerPoint back in Novemeber 2003. Here are the links:

Wired 11.09: Learning to Love PowerPoint by David Byrne:

"Although I began by making fun of the medium, I soon realized I could actually create things that were beautiful. I could bend the program to my own whim and use it as an artistic agent. The pieces became like short films: Some were sweet, some were scary, and some were mysterioso. I discovered that even without text, I could make works that were 'about' something, something beyond themselves, and that they could even have emotional resonance. What had I stumbled upon? Surely some techie or computer artist was already using this dumb program as an artistic medium. I couldn't really have this territory all to myself -or could I?"

Wired 11.09: PowerPoint Is Evil by Genevieve Liang:

"Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn't. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These side effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall."

Sojourners Magazine has a couple of interesting essays on the nature of the relationship between evangelicals and liberals (framed within the context of the US Presbyterian church). Each essay is written by a self-confessed "evangelical" and "liberal" respectively and look at what each can learn from the other.

Why the Evangelical Church Needs the Liberal Church, Sojourners Magazine/February 2004 by Richard Mouw.

Why the Liberal Church Needs the Evangelical Church, Sojourners Magazine/February 2004 by Barbara Wheeler.

I was struck by Wheeler's image of the church:

"a tense, edgy, difficult church made up of zenoi, strangers, who cling to each other for dear life in the same chilly, rocky baptismal boat because we are headed to the same destination: a better country."

and

"This image of the church as a band of strangers who accept our discomfort with each other as God's way of moving us forward may seem grimly Calvinistic. The image certainly flies in the face of the best marketing advice about how to grow your church or denomination: Create a warm, friendly enclave where like-minded people can find refuge from the tensions of contemporary life. Churches like that are what the proponents of a cool, clean division of the denomination claim to have in view."

How much are our own churches, emergent or otherwise, like the enclaves rather than like the parables of the net, or of wheat and tares, in Matthew's gospel?

Last night I took my two eldest boys, Mark & Christopher, to the party put on by Waitakere Libraries for all children who take part in the summer reading programme. This is an excellent programme put on by various libraries around the country and in Waitakere is sponsored by the various local Rotary clubs. Here's how it works:

In November children sign up for the programme at a local library that becomes their centre to report back to. The children commit to read for at least 1.5 hours per week from library books and over the next six weeks to check in at least 4 times with the librarians. A librarian sits down with each child and talks to them about their books and reading, what they enjoyed or didn't like.

Each child gets a pack at the start of the programme that has log sheets, activities etc. in it. At each check-in they get a stamp/sticker on their chart and a small reward (based around a theme - this year "dinosaurs" (Jurassic Joyride was the programme title)). Then at the end of the programme the children get invited to a party (held at Te Atatu Community Centre) with magicians, clowns, a disco, food and drink and prizes for best costume, best dancing and for completing the programme (all kids who complete it get a medallion, certificate and a book).

My observations of the programme:

• The children like the interaction and stimulus of being engaged by the librarian about their reading.
  
• We go to the library more often than normal.
  
• Our boys reading skills pick up markedly.
  
• It free - no costs to the families except time. (The party is free too).
  
• At the party the ethnic mix of children (& their families) was huge.
  
• 500 children signed up in Waitakere - they had to cap numbers!
  
• 80% of children completed their contracts.
  
• It's now been running every year since 1998.
  
• It's fun.
  

It's pretty inspiring really. Compared to some of the things I see churches etc. doing I think we might be better throwing our resources into the hat like this - incarnational action and the Kingdom in the real world. Improved literacy, kids and families having fun, crossing all sorts of ethnic and financial boundaries and being part of the community.

Some more information at:

Summer Reading Programmes
and
Waitakere Kidz Newsletter for Dec 2003 (PDF file)

Oh and by the way, Christopher won an amazing Origami stegosaurus for outstanding dancing!

A new survey of Internet users proves we bloggers do have a life after all.

Instead, the typical Internet user is an avid reader of books and spends more time engaged in social activities than the non-user, it says. And, television viewing is down among some Internet users by as much as five hours per week compared with Net abstainers, the study added.

'Use of the Internet is reducing television viewing around the world while having little impact on positive aspects of social life,' said Jeffrey Cole, director of the UCLA Center for Communication Policy, the California university that organized the project."

The full story at: Reuters News Article : Internet 'Geek' Image Shattered by New Study: "

Emergent Kiwi has a nice, new, spartan blog up and running. Update your links now!

Every now and then I dip into Richard Briggs' book It's been a quiet week in the global village. It's light, thought-provoking and the format of a series of reflections or vignettes on Christian life and mission in the contemporary world works for me. Today I saw this in it.

Seems to me that we're not good at imagining what we really want for a perfect day. But then, fortunately, these things are not ours to decide. The way the God lifts impossible burdens off our shoulders is always one of the things I've liked most about him. It makes life more interesting. It makes it liveable.

Seemed to fit with some other blog entries I've read recently.

Emergent Kiwi's musings on coffee, newspapers and Sunday church reminded me of this prayer that I've had pinned up beside my desk on-and-off for the last few years. It's by Richard Foster but I saw it in the book The Art of Prayer: A Pathway to Spiritual Growth by Meryl Doney.

Somehow, Jesus, I like praying with a cup of coffee in my hands. I guess the warmth of the cup settles me and speaks of the warmth of your love. I hold the cup against my cheek and listen, hushed and still. I blow on the coffee and drink. Spirit of God, blow across my little life and let me drink in your great life.

Ammmmmen.

For all you dedicated (obsessive?) bloggers out there.

Available at:

ThinkGeek :: I'm blogging this.

Just been listening to an interesting programme on Science Fiction and what it tells us about our human hopes and fears on National Radio via a RealAudio link. There's a selection of NZ news and reports plus the live feed at the top for those of you who are overseas and missing out on familiar voices.

RNZI Audio Links

Delayed coverage is also available on an XTRA web site

XTRA: Broadband: News: National Audio

Useful too if your PC interferes with AM radio reception.

For all you interested in cyberculture I found this today: The Cyberspace and Critical Theory Overview

It is a large collection of materials drawn together by George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University.

Maggi Dawn posted a comment on my blog entry about "Darwin and Fundamentalism" with a reference to book on Victorian times and how that related to Darwin. I've gathered some links to web sites with Darwin and Victoriana information so I thought I'd add them here for those who are interested.

• The Victorian Web: An Overview
• The C. Warren Irvin, Jr., Collection of Charles Darwin and Darwiniana
• Extract from Charles Darwin's autobiography
• Online Literature Library - Charles Darwin (texts of his books)

Just whipped through John Polkinghorne's little book Traffic in Truth: Exchanges between Science and Theology which, like the Darwin book I blogged about earlier, provides an easy entrance to thinking about the relationship between science and religion. It reads like the combination of an introduction and conclusion from one of his other more lengthy books - at 54 pages it's small enough to skim through in an single sitting. In his overview of the roles of chance and necessity in the universe he says,

Evolving fruitfulness seems to require a compromise between reliability and change. Too reliable a world would be so rigid that nothing new took place; too changeable a world would be in such a state of flux that nothing would ever persist in it.

When I read it I instinctively thought of the church - those that are too reliable and never venture into new things unless they are certainties and those that refuse to hold onto traditions and structures that are life-giving and are always looking for the next-best-thing. An emerging or reforming church need both chance (life-giving novelty) and reliability (life-giving traditions).

There is an official web site for John Polkinghorne with information about him, his work and talks and with links to science & religion resources.

I've been intrigued by both Jonny Baker (jonnybaker: new year recommendation) and Paul Fromont (Be Extraordinarily Loving) writing about Michael Frost & Alan Hirsch's "The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st-Century Church". Given that I'd have to order it in from overseas I was pleased to find that the publisher Hendrickson have a sample chapter available on their web site. Now I can have a look at what's been impressing them.

Go to The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st-Century Church. There are PDFs of the contents, introduction and a sample chapter.

Came across this the other day. I like haiku (is that the plural?) so the idea of a new one each day appealed to me.

tinywords.com: haiku daily

You can submit your own and add your comments too.

It's been a week or two of finishing off books that have been sitting on the bookshelf in my office. One of the latest was Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents by Ellen Ullman. An Amazon review notes that:

Close to the Machine explores a world in which 'the real world and its uses no longer matter.' This memoir examines the relationship between human and machine, between material and cyberworlds and reminds us that the body and soul exist before and after any machine.

The book itself was okay. I could identify with a lot in it but at times the text seemed to drag. One passage in particular thought struck me

In this sense, we virtual workers are everyone's future. We wander from job to job, and now it's hard for anyone to stay put anymore. Our job commitments are contractual, contingent, impermanent, and this model of insecure life is spreading outward from us. I may be wrong, but I have this idea that we programmers are the world's canaries. We spend out time alone in front of monitors; now look up at any office building, look into living-room windows at night: so many people sitting alone in front of monitors. We lead machine-centered lives; now everyone's life is full of automated tellers, portable phones, pages, keyboards, mice. We live in a contest of the fittest, where the most knowledgeable and skillful win and the rest are discarded; and this is the working life that waits for everybody. Everyone agrees: be a knowledge worker or be left behind. Technical people, consultants, contract programmers: we are going first. We fly down and down, closer and closer to the virtualize life, and where we go the world is following.

Had me stop and think about churches and Christians caught up in this - of these models applied to congregations - servants of God and fellow wayfarers with commitments and relationships described as "contractual, contingent, impermanent".

Maybe it would be good to be an oasis in this world - a place of solidity, permanence, lasting relationships - even for those who briefly pass through; cast about by the powerful and damaging forces of the virtual world. The Kingdom of God belongs to those who have been discarded.

Just read Darwin and Fundamentalism by Merryl Wyn Davies. It's a short book in the Icon series "Postmodern Encounters". If you're looking for a brief (80 pages) introduction on the subject of Darwin, Darwinism, religious responses (positive and negative) and scientific engagement (again postive and negative responses) then this provides a good entry point. It's footnoted so you can follow things up. Davies notes that fundamentalism occurs both in religious and scientific arenas and that the issues thrown up are more that a dualistic split between "materialistic, atheistic evolutionism" and "fundamentalist, literalist creationism". Briefly she argues that

A true appreciation of the historic context of Darwin, the socially constructed nature of science, and theological and historically informed understanding of religion, which is much more that simply Christian fundamentalism, suggests that we are being hijacked by two extremist positions.

Well worth borrowing from the library to read for a day or so on the train into work just to get the mental juices percolating (even if you don't agree with all her conclusions).

A related link is Evolution: Library: Emi & Nathan: Personal Testimonies at PBS which has a video clip of the following:

As science majors at a conservative Christian college, Emi and Nathan have both struggled with the creation/evolution debate for themselves. For them, as for many people, evolution and religion seem to contradict each other. In this interview excerpt from Evolution: "What about God?", Emi and Nathan share their own experiences and their strategies for tackling the issue through further education.

Just when I though I'd gotten over my coveting of my neighbour's iPod : Apple - iPod - iPod mini

Looks like it will be closer to a couple of weeks before everything is up and running smoothly. I've got the prototype running sweetly under Mac OS X and Apache on my iBook but my hosting provider won't have a facility I need for my requirements for another couple of weeks.

So I'll be playing with MT templates, CSS and using multiple embedded MT blogs to handle different functions.

Blogging takes a back seat for the next week or so while I move to Movable Type. The lure of RSS-XML feeds and plug-ins has finally won me over. Stay tuned.

I've been flicking through Ben Shneiderman's book Leonardo's Laptop today and saw he'd written a section on e-learning in which he proposes a model for classroom and distance education.

COLLECT	Gather information and acquired resources
RELATE	Work in collaborative teams
CREATE	Develop ambitious projects
DONATE	Produce results that are meaningful to someone outside the classroom

Skimming through it reminded me quite a bit of Steve Taylor's proposal for a postmodern monastry and open-source theology. The last bit especially - creating things for the benefit of the wider community.

Kim and I had an awesome day yesterday down in Hamilton at the wedding of a good friend of ours (Jono). Really nice to catch up with old friends and celebrate with Jono and Yuki (she's far too good for him :-) ).

The wedding was just right for the day. A real blue sky scorcher so after the wedding ceremony it was out of our "more formal" clothes and into beach and BBQ clothes for the "reception". Pig on a spit, mountains of pavlova and great company while we sat around on the grass chatting, eating and drinking.

The sharing of food, drink and good company are sacred.

Congratulations Jono and Yuki. All the best for the New Year and your new life.

Tim Berners-Lee was knighted in the Queen's New Year's Honours list. The BBC has a short story and biography at BBC NEWS | Technology | Web's inventor gets a knighthood

Happy New Year!

Another year ends and another starts. On the whole it's been a good year for me and my family. Some transitions with respect to work (from BCNZ to Carey next year) and some encouraging feedback on my PhD research.

I've been greatly encouraged by postings on various blogs and meeting new people through them. The Advent grid blogs were great (I have some ideas on that for another day).

All the best to you and yours for the New Year.

Here's the Auckland Sky Tower last night at midnight.