News from Farholme

Important anouncement

2009-10-02T19:30:00.001+01:00

No, not a new book, but a move for the blog.

From now on, you can read my weekly offerings here, now on my website. If you have been following my blog, then please alter your favourites to the new url and thank you for reading it.

Chris

On bad and good art

2009-09-25T18:43:00.001+01:00

I fear I'm going to make enemies with this blog but something has to be said. Last weekend we were on the edge of the Cotswolds for a family reunion and on the Sunday spent a couple of hours in the once picturesque but now rather tourist beset village of Broadway. There we found a shop devoted entirely to the works of the American artist Thomas Kinkade and we wandered around looking at the numerous prints and keeping our comments to ourselves. If by some fortune you do not know the work of this gentleman then here is a specimen.

And if you insist here's another.

Now that's probably all you need to know; his work is pretty much variations on a theme and instantly recognisable from ten paces. ‘Thomas who?’ I hear some of you say but what is interesting is this man is probably the world's bestselling living artist. You may consult his website (I have no intention of giving you the URL) and you will find that he declares himself ‘Thomas Kinkade: The Painter of Light’. (The last bit by the way he has rather modestly trademarked; although as some wit has remarked, ‘The Painter of Lite’ is a better title.) Now normally I would pass over such things but Kinkade makes claims to be a Christian and certainly a little fish logo rests over his signature. Not only that but the Wikipedia article on him (which I have no reason to disbelieve) tells us that his paintings are much loved amongst American Evangelicals. I have a nasty feeling that they are probably popular amongst British Evangelicals too.

Now here I want to be careful. After all, we all disagree on aesthetic matters: and it could be -I suppose - that my intense dislike of these works is due to a sort of cultural snobbery or a personal dislike of American popular art. Well I've searched hard and I don't think I'm guilty of either sin. Indeed, with respect to the latter I have to say that I have rather a soft spot for Norman Rockwell. I suppose too I want to be wary of what is no more than envy: Kinkade has certainly made a massive fortune through shrewd marketing: another wit calls him ‘the artist formally known as prints’. (By the way Kinkade attracts some extraordinary attacks: there are some spectacular and often hilarious parodies of his work on something awful.com). I also recognise that the man clearly has (or had) talent; there are well, portions of his paintings that are done well. And let's face it, in a world where dead sharks and unmade beds can be considered art it's surely no bad thing to see landscapes and homely scenes. Yet when every excuse is made I have to say that I find these paintings bad art generally and, in particular, bad Christian Art.

I have spent some time considering why I dislike these paintings. There are several reasons. I loathe the formulaic and lazy repetition of elements (the glowing skies, the sombre trees, the absence of people, the snow draped rocks and above all, those wretched houses with golden light blazing through the windows as if every stove had suddenly gone supernova). I am sickened by the nauseous distorted colours which seem to me to be the visual equivalent of chocolate sauce and syrup on ice cream. Yet I think my biggest dislike of these paintings is simply that they are not true to the world. It's not just that the water wheels he paints couldn't turn, that no house ever glows like that, or that it’s sometimes impossible to know whether it is dawn or midday. It's something more profound: these paintings are escapist in the worst sense of the word. In Kinkade's world, no shadow falls. And because no shadow falls there can be neither redemption nor authenticity. His paintings, as Christian Art at the very least, are lies both about us and about the world.

By way of contrast (and I hope I don't come over as an intellectual snob), I have been listening to Bach cantatas on the way to and from college. (The first 40 discs by the Japanese Christian Masaaki Suzuki have come out in a series of cheap box sets.) Anyway in Cantata 12, Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Klagen (‘Weeping, lamenting, worrying, fearing’) there is a wonderful aria with the following haunting couplet probably based on Revelation 2.10 and 1 Corinthians 9:24.

‘Kreuz und Krone sind verbunden,
Kampf und Kleinod sind vereint.’

Which being translated is “Cross and crown are joined together, struggle and treasure are united”. The great authority on Bach, Durr, suggests that Kleinod should really be translated as ‘prize medal’: so maybe that last line ought to read “contest and prize are united.” Well maybe the alliteration is a little bit cheesy but frankly, it all seems so much truer to life and ultimately, infinitely more encouraging than all of Kinkade’s paintings.

A warning to the incautious

2009-09-18T18:00:00.001+01:00

I don't understand this blogging business; post something innocuous and you get lots of responses, say something outrageous and there is only silence. I thought for instance last week I would have lots of responses; instead Catherine took another position in her post (she made some fair points even if I don't agree with them all) and we got not a single response. Oh well.

Anyway, some people might lament the fact that I am not hard-hitting enough, that I do not thrash about and lash the targets of the age with barbed witticisms and withering critiques. (Memo to self: must read Richard Dawkins's new book – that should give me something to be venomous about.) There are several reasons why this is not a more acid blog and my belief in grace and forgiveness is only one of them.

One reason is something that has always lurked at the back of my mind but which has surfaced rather spectacularly in the UK; namely our extraordinary libel laws. I picked up a fascinating and disturbing case in a recent perusal of the New York Times website. The background is that a British science journalist of some repute, Simon Singh, wrote an article in The Guardian in which he said there was no evidence for some of the claims that the British Chiropractic Association makes about the health benefits of visiting a chiropractor. He specifically wrote, “The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.” That penultimate and incautious word bogus damned him and he is now being sued for libel by the BCA. He is in a desperate no-win situation. In order to successfully defend himself, he will have to come up with at least £25,000 and spend a couple of years battling the BCA; if he loses he will be hammered for the best part of quarter of a million.

The problem is that British libel laws are very biased. It is apparently very easy to bring a libel case against someone and astonishingly hard and costly to defend having made an allegedly libellous statement. The New York Times says that the average cost of defending a libel case in England and Wales is 140 times greater than it is in most of the rest of Europe. Not only that but English law favours the person who believes he or she says she has been defamed.

Now I know almost nothing about chiropractors. Until I did a bit of reading up on the subject I was not aware that there was something of a philosophy behind it and I am not qualified to say whether Singh is right or wrong. (Mind you, I have my suspicions.) The New York Times's point of view was that the UK was definitely not a place for discussion of difficult scientific issues and I have to concur. What is surely legitimate discussion is being suppressed by the fear of punitive litigation.

If pushed to give a Christian take on this, I think I would want to say three things. The first is that, as those who are dedicated to the truth, we must have some sort of commitment to supporting open discussion even if the outcome can sometimes be abusive and hateful. ‘You will know the truth and the truth will set you free’ (John 8:32). Surely, one of the differences between Christian orthodoxy and fundamentalism is that orthodoxy is prepared to risk being criticised. That somewhat aberrant Puritan, Milton wrote in protest against censorship. (Mind you I wonder whether he would have persisted in his views had he seen what's on the Internet.) If this sort of legal situation persists we will have a culture of nothing but blandness and empty words. Perhaps this is the root of the legendary English politeness: not goodness of heart but the fear of being sued!

The second is that in the sovereignty of God (and the stupidity of men) such actions can actually be astonishingly self-defeating. Courtesy of this action I, and I'm sure many others, have gone from being neutrally ignorant on chiropractors to being better informed and distinctly more negative.

The third is the comforting thought that we know that the truth will ultimately triumph. Perhaps in this life but certainly in the next, the lie will perish. A verdict will be given that is more definitive (and certainly more unarguable) than given by any judge and jury. And if necessary we can wait until then.

So if you do turn to this blog and find a fiery condemnation of some movement or individual, can probably guess that I have left the UK’s shores and am living abroad. In the meantime I will watch out for words like ‘bogus’.

Have a good week.

What governs governments?

2009-09-11T21:41:00.000+01:00

Something of the vacuum at the heart of the present British government has been exposed in two recent issues. The first, which has received global publicity, is the curious freeing of Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi, the only convicted person linked to the Lockerbie bombing. Since this action – allegedly on compassionate grounds – took place, it has become widely assumed (and barely denied) that it was linked with a lucrative trade deal with Libya.

A second case, which I only learned about today, is an interesting piece of new legislation. This is the new Vetting and Barring Scheme, in which those who drive other people’s children to sporting events and the like (as well as those who host foreign children) will have to sign up to a registration scheme which will cost them around £60 (or $100) in order for them to be licensed. The motive is of course to deter paedophiles. Now, here of course I have to say – as all commentators on this must say – that I find paedophilia utterly abhorrent and I think that the protection of young people is absolutely vital.

However, there has been widespread criticism of the practicality, efficacy and morality of this. For one, it only picks up those people who have already had convictions or warnings for offences with young people (and vulnerable adults). It does nothing (nor can it do) to prevent such things happening. For another, it is likely to greatly reduce the number of volunteers that there are for such activities; already something of an issue in Britain. And finally, it is all worded so vaguely that it’s difficult to know exactly when a sporadic habit of taking someone’s kids to a football match becomes a regular and notifiable one. Deeper concerns lie in the way that the way that this new scheme will, in conjunction with the existing child protection legislation, result in nearly 12,000,000 people being checked in the UK for working with children; nearly one in four adults. (It is soon going to reach the point where if you haven’t applied for such a form, it will be assumed you have something to hide.) In this, somehow the traditional British legal maxim of innocent until proved guilty seems to have been pushed to one side.

What has driven this current spate of anti-paedophile legislation is public pressure after a small number of appalling and very high profile murders. This pressure has been sustained by the regular whipping up of popular sentiment by the press who delight, in an age of political correctness, in at last having someone, somewhere they can demonise. There is the intoxicating spirit of a witchhunt abroad. Don’t believe me? Apparently 200 case workers will collect information from police, professional bodies and employers, before ruling who is barred, and significantly, they will be allowed to bar people on what is called ‘soft intelligence.’ Heaven preserve us from ‘soft intelligence’; the allegation without a source, the smear without substantiation leading to a judgement that can never be challenged. How can you challenge something that has not formally been given? How can you overturn innuendo? You can imagine the conversation can’t you? ‘I’m sorry: you’re barred from taking children to a sportsground.’ ‘Why?’ ‘I’m sorry I can’t tell you.’ In fact I daresay this blog will be taken down and put in my file to be used in evidence against me.

Actually, I don’t particularly want to argue the slender merits and considerable demerits of both actions here. What I want to note is that if the Al-Megrahi release was motivated by money, the new legislation is driven simply by popular demand. What is so fascinating and very alarming is that having over the last 30 years shed any moral reliance on the Christian ethic the ship of government is now effectively rudderless in the seas of this world. Without any firm basis of right and wrong the government simply responds to the pull of trade or the push of public opinion. When Bob Dylan sang in Slow Train Coming, ‘Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord, But you’re gonna have to serve somebody’, we assumed that he was referring to us as individuals. He probably was: but states have to serve somebody too.

Have a good week.

Words, words, words

2009-09-04T18:21:00.000+01:00

Well, our long summer break has finally drawn to a close. We are now in the ‘phoney war’ stage of meeting students, preparing notes and lesson plans but not actually teaching. That starts properly on Wednesday. It’s a curious moment: the relaunch of what is in most ways a fairly breathless sequence that runs on – head over heels – until May.

Anyway I’ve had some really good news in that, although I was due to teach Geography this autumn along with the perennial Geology and Environmental Studies, the demand for Geology is such that I am being taken off Geography. I’m very pleased about this, not because I don’t like Geography but because at ‘A’ level it is effectively a social science and involves a language that quite simply I neither possess nor understand. So when a Geology paper asks me about earthquakes I can waffle on for ages to students about how they should answer with reference to their tectonic cause and effect and all the various scientific factors: I fully understand the question. But when I come to a geography paper (and I don’t think I’m totally distorting a genuine question) and I read ‘Why do people’s perceptions of earthquake hazards vary?’ I am useless. Actually, I’m probably worse than useless because I would start explaining about plate tectonics and various geological phenomena when, no doubt, the answer is all to do with social, economic and demographic impacts. It’s a little bit like doing The Times crossword or something similar: you look at a clue and immediately think you know the answer, but of course the real answer is something utterly different. So that’s largely a question of a language code that I have failed to crack.

This year we have an added complication of an impending merger between Gorseinon College (where I teach, very academic) and Swansea College (not very academic). All being well things will work out but it’s not an obvious marriage: the hope is though that we will stay pretty much as we are with our generally excellent results undiminished. In the draft document I was given today there was any amount of nuanced statements that we are all trying to read something into. What exactly are they hinting at? Words again.

Another piece of news is that I have just received the cover proofs for a book that is coming out in February called The Return: Grace and the Prodigal by J. John with Chris Walley. This is a book-length treatment of the issues raised by the great parable of the Prodigal (and parables in general). It’s published by Hodder and I am living in hope that it does well. There is another linguistic nuance in the fact that the book is by ‘J John with Chris Walley’. This is evidently supposed to convey something different to J John and Chris Walley, but I am blowed if I know what. Words!

Finally, and probably of more relevance to most of you, is the fact that I have been working on a new fiction book. I wasn’t going to mention it at this stage but I had an e-mail yesterday from the nice lady at Hodder I have been working with, saying she was moving on. So I seized the moment and asked if she could recommend any literary agents and got the obvious response ‘well what sort of a book is it?’ So I spent last night tidying up the one existing chapter and doing a two-page summary. It’s very much a standalone work and it has no resemblance or linkage to the Lamb among the Stars. I don’t want to say too much more about it because it is based on an eminently copyable idea. What I can say is that I have aimed for popularity and have done all I can to make the first chapter as arresting and compelling as possible. Anyway that has now gone on to Hodder and who knows? In the meantime, if there are any literary agents out there who want a really good story then why not get in touch? And here again I will no doubt find myself carefully scrutinising any comment from Hodders or an agent; trying to decode the real meaning behind what is said.

These are just four instances which remind us that words mean more than their dictionary definition. They are curiously slippery and elusive things; so much depends on context, intonation and interpretation. There are lots of deep theological reasons for the Incarnation (‘the Word became flesh’) such as the fact that God had to become a member of the human race in order to legitimately pay the price for human sin. I can’t help but also wonder whether the very elusive nature of words means that sometimes they have to be supplemented with actions to make them unambiguous. In the life and death of Christ we see something louder and clearer than any verbal proclamation.

Preston and the decline of the West

2009-08-28T19:31:00.002+01:00

I don't expect that many of my readers will know of Preston. It is a small town on the very northern limits of the industrial north west of Britain. If it is known at all, I suspect its chief fame lies as being something of a landmark on the journey north on the motorway: after Preston the ghastly and almost continuous urban sprawl of Central England is left behind and the Lake District fells begin to beckon. It is a town that I have known from school days so I reckon I've been acquainted with it for a rather staggering 45 years. We were there last weekend (my parents live nearby) and walking through I was struck by the contrast between the Victorian buildings and those created during the last half century.

I should explain that Preston was an important textile town in the 19th century (its motto is ‘Proud Preston’) and like so many of our northern cities acquired a civic architecture appropriate to its status as a global leader in industry. I'm afraid I've had to borrow some photographs off the web but this is the Harris Library and there are a number of other civic buildings of similar scale and quality.

Although Preston survived the Second World War without any major damage from bombing it lost a very fine town hall due to fire in 1947. But much remains: even some of the smaller Victorian chapels display a striking solidity.

Now what struck me in my stroll was how all this contrasted with what had been created during the near half century that I have known Preston. In my time I have seen the arrival of shopping arcades, out-of-town centres, car parks, bypasses and the odd sports ground or two. But there is nothing built to last. Indeed, the massive but now rather shabby concrete bus station built in my youth is now about to be torn down and replaced. This is all rather striking given that the last half century has been a time of almost unparalleled prosperity. Yet as I looked around I found myself wondering where all the wealth had gone. What have we done with the money? Where are the civic improvements that you might expect?

I do not believe Preston's experience is unique: quite simply we do not seem to build anything in the same way these days. This of course raises the question ‘why?’ Why do we no longer build majestic buildings that we expect to last for at least a couple of centuries? Why are our buildings – with a few exceptions –temporary, ephemeral structures whose best claim to fame is cheapness and functionality? I suspect you would need to be both an architectural and a cultural historian to really pin down all the causes and I am neither. But let me make some suggestions: I think there are several technical factors that have come together.

There are technological changes. Steel, concrete and glass produce a very different building style. We go for lightness and space rather than solidity and weight.
With the ever more rapid changes in technology there is no point in building for the future; we all know of old buildings where we cannot fit in insulation, double glazing, fibre-optic cable or even enough electrical power points. In a world where the future is imponderable, the answer is simple: don’t build for the future.
City centres are not the permanent features that we thought they might be. In Britain the Second World War was very salutary in this respect. The conventional bombing of Coventry and Dresden demonstrated that large-scale urban destruction was possible; the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that total urban destruction was possible.
With the rise of the motor car city centres began to lose their central importance. The peripheries became more important.

Yet there are also I think cultural and philosophical issues worthy of consideration. So for a start, we don’t do ‘civic’ architecture on this scale anymore because we don’t have their values.

The elevation of market forces means that cheapness is all. One of the sad maxims of earthquake damage is that educational buildings generally collapse quickly. The reason is that they are thrown up quickly by councils whose agenda runs no deeper than providing a service for voters. There are no votes – only increased costs – in building for centuries.The western world has become dominated by an ideology which centres everything around the private individual as consumer. With such a worldview why take the time to build major and imposing buildings for the community? Instead we create what is effectively consumerist architecture: and here a building is surely like the packaging around an item; effectively disposable.
Yes, there has been a massive growth in wealth but it has been largely diverted back to private individuals and private wealth. We have consciously – or subconsciously – chosen cheap holidays and new cars over faster rail systems, expanded civic libraries and imposing town halls. You could almost say ‘If you want our monument look in our garages’.
We simply do not build for the future. Much is made of popular evangelicalism’s preoccupation with an imminent end. I actually wonder whether that is not to some extent an echo of secular culture’s failure to believe in a lasting future. “Let us eat, shop and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”

The thing that is striking is that some of this short-term consumerist ethos has found their way into the church. In the Old Testament we see the Jewish people moving from the temporary tented Tabernacle to the solidly imposing Temple. In what we are and what we stand for we seem to prefer the alternative trend. There is something troublingly lightweight, flimsy and ephemeral about much of our worship and teaching and yes, our, buildings. In many ways I am troubled by the massive chapels of towns like Preston and of many Welsh urban areas. They are impractical and hard to maintain. Yet in their construction I see things that I find missing today: a confidence, a hope in the future, a desire to make a lasting statement about values. In a way that we do not, they had faith.

Issues of health care

2009-08-21T18:00:00.000+01:00

There has been a certain bemusement in the UK recently over the sudden American preoccupation with the British National Health Service. I followed the debate with some interest: these are important issues. I also have some familiarity with the private system: when we were in Lebanon the system was totally private. The result was that at the entrance of the American University Hospital casualty department two sombre signs were posted . The first read something on the lines of ‘No guns allowed beyond this point!’; the second, ‘Medical Insurance Essential’. Immediately beyond the signs was an armed guard and a cashier’s office to ensure that both these entry criteria were met.

Anyway, I have to say that most Brits I know were pretty indignant about the NHS being trashed on US television by those opposed to Obama’s health care reform package. Passing over the ridiculous assertion that Professor Stephen Hawking would not have been kept alive by the British system, when that is exactly what it has done, our indignation was aroused on a couple of counts.

The first is that on the whole the British system works very well, and when it comes to accidents and emergencies, extremely well. We get the odd horror story but in general the system is really very good at what we call A and E. One of its big plus points is that when you do get ill or injured the only thing that matters is the medical process. If you hear someone in the UK say ‘I can't afford to get ill’, 99 times out of 100 what they mean is ‘I can't afford to take time off work’, ‘I’ve a wedding to attend’ or ‘It’s the big match coming up’. It is also very good for long-term care. As some of you know, our first grandson (now a thriving one-year-old) has a major hormonal deficiency that will require him to be on replacement steroids and to have regular health checks for the rest of his life. The total financial cost to him and his parents of this condition is zero. Well given that all three of them have enough to deal with anyway, there seems a degree of justice in the state shouldering some of the burden. I don't mind my tax money going to that.

The second point of indignation centred on our perception of the existing US health system. Not having much experience of this, I do not wish to comment too much but it is a generally accepted truism that whenever you go to the States you make sure you have good health insurance. There is much that Americans may legitimately take pride in but I have never heard any American boast of their health system.

There is also much muttering in the UK over the perception (note, I choose my words carefully) that the protest against health care reform was being funded by the vested interests of the healthcare industries. Maybe I'm getting unusually cynical, but I too tend to take the old policeman's rule that when faced with a crime, you ask ‘who benefits?’.

However the venerable NHS is not perfect. There are two problems, which relate to the general Christian theme of these blogs, to which I have no easy answer. The first one is that the NHS was created after the Second World War for a population that was still largely speaking, Christian. They felt that life was inevitably tough (the war and rationing had reminded them of that) and they had little expectation of making it much beyond the biblical 70 years. They had, if you like, limited expectations of a Health Service: it was not expected to reverse the Fall. (It should also be said that in those days there was not a lot the health service could do anyway; I have read somewhere that in the first years of the National Health Service, there were only 27 drugs available to doctors.) The problem now is that people expect to live to 90 or more, with all their organs working perfectly, their looks preserved and preferably sexually active, all at the state's expense. (I hate to think of the number of drugs now available to the NHS, or their cost.)

My second concern, and I know it is shared by many people, is the extent to which we should bail out those who have effectively brought upon themselves self-inflicted injuries. I knew someone who courtesy of illegal steroid use during weight training destroyed his knees and put him and his family at the mercy of the state forever. A very large number of injuries received in our excellent accident and emergency wards over the weekend come about as a result of excessive alcohol abuse. And do I need to mention sexually transmitted diseases in unhealthy life styles? I do wonder if we had a private medical system, as we do with car insurance, such people would lose their ‘no claims bonus’ or its equivalent. But a totally free system is inevitably open to abuse.

Anyway I have no easy answers; the eternal Christian dilemma of balancing generosity and justice, fairness and forgiveness, persist. But I would cautiously suggest that, in both the UK and the US, we really need to do some careful and compassionate thinking about the way ahead.

Talking to God

2009-08-14T19:17:00.003+01:00

There’s a lot that I could blog on this week, from family matters to healthcare policies, but I want to continue the theme that was picked up last week: that of language. One of the fun things of struggling with another language (and I never do more than struggle) is that, like looking in a mirror, you see familiar things very differently.

Anyway, let’s begin with some grammar. For those of you that don’t know French, French verbs take a tu form for family, children and close friends and a much more respect-laden vous form for everybody else, particularly those who are above you socially. Vous is also used when you are addressing more than one person. Most tourists tend to use the vous form in France because it’s less likely to give offence. English residents and others living in France apparently go through nervous agonies knowing when to shift from the vous to tu form. (I’m told that there are similar patterns in German, Spanish and other European languages: it is called the T-V distinction and you can read all about it on Wikipedia.)

Now God doesn’t play a major part in French culture. Voltaire and others had good go at ejecting him around the time of the French Revolution and he never really seems to have made much of a comeback. You get the impression that, in popular French Catholicism, the ‘Blessed Virgin’ and the ‘Saints’ tend to occupy what we might call the spiritual ecological niche that Father, Son and Holy Spirit fills in Protestantism. Certainly all the evidence is that if God is at all considered in the French mindset he is as a very remote and distant character. So with that all in mind, it comes as something of a surprise when, reading a French Bible you see that God is addressed in the intimate tu form.

On and off this week I have been trying to find out through the Internet and a French teacher friend something of the origins of this peculiarity. What transpires is that the Protestants seem from fairly early days to have used tu to address God while the Catholics didn’t. This caused some animosity and heightened the religious divide between them. The Protestants were held to be overly familiar; they seem to have retaliated by saying that the Catholic use of vous could mean that they believed that God was not one. Given that Bible reading was not actually approved of in Catholicism until 45 years ago, the debate was probably quite academic. However at the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) papal approval was given firstly, to reading the Bible and secondly, to using the informal manner of address. So things are changing: nevertheless, some French Catholics have never adjusted and still resolutely use the vous form of God. After all, the argument goes, isn’t it inconsistent to address the Virgin Mary as vous but to address her Boss (so to speak) as tu?

This leads back to the fact that we used to have a similar problem in English with thee, thou and thine. Thee took the place of the French tu and was used for close friends and social equals and inferiors. You/ye and yours were reserved for those of higher social status. (There is a very good Wikipedia article on it). Apparently it had largely fallen out of use by around 1650 in southern Britain so all those historical novels set in the Civil War with them thee-ing and thou-ing are probably incorrect. As an aside, it has persisted in North English dialect until the present. Growing up in Lancashire it was very common to often hear people addressed as thee: as in “I’ll get thee a cuppa’ tea” and “where has tha' been?” Being totally lacking in linguistic skill (grammar of any sort was starting to die out in the 1960s) I only now realise that it was restricted to use between friends and in the singular form only. The curious irony is, of course, that many people assume that the use by the Authorised Version (KJV) Bible of thee and thou is to indicate a respectful distance between us and God. That was not the meaning: far from it.

In fact, the issues here are not entirely linguistic; it’s the old dilemma of familiarity and respect. Because neither Hebrew nor Greek uses this T-V distinction we don’t have a pattern to go from. In this respect English Bible translators have much less of a problem: they don’t have to choose. I suppose using the tu form in prayer is something one would learn. How suitable you would feel it was, would probably depend on how you felt you stood in respect to God. If you see God as your Heavenly Father then the family tu form would no doubt seem utterly sensible. But if you see him as Lord then I presume vous would seem more appropriate.

A final comment here. In the Lamb among The Stars the Assembly worlds speak the artificial Communal. In case anyone asks I have no real answer as to whether that language would have preserved the T-V distinction. The issues of familiarity and respect, of God being Father, Friend and Lord are, this side of glory, not easily resolved.

Have a good week

Chris

On the future of English

2009-08-07T20:38:00.002+01:00

One thing was very striking in France this year, the fact that almost everybody we met was able to communicate in some way in some form of English. Don't misunderstand me, we used French with the French and for the most part got along very well, but every so often we needed some help and at this point they would take pity on us or overcome national pride and come up with a helpful statement in some form of English that would clarify matters. The Germans and Belgians also seem to have access to a similar, rudimentary but functional form of English. (What about the Dutch you say? In my experience the Dutch almost without exception speak English very well: sadly, the true Dutchman/Dutch woman often reveals their origin by speaking amore formal and more correct English than we lazy speakers ever would.)

This is the phenomenon that has been called Globish (pronounced globe-ish), a word which I will avoid because it seems to be a patented term with a particular philosophy behind it. ‘Global Basic English’ may be a better term. But whatever you call that there is no doubt that the phenomenon of English-Lite it is here and is increasingly widely used as a functional lingua franca across the world. It is able to deal brutally with tenses so that past, present and future simply become ‘I go to town yesterday’, ‘I go to town today’, ‘I go to town tomorrow’. Plurals are created simply by adding an S to anything. You identify the subject of a sentence by simply saying ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘you’, ‘they’. Sentences are kept short. Vocabulary is reduced; some people say to as little as 1,500 words. Adjectives can be put before or after the noun and are very limited: ‘big’, ‘small’, ‘cheap’, ‘expensive’, ‘many’, ‘few’. Word order is astonishingly flexible. Anything remotely clever or subtle like puns, humour, sarcasm, irony, nuances or ambiguous words is avoided.

On the whole I welcome this. Ever since Latin stopped being the language that every civilised gentleman and lady used we have been waiting for something like this. It's not quite the end of the curse of Babel but it’s better than mutual incomprehension.

Some people however object to this on the grounds that it is the triumph of American and English culture over the rest of the world. I am not so sure: the whole point about Global Basic English or whatever we call it is that it does not replace the native language. It is hardly going to be the main language of any culture. It is not easy to be romantic in it for a start and it is hardly suitable as a language of politics: for that you need a language in which it is far easier to mislead people than in stark, plain GBE. One of the key proponents of Globish is French and he sees it as being the salvation of the French language; I can see his point.

Two observations. First, if the rise of Global Basic English is at all threatening, it is threatening to native speakers of English. On the one hand, it is we who are most inclined to be misunderstood by our use of complexities and nuances that others eschew. On the other, there will be a danger that High English will be corrupted by the presence of its debased English-lite offspring. One teacher grumbled to me this year that he felt some of his native English speakers were incapable of using past, present and future tenses correctly. And this was at A level! And of course the fact that you can universally be understood with a subset of your native language is not exactly going to encourage us to master French, German or Spanish, let alone the really difficult languages of East Asia.

The second observation, which does have a spiritual significance, is that in some respects we have been here before. Scholars point out that classical Greek which was venerated by every civilised man because of its flexibility and great literary tradition, gave rise to a vulgar offshoot, Koine Greek. Koine Greek (which eventually acquired a much greater subtlety than Global Basic English has at the moment) became the language of tradesmen and the marketplace anywhere where the Greeks had once ruled; which was pretty much most of the Mediterranean and well over as far as Mesopotamia. It seems to have coexisted with classical Greek.

The really interesting thing is that it in this Koine Greek that the New Testament is written and which appears to have been the language of much of the early church. That is something you need to remember when you hear people defend the Authorised Version (KJV) on the grounds of its beauty of language. Equally it is worth remembering when you come across preachers who deliberately aimed for a polished preaching style with a high use of English. (The Arabic church has suffered greatly from preachers who feel that they must communicate in high classical Arabic; Welsh speaking friends tell me that their church has also suffered at the hands of men who aspire to flowery literary elegance.) Those of us who are writers and who aim for a measure of literary competence and even that hard-to-define thing called style need to remember that a debased language seems to have been good enough for God. When it comes to preaching, it seems that style and elegance are added extras. In the beginning was the Word…

Burglary and France

2009-07-31T21:17:00.001+01:00

I suppose if you read the last few blogs you had this vision of me writing them from a cool, damp Swansea. Well, I have to disillusion you. We have been on holiday and in fact I wrote the last three blogs together in the first week of July and had them remotely posted in our absence. I did however manage to check on my blogs reasonably regularly courtesy of my iPhone and a very dodgy and extremely expensive GPRS network. So I hope no one was terribly miffed when it took 48 hours for the answer to be posted.

You see the thing is you can hardly announce on the Internet that you’re going away on holiday for the next two weeks. All someone needs to know is where you live (and that probably isn’t too hard to find) and Mr or Mrs Badperson can break in and help themselves. Actually, you’d find it quite difficult with us as we have a very efficient burglar alarm and one or two neighbours who seem to know exactly what we are doing, even when we aren’t doing it.

We haven’t had a burglary for over ten years. What happened the only time we have been burgled is quite revealing about Swansea and doesn’t really reflect much credit on Swansea, its burglars or police. In addition to taking one or two valuable things, such as my wife’s engagement ring, the thieves helped themselves to a large part of my CD collection but apparently failed to notice that all the CDs were classical ones. I alerted the only two second-hand shops in Swansea that might conceivably take classical CDs (as you may have gathered, it’s not that sort of the town) and gave them my phone number in case some unlikely character decided to try and offload some improbable music. (You can imagine the dialogue. ‘Yeah well, I guess I’ve kinda got bored wiv late ‘em late Beethoven quartets. I know all the tunes.’ )

Rather to my surprise, a few days later, I did actually get a phone call: a couple of girls who obviously didn’t know Bach from Borodin had tried to sell a bag full at one shop and were heading to the next one. With the extraordinary glee that comes from the realisation that your own intelligence and righteousness is about to achieve a glorious victory over someone else’s stupidity and wickedness I called the police. They moved with uncommon swiftness and met the girls at the shop. Here however the achievement of the constabulary grinds to a miserable halt. The cops took the CDs off the girls on the grounds that they felt they might be stolen property, but let the girls themselves go because they couldn’t prove that they were stolen. (Me? I’d have asked them to whistle the opening bars of Beethoven Five but then I’m mean like that.) When, a day or so later, I went down to the police station I was asked to prove that the CDs were mine. At this point, I showed them that a number of them actually had my name and address on sticky labels on the back (I had lent them out to friends). Faced with this rather unwelcome but peculiarly compelling piece of evidence that they were genuinely stolen, the police then decided to search the girl’s accommodation. But by now the master burglar who had been running the show had moved on along with the loot. I was told that the girls were involved in drugs, that it wasn’t them that had done the burglary anyway and while I could press charges of them being accessories and receivers of stolen goods, the nasty man behind them would probably beat them up. So, I shrugged, committed it to divine justice, took my CDs and went home. The insurance kindly coughed up for all the other missing bits but they got their own back (they always do) by increasing premiums and insisting that we had a burglar alarm installed: which has on occasions been more trouble than it’s worth.

Anyway I digress. France was wonderful. We drove right the way down to the southeast corner, the Cote D’Azur, just above Nice. For the first week we stayed at the new centre A Rocha France have at Les Courmettes because I wanted to see how suitable it was for doing geology. We had intended to drive around the Mediterranean a way before coming back up the Massif Central but instead we found a nice warm freshwater lake with a good campsite and stayed put instead, enjoying sunshine, heat and good food. When we came back to Swansea it had been (guess what) raining pretty solidly for two weeks. As it is now. And probably will be tomorrow.

I consider myself pretty incorruptible. If someone offered me a life in the French countryside for a single night’s act of quality and competent burglary you’ll be pleased to know that I’d say no.
But slowly.

Mind the Gap

2009-07-24T18:30:00.000+01:00

I have been reading through the 10 Commandments and the social legislation that follows in Exodus 20 over the last few days and happened to glance at the notes in my NLT Study Bible. The writer made the very interesting point that although many of the legal elements have parallels in other documents of the ancient near East, the cause and effect linkage between faith and ethics found here seems to be unique. In other words although there were religious practices elsewhere and legal rules aplenty, it seems that very few people connected the two. Yet in Judaism to be a believer in Yahweh was to live out his religious code. To some people this may come as something of a blinding novelty: after all isn’t religion all about ‘do this’ and ‘don’t do that’? Well apparently it wasn’t common then.

The interesting thing is it is becoming increasingly uncommon now. We are seeing – increasingly I fear – a split between ethics and faith. In other words we are coming to a point where belief is totally separate from actions. So we have all sorts of people engaged in all sorts of unpleasantness and immorality (and please remember that immorality is not just to do with sex) who are quite happy to call themselves Christian.

I was reminded of a classic example of this in my recent reading up on the Napoleonic Wars where towards the end the Duke of Wellington plays a major part. A few years ago I read a very fine biography of the great soldier (and not so great politician) called ‘Wellington: The Iron Duke’ by
Richard Holmes. Here, as far as I remember, on one page Holmes details the Dukes voracious sexual appetite: it was of such an extent that one suspects his genes are now widely disseminated throughout Europe. Then a few pages later he discusses his religious beliefs with a degree of care and concludes that he was a generally orthodox run-of-the-mill Anglican. The really striking thing is that there is not a single sentence to suggest that the biographer saw any contradiction between Wellington’s faith and his actions. For Holmes, religion is in one compartment; behaviour in another. Interestingly enough this is surely sloppy history. Even if a late 20th century author sees no contradiction in a promiscuous and openly adulterous man having a Christian faith, then surely the Duke himself and his contemporaries would have been aware of the tension.

Of course you don’t have to look into biographies to see such sentiments. Many religious people parade their spirituality and do not feel obliged to justify or excuse the evident immorality of their actions; whether sexual, financial or behavioural. We can easily be tempted to go along with this current mood. For instance I quite often get annoyed with my students, laugh at rude jokes or say things that I later think ‘Doh! I really shouldn’t have said that.’ Yet I don’t think in four years of teaching I have ever had anyone say ‘Chris isn’t that inconsistent with your Christian beliefs?’ But they all want to know whether I believe in the Big Bang. Maybe I should point out my own inconsistencies?

Self-help is no help

2009-07-17T18:30:00.001+01:00

I don’t know how many of you picked up the following news item but it is a worthy subject of reflection. As reported on the BBC site, it was that Canadian psychologists have come to the conclusion that self-help mantras actually make you feel worse. “Those with low self-esteem actually felt worse after repeating positive statements about themselves. They said phrases such as ‘I am a lovable person’ only helped people with high self-esteem.”

Now of course this is just one piece of research and it should be surrounded by endless qualifications (see the NHS comments). Nevertheless I found it extremely interesting. This sort of thing is pretty widespread (see your local bookshop) and indeed sanctified-to-some-degree versions widely occur in modern Christianity.

The fact is I have always been suspicious of this form of self-help. Curiously enough it is not, I think, that it poses theological problems; it is rather that it flies in the face of science. It has always seemed to me to be the mental version of trying to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps. I believe that facts stay facts whatever we say about them. I suppose the extreme example here is the dismissal of the reality of illness by Christian Science (which, of course, famously is neither Christian nor science). Surely we have all had times when if we had tried to say to ourselves ‘I am a lovable person’, the honest response would have been ‘No, I am not!’

It’s a pity really. I honestly wish the world’s ills could be cured by simple mantras, regularly applied. I would cautiously suggest instead that the traditional Christian approach is better. Here two elements seem vital. The first is the honest (and, no doubt, painful) evaluation of the flawed beings that we really are and the second is the recognition that God, in Jesus Christ, loves us. (By the way, the latter is a vitally different thing from ‘finding us lovable’.) These two elements must be applied together or we get into trouble. God deliver us from ‘wretched sinner’ preaching unless it comes with the antidote of abundant grace. We must only make wounds where we also administer healing: and there cautiously. Such a two-pronged message has a double virtue: on the one hand it allows us to make an honest diagnosis of who we are and on the other it offers us a source of help that is outside of ourselves. Instead of sinking in a bog of internal self-denigration, we are able to stand on the rock of abundant external grace.

I wish indeed it was otherwise. But it isn’t. While psychologists may not agree with the Christian solution they seem ready to agree that the alternative doesn’t work.

Oxford and Cambridge and dealing with regrets

2009-07-10T18:30:00.001+01:00

Last week I had the privilege (and I mean it) of being one of six staff taking 40 students from Gorseinon College to Oxford and Cambridge for their open days. It was something of a four-day epic and I’m still slightly recovering from it: you can never relax with even well-behaved students and temperatures hit 30o+.

For me the trip aroused ghosts. I don’t often talk about my past and any future biographer (dream on!) may well be delighted by the factual crumbs I here present. Due to some obscurity in our local education rules I went to secondary school at the age of 10 and was thus a year younger than almost everybody else. The school I went to (Hutton Grammar School) was well over an hour’s journey away and I used to leave the house at seven in the morning and get back after five. I did very badly in the first few years and managed to find myself on Headmaster’s Report for poor performance. In hindsight, I was simply exposed to too much, too early. It is symptomatic of what Hutton was that no one spotted the problem. (Mind you it did have two good biology teachers and an excellent geographer to whom I owe considerable and lasting debts. The RE teacher, by contrast, was a sadistic liberal brute whose violent temper was such that everybody was very scared of him.)

Anyway, by Sixth Form I had begun to master my problems and was showing academic promise. When my A level results came out they were extremely good but by then it was all too late and I ended up at Sheffield. I now realise that this had (with some minor exceptions in the staff) a truly lousy Geology Department. Indeed when, a number of years later, I came to lecture on Geology in Beirut I found there were some very fundamental elements of the subject that were a profound novelty to me. Here ends the history lesson.

Anyway you can imagine that, last week, I often found myself often wondering ‘What if?’. What if that warm August day in 1971 when I went in for my results, some discerning teacher had said ‘Hey why not come back for a third year and try for Oxford or Cambridge?’? One of the problems of being a fantasy writer – perhaps it is a just punishment for aspiring to write in such a genre – is that we can create our own alternative life scenarios all too easily. We ask, all too often, ‘what if?’ and imagine the alternatives.

Now that, dear friends, is one of my own ‘what-might-have-been’ or ‘road-not-taken’ moments. It is a somewhat peculiar (and intellectually snobbish) one but I suspect most of us have something similar. The job we could’ve taken; the guy or girl we should have asked out for a date; the tough decision we flunked. And so on….

I suspect there are a lot of things that could be said about this and I would be grateful for sane and spiritual comments. Let me list some observations of my own.

We rarely, if ever, know that the road not taken would have been the better road. I might not have enjoyed Oxford or Cambridge or I might have become even more intellectually arrogant than I am… (apparently blog writing is a sign of intellectual arrogance) and so on.
We cannot live our lives looking backwards: you can never drive a car successfully if you constantly peer in the rear-view mirror. The issues I have are not what I might have done in 1971 but what I will do in July 2009.
Regret is a poisonous diet. It can sour all that we were, all that we are and all will be. A disappointment is unfortunate; but to have it wreck the rest of our lives is to turn a disappointment into a disaster.
This sort of view (like greed, which it resembles) is insatiable: life could always have been better. After all I did go to university and eventually got a PhD! Isn’t that enough?
A specifically Christian perspective is that we are told that this world is not all that there is. It is at best a brief preparation for eternity. Everything ultimately is to be judged in the light of eternity. That is what really counts.

Buildings and bad ideas

2009-07-03T21:44:00.002+01:00

A friend of mine from the United States who reads this blog sent me this web address . It’s basically about the problems of the Anglican Church in the UK and how some churches are considering putting advertising placards on their steeples in order to pay for the incredibly expensive upkeep of their buildings. I sympathise. What is quite interesting in Wales is that although there are a vast number of disused chapels, most of the new churches (and there are a few) are avoiding them and using schools or old cinemas for worship. The upkeep of historically important buildings is difficult enough but it is even worse when you have to abide by well meant legislation for the preservation of ancient buildings which prohibits you doing common sense things like ripping out pews or removing the organ.

As I was thinking about this I was reminded of a book idea that I almost certainly will never write called Ten Bad Ideas in the History of Christianity. Let me list some of these and you can use your intellect to guess the where and when of them.

‘ Say, I have this great idea, instead of meeting in homes, why don’t we make special buildings for our fellowship meetings? I do know, we could call them “churches”.’
‘My Lord Emperor, have you considered making Christianity the state religion? That way religion would support the state and the state would support the religion. A great idea: can't fail. ’
‘Your Highness, we were wondering if as Pope, you have ever considered getting a lot of men together, giving them a few swords, blessing them and then having them sail over to the Holy Land and take it back from the infidel. You could call the whole thing well, a crusade.’
‘Your Highness, we are sure that, as supreme Pontiff of the church, you find the widespread presence of heresy and dissent distressing. One novel suggestion we have for ensuring the smooth running of the ecclesiastical world is to have a special body of people authorised to establish good practice throughout Christendom, by force if necessary. You could call it The Inquisition.’
‘Galileo? You need to sort him out: you don’t want these science people getting ahead of themselves. Make him recant.’
‘Witches? Bad news all round. Hard to deal with. I know! We could try burning them.’
‘Given that so many people don’t seem to want to believe in Christianity anymore perhaps we can try pushing the argument from design. After all you can’t reason your way out of that can you?’
‘Ah Bishop. There’s some chap speaking in favour of this thing called Evolution down in Oxford. I don’t suppose you’d like to go and oppose him would you? Make it plain who holds the intellectual high ground. A bit of ridicule - a spot of humiliation - that sort of thing. That ought to sort that lot out. ’
‘ Archbishop, Number 10 here. The Prime Minister would be awfully grateful if you could call the present conflict a “holy war”. Wondered if you could point out how diabolic the enemy is and promise our boys that they are doing God’s will. You know the sort of thing.’
I can’t think of a tenth but I’m sure you can.

Well, have a good week, and try to spot the bad ideas before you carry them out, not afterwards.

Lives in shadow and sunlight

2009-06-26T18:45:00.002+01:00

I am currently reading a book on the Napoleonic Wars called War of Wars by Robert Harvey. (No, I am not writing a book on the time; it’s just that it’s an appalling gap in my own knowledge I would like to remedy.) It’s an easy read although I was a bit alarmed to find from the Amazon reviews that there are a number of minor historical errors.

Anyway yesterday I came across mention of Charles Middleton, 1st Baron Barham (October 14, 1726 – June 17, 1813) a British naval officer and politician. ‘Who?’ you say, and frankly I don’t blame you: you’d have to be a specialist in the period to know him. The point is that Barham was head of the British Admiralty during the Napoleonic Wars, by which point he was in his late 70s. Essentially what we would call a ‘desk warrior’, Barham made sure that the ships and sailors were supplied with everything necessary to fight Napoleon. In an age of corruption, he was incorruptible and at a time of sloth, he was energetic. He was, by all accounts, the model of the perfect civil servant. It was his wise decisions and prudent planning that made sure that Nelson was able to resoundingly defeat the French and Spanish fleets at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. You will not be surprised to know that Barham was a very committed Evangelical and one of the early proponents of the abolition of the slave trade. In fact, it may even have been Barham who suggested to Wilberforce that he take up the antislavery cause. We Protestants do not have patron saints. If we did, Baron Barham would be an excellent one for civil servants and those whose lives involve sitting in offices, ticking off items on lists and balancing books. Perhaps there is a stained glass window of him somewhere.

Anyway as I was thinking of the good baron, news came in of Michael Jackson’s death. As one of the few people on the planet unable to hum a single bar of anything MJ ever sang I am reluctant to comment on his worth. I would cautiously suggest (there is a certain irony in my tone at this point) though that despite what many commentators have been saying, the loss to music is not quite on the same scale as if Beethoven had fallen off a cliff at the age of five. Nevertheless I found myself sticking up for the man a couple of occasions today when it was sneeringly suggested that he was a paedophile: the court found that he was not guilty. From what I understand (and I did once watch a documentary on him), Jacko seemed to be a tragic figure, a mixed up child whose development into a man was frozen by the glare of the spotlight. If ever we wanted evidence of the cost of fame, his all too short life surely provides it.

Anyway, I thought the two figures contrasted rather nicely. Barham, office bound, overlooked, labouring on dryly and steadily into an enormously profitable old age, and Jackson, the global celebrity, burnt out in the light of publicity at barely half Barham’s age. I know which I’d choose to be.

Things I don’t like about Britain

2009-06-19T17:25:00.004+01:00

In last week’s blog I accentuated the positive and praised our noble isle; it is now time for me to be negative. However I find myself with a real problem. This morning in Iran, the supreme leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, accused Britain of being particularly ‘evil’. (For some reason the United States of America escaped his wrath: perhaps under Obama you are no longer the Great Satan.) After a great deal of soul-searching I have decided to take the risk of providing the Ayatollah further proof of his case. (Actually your Grace/Highness/Ayatollahness, I really don’t mind you quoting me in your next rhetorical blast before ten thousand students: it wouldn’t half do wonders for the book sales.)

Anyway here goes:

The way that, although the British do political correctness as well as anybody else we still, deep down, believe that we are number one nation. The result is a degree of smugness and barely suppressed superiority. This leads to many other problems:

Our astonishing reluctance to learn any other language.
The general assumption that the only way to do things is our way and the sooner that the French, Chinese or Indians actually catch up with us the better they will be.
A quietly patronising view towards such people as Americans and frankly everybody else. We don’t like to publicly call them inferior but well……

A viewpoint that tends to think that cutting and hurtful sarcasm is the ultimate pinnacle of humour.
An attitude which greets any and every occurrence of patriotism, morality or self-sacrifice with a sneer.
The way we take our landscape and culture for granted and are only slightly and momentarily upset when they get trashed.
The appalling and overpriced British railway system.
The increasing prevalence of drunken behaviour. I suspect we always did have a considerable number of drunks but what seems to be abnormal is the astonishingly early hour of the day in which drunkenness can now occur and the fact that people now seem to be proud to be paralytic. By the way, a drunk in a British train is a horror squared.
The increasingly prevalent view that anyone who is in any way religious must be slightly damaged in the area of intelligence.
A ridiculous mawkish tendency to burst into tears when it comes to fluffy animals and dead princesses. It is not actually the emotion here that is to be blamed but the inconsistency. We don’t bat an eyelid about creating a shopping complex that wipes out an entire family of badgers because we have destroyed their habitat, but we get terribly upset when someone runs one over. And as for the dead princesses, well we probably hounded them to their grave.
The weather. I object to a continuous nine months of cold grey cloud and rain interspersed with brief moments of sunlight.
The utterly inconsistent British view of sex. The powers that be lament our appalling rates of teenage pregnancy and abortion while our popular media insist that the only way to have fun is to be horizontal with someone else.
The prevalence of the belief that someone who sits in an office doing nothing more than moving bits of paper around enriching one part of the world at the expense of another is somehow vastly superior to a man or woman who actually makes things for sale.
The ridiculous and frankly catastrophic view that you buy a house (or preferably several houses) as an investment. On this basis house prices going up is a good thing because it increases your investment; the fact that it harms society by creating a vast body of people who cannot ever afford to buy houses is conveniently overlooked.
The dreadful price of things in this country. This is largely due to the previous two ills. Because we have legitimised greed as honourable and because house prices are so expensive we all need to make as much money as we can. The only way of doing that is by such things as charging three pounds/ five dollars for a cup of coffee that tastes like mud.
I have a personal aversion to various products from United Kingdom that I think the world would be much better without: these include Benny Hill, Big Brother, most football stars and Jeremy Clarkson. The only saving grace of all of them is that they have contributed to the gross national product.
A view of history which attempts to explain many of the fine things about British culture (see last week for examples) as being somehow due to ‘Britishness’ (err, isn’t this racism?), rather than our nation’s long traditions of Christian ethics.

Well if you live somewhere other than in Britain in Britain and a stranger with a suitcase knocks on your door this week don’t be surprised. It’s me seeking political asylum. But as a concluding aside: why is it so much easier to say negative things about your country than positive ones?

What I like about Britain

2009-06-12T18:30:00.002+01:00

Much to everybody’s surprise the Prime Minister appears to have got off the hook despite pretty appalling European election results. The reality is that his party is in such trouble that no one particularly wants to take over given that they have to hold a general election within ten months or so.

Anyway by way of a change I thought I would run two-parter on a) What I like about Britain and b) What I don’t. Feel free to join in. What I like, in no particular order, are the following aspects of Britain.

No matter where you live in the UK you don’t really need air conditioning.
The fact that we are in hopeless confusion about what we called: Great Britain/British Isles/United Kingdom and whether we are British/English/Welsh/Scottish or whatever the Northern Irish call themselves.
We use a language which has a remarkable property of allowing sentences be comprehensible even when the words are put in all the wrong places.
We haven’t had a proper massacre on British soil for probably 400 years. (Some idea of how rare a proper massacre is can be seen when you look at the events of 16 August 1819 when cavalry with drawn sabres charged into a crowd of 60,000–80,000 which had gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation. The result was that 15 people were killed and the event became known to posterity as the ‘Peterloo Massacre’. I've known Lebanese family disputes with a higher death toll.)
Except when drunk (see next week) there is a tradition of agreeing to differ and a refusal to adopt a belligerent position. Typical English phrases include ‘I can see where you are coming from…’ and ‘Well, I suppose that’s a fair point but I would like to point out that…’
You have to work hard to get frostbite. (Although if you wear a swimming costume on a British beach on the average summer day something very similar seems to occur.)
There are no wild animals and our one poisonous snake species manages to kill two people a century or thereabouts.
To be an underachiever is absolutely normal. Indeed there is something wrong with your ambition if you do not want to be an underachiever. We are truly excellent at mediocrity.
BBC radio, BBC on the Internet and the BBC World Service. Not however the BBC television service.
The fact that we are now vaguely repentant and apologetic about having tried to conquer large parts of the world. We certainly have no idea of making another attempt.
The idea of the English pub in which over several hours people slowly drink a brown moderately alcoholic drink and politely discuss what’s wrong with the world. (Note that I said the idea: the reality is now often very different but that’s for next week.)
The fact that no one ever visits Britain and says (as they do in Belgium and Finland), ‘Say, did anybody famous ever come from here?’
The fact that the monarch is not a political appointee.
A national church which dogmatically holds only one belief: that it is wrong to hold dogmatic beliefs.
The fact that British police are generally unlikely to shoot you and when they do they are fearfully apologetic.
The way that we persistently and rather endearingly hold onto the belief (against all the evidence) that we really are good at some things such as comedy, car making, playing football and acting as a good moral influence on the United States and/or France.
We have some jolly fine museums mostly filled with splendid bits that we looted from all over the world when we were top dog.
The way we rejoice in our defeats (Dunkirk) and rarely get jingoistic about our triumphs.
Our penchant for finding the real world so distasteful that we must seek refuge in fantasy.
A widespread refusal to complain as in ‘Mustn’t grumble, must we?’ (This of course has the unfortunate repercussion that all manner of substandard things can persist in Britain because no one does protest about them. Just try the railways.)
Being nice to animals. (I was in the British Museum last weekend where there are some splendid Assyrian wall panels; listening to the bystanders it was clear that no one objected to the scenes of torture and humiliation of human beings but everyone was outraged at the scenes of lions being killed.)
We lead the world in fine funerals. Few people want to live as a Brit but most aspire to die like one.
The widespread view (unfortunately not held by newspaper proprietors from Australia) that it is unsporting to interfere with the press.

Leadership and morality

2009-06-05T18:30:00.000+01:00

As I have no idea of how many of you are UK residents I need to fill in a little bit of the background to the current political situation over here. These are dark days. Gordon Brown’s government, beleaguered and astonishingly unpopular, is clearly in its last days. I am not aware that he has publicly been compared to a zombie but he has certainly been recently called a dead man walking. The government is beset by defections, allegations and recriminations; the ship of state is now so deep in the water that it cannot surely stay afloat long. Indeed, by the time you read this blog Brown may have resigned. For three weeks we have had day after day of revelations on how ministers and others have sought to bend or break various rules in order to maximise their income. A vast majority of the country now firmly believes that most, if not all, of our politicians are actually corrupt.

An enormous amount of ink has been spilt on our leaders and I do not want to say any more about them in particular. What I want to comment on is the interesting effect on public morality that this succession of mini scandals has had. I haven't exactly heard anybody say ’Well, if they can do it so can I’ but I've heard things are pretty close to it. There has been an almost audible slackening of the nation's ethical standards; a collective sigh of relief that tax dodging, expenses fiddling and sharp property deals are actually no longer serious offences. If national morality was a needle on a gauge then we have had it flicker and sink ever lower. The date cannot be far away when the accused turns to the judge and says ‘Your honour, in my defence, I was only doing what my MP has been doing for years.’ I am not personally terribly surprised at these revelations (I lived in Lebanon for eight years where almost all politicians were seriously corrupt) but I do not find them uplifting. One had hoped for better things in a country famed for its decency and democracy.

Let me make three observations. The first is that this shows the utter importance of leadership. It may sound blindingly obvious – and perhaps it is – but leadership is important in setting the moral tone of the country. I am not sure how much we learn from example, but I do know that we set our standards from it. We are a species that suffers from herd behaviour. As the leaders, so the followers; as the shepherds, so the sheep. If those who lead a nation are at best greedy and at worst corrupt, then you are unlikely to find better behaviour amongst the population.

The second is this. Having said that leadership is critical, it is one of the great strengths of Protestantism or biblical Christianity that it creates an individual morality and in so doing provides something of a defence against corruption from above. My understanding of the Protestant view of humanity is that every single one of us stands as individuals before a knowing God. I'm not terribly enthused by the old phrase that used to be embroidered on wall-hangings, ‘Thou God, seest me’, but it's undeniable that to have individuals perceiving themselves as personally accountable before God has had an astonishingly benevolent effect on society. Protestantism proves to be a great and potent bulwark against widespread corruption. There is a fascinating organisation called Transparency International which provides lists of the least and most corrupt countries. On the table of perceived corruption the least corrupt countries are overwhelmingly the Protestant states of northern Europe and their former overseas colonies. One of the biggest challenges facing atheism is how, in the absence of a supervising deity, you are going to prevent antisocial behaviour. It seems that if we remove God we must replace him with the CCTV and trial by press.

The third reflection is that this, above all, needs to be a truth that we take on as individuals. Human nature being what it is we are all tempted to be corrupt in some shape or form. Corruption is subtle, insidious and progressive. It starts small but soon grows. We need to resolve personally to make sure that we stop the rot as quickly as possible. And if we are in leadership we need to take more care, not less, to be honest.

Have a good week

Chris

Dealing with the media

2009-05-29T19:50:00.006+01:00

Here’s a question for you about two females who have been in the news this week. The first is the so-called Messel Lemur, a stunningly well preserved early primate about 48 million years old found in the oil shale of Messel, Germany. The second is Susan Boyle, the 48-year-old unknown Scots singer sometimes described as ‘chubby’ or ‘dowdy’, who created something of a national and international sensation in the Britain’s Got Talent television program. What links the two? There are of course any number of uncharitable answers to this involving perhaps the number ‘48’, ‘preservation’, ‘hair’ and ‘being female’. The real answer is that both raise interesting questions to do with the media.

Let us consider first, the older of our two females. Three things are noteworthy. First of all, the Lemur (or proto-Lemur) was immediately proclaimed to be a ‘Missing Link’ and our great, great grandmother umpteen times removed. Whether or not this is the case is not my point here; the fact is it that it was an inevitable but clever piece of marketing. As a lemur, pure and simple, no one would care. I can’t resist using the British slang expression “no one would give a monkey’s”. (Please don’t look up the origin of this: although the expression itself is reasonably harmless, its origin is unspeakably rude.) However, rebrand it as ‘a missing link’ and the press will be banging on the door.

The second smart trick was to give the creature (technically Darwinius masillae) the cosy little name ‘Ida’. My suspicion is that this is a tradition that goes back to 1974 when ‘Lucy’, more prosaically known as Australopithecus afarensis, was discovered in Ethiopia and has been a big hit ever since. So that was another nice marketing touch. A third is more subtle. In a rather curious (and possibly unprecedented) way, no sooner had news of Ida been announced in the scientific press when it was revealed that the BBC would be showing a programme on her the following day narrated by no less than the Blessed Monarch of Natural History, David Attenborough. This strikes me as very curious. The normal pattern in science (and I remind you I do know a little of what I am talking about here), is to publish the data and then wait for speculation, comment and criticism. In theory, once the dust has settled there will be something like a scientific consensus and this the point at which the press ought to be involved. Given the lead time to produce a TV programme suggests that the scientific team had been working closely with the BBC right from the start. I’m not suggesting there is anything wrong in what has been done: it’s just that this smacks of the press and science being a little too closely linked. That’s a worrying trend.

With Susan Boyle – who went from utter unknown to international star within days – things are very interesting and I refer you to the Wikipedia section on her entry entitled ‘Social Analysis’. With nothing else to talk about apart from the biggest political scandal for several hundred years (that was irony) the popular press has been building up Ms Boyle to an astonishing degree. Yet those that live by the press can also die by it and this week Ms Boyle has made the headlines of the wrong sort for lashing out at people with a pretty foul-mouthed tirade. The papers are beginning to turn on her.

The fact of the matter is that the media has a ravenous and insatiable appetite for novelty and sensation and we need to keep them at a distance. There is an ancient* Russian proverb which says ‘However cold you are, it is not a good idea to share your bed with wolves.’

*If you cannot find it in the standard dictionary of Russian Aphorisms don’t worry: I’ve just invented it.

On pigs and servants

2009-05-22T18:00:00.000+01:00

In last week’s blog I was lamenting the fact that I had had my geology classes halved in number and doubled in size. In the intervening week I have to say there has been very little apparent progress in college but I have had three very able first-year students say they want to switch to geology next year so I live in hope that public pressure will force something of a climb down.

One factor that may have an effect is the imminent European elections. How so? Well it is generally expected that the ruling Labour Party will be massively damaged in these elections and be forced to throw out some sops to ordinary people (as opposed to bankers and the like) to avoid being cast into the outer darkness in the General Election that must occur within the next twelve months. So the hope is that they will find some money from somewhere and rescue education. Well, we live in hope!

Matters have been made much more intense by the spectacular series of revelations about MPs’ expenses. For those outside the United Kingdom let me remind you that the House of Commons, which is effectively the country’s governing body, is composed of some 646 members of parliament elected by constituencies. MPs get paid a decent salary (by most people’s standard) and a very generous pension (by almost anybody’s standard). It had always been taken for granted that they were entitled to expenses, often centred around having a property in London; after all an MP from South Wales can hardly be expected to catch the train up and back everyday. These expenses figures were secret but have been leaked over the last fortnight in the right-wing newspaper The Daily Telegraph. They have revealed a range of things:

Many MPs have been pushing the expense system to the absolute limit: so for instance we find that entire homes and flats have been furnished at the public’s expense. Some of the claims have been either outrageous or banal: glittery toilet seats, jellied eels, moat cleaning, a floating ‘duck island’ for a pond, hair straighteners. While much of this is legal, it is either dubious or petty.
A number of MPs have been exposed as creatively manipulating the system to make quite a tidy little profit. One ‘nice little earner’ has been what is now called flipping; a technique whereby a Member of Parliament switches his or her second home between several houses, which has the effect of allowing the maximisation of taxpayer-funded allowances. Other tricks have been buying rundown property, getting the State to refurbish it and then selling it at a personal profit before buying another one and so on.
Some MPs have clearly been engaged in fraud and are being interviewed by the police and the tax office.

As the quip goes: ‘we were prepared for swine flu; we were unprepared for a plague of pigs.’

In the resulting flurry of righteousness, recrimination and resignations, MPs have been quick to come up with excuses. These include such things as ‘accounting clearly isn’t my strong suit’, ‘I seem to have made a mistake’, ‘ I apologise for my unforgivable oversight’ and so on. The public have shown an astonishing appetite for these revelations, and still the scandal rolls on. The prurient desire to look into lives of those who rule us is almost universal and this scandal has allowed it with a vengeance. The fact that we are in a massive economic downturn has also exacerbated matters; had the country been booming I think we would have been much more forgiving.

Anyway the point of this blog is not to say what everybody else is saying but to say something else. The most obvious Christian comment is that given that modern British society has become separated from any creed or ethical basis this sort of thing is hardly surprising. I have no doubt that such scams were present in the past: but were they ever so endemic and were they ever quite so wide ranging? In some cultures – those of you who know my background will guess where I am referring to – it is expected that the politicians are corrupt and will defraud the nation. We had hoped otherwise here.

A more subtle point is that it is now evident we have lost the servant ethos that goes with Christianity. MPs are ‘elected to serve’ a particular constituency. Not, you note, to rule. With the death of the servant ethos what has emerged is an astonishing arrogance; a wilful belief that as a Member of Parliament you have a right to plunder the system. Now, one of the most striking features of the Christian faith is its outrageous and irrational celebration of service. There seems little question even in the eyes of those who are sceptical about the authenticity of much in the gospels that this goes back to Jesus of Nazareth. (See for example Mark 10:45: "For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”) Sadly, in the present scandal we are beginning to have sketched out what politics looks like when men and women rule rather than serve. We do not like what we see.

Failed hopes and faith

2009-05-15T19:39:00.001+01:00

Let me begin by a little bit of background. Around 10 years ago Wales was granted some degree of independence within the complex geographical unit that is the United Kingdom. Its governing body, the Assembly (which seems to increasingly bear less and less resemblance to the benign and competent Assembly of my novels), has both jurisdiction and funding control over a few limited areas. One of those areas is education. Recently, partly due to pressures caused by the recession and partly due to what seems to be incompetence, they have managed to cut funding to many schools and colleges that provide education for our 16- to 18-year-olds. One of those badly affected is my college, where we have something like a £400,000 shortfall.

I hasten to add that our academic record is exemplary, but these days being good doesn't seem to be enough. (Actually, it seems that you are better off being a poor performer because the trend is to throw money at failures rather than successes.) Well this week we were told that there would have to be major cuts and various drastic measures including increasing class size and reduced course options. I have been moderately badly hit by this. From teaching almost nothing but geology I will now have to diversify into geography and a wider area of environmental studies. And, on current numbers, I will have class sizes of around 24. Now of course all this may change (prayers are welcome) but the mood has been pretty glum in college and I have to say I have felt pretty discouraged. Had it been financially feasible I might have been tempted to hand in my resignation this week on the grounds that educational standards are likely to be compromised. But it wasn’t feasible. I consoled myself with the thought that I once ran an academic department that survived a direct hit from a tank shell, an assassination and an invasion. So I will try to grin and bear it.

Anyway, what I have found interesting is that a number of people who are more badly affected than me are less fed up about it. Some of them are not, as far as I know, Christians or believers in God. This raises an issue that I have noticed before: Christians can get upset and worked up over things that other people are largely unaffected by. In fact it may even be – I have no figures to prove it –that there are slightly higher numbers of depressives in Christianity than outside. What’s going on here? How does this square with our songs of joy and our talk of victory?

A full answer would require a book and a lot of time. I suspect though that a major factor is that we very easily fall into a gulf between the world as we believe it ought to be and the world as it actually is. Let me explain what I mean. Imagine you are an atheist of a Dawkinisian hue: how do you view the world? I suspect you would see it is as an imperfect place full of temporary ad hoc solutions due to working of that interminably slow, blind and extraordinarily clumsy giant Evolution. On such a view the failure of an educational policy, the triumph of bad over good, the destruction of something – or someone – worthwhile is just one of those things that happens in a messy meaningless and godless world. ‘Things are a mess!’ we protest, but our Evolutionist simply responds: ‘What right have you to expect anything otherwise?’ As Shakespeare has Macbeth say: ‘life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.’

The Christian, however, takes a different view. For one thing, we have higher hopes; we believe that good should triumph, that evil should be punished and that in every way things ought to get better. I am not here being rude about atheists (although if you ask me nicely I will be) but I do believe that we Christians dream higher dreams. So our expectations are higher. We would, though, go even further. We believe in a God who has not only created the universe but also supervises it. On this basis we have feel certain that when some dirty deed is done, God as the cosmic referee will blow the whistle and cry ‘foul!’

On this basis you can see that we expect life’s little tales to have happy endings. And, all too frequently, they don't. If you understand this you can see why perhaps we more easily get depressed when unrequited nastiness occurs or unjudged stupidity triumphs.

There are two answers to the conundrum we find ourselves in. The first is to lower our expectations – and that I am reluctant to encourage; I feel we must always aim high and hope for the best. The second is to remind ourselves that we do not here see the full picture. As the old image goes, what we see is merely the back of the great tapestry and here there are many random and tangled threads. We have not yet seen the real end of the story.

I am not of course defending depression; if you are suffering from it I wish you a speedy recovery. But if it is the depression caused by the gap between high idealistic hopes and a dismaying reality then you deserve every sympathy. Far better to dream and be frustrated than not dream at all.

Have a good week!

Talking about time

2009-05-08T18:40:00.002+01:00

For various reasons time has been at the forefront of my thoughts quite a lot this week. One reason is that I have finished my teaching of AS students; those totally ignorant fresh-faced kids I first met in September are now slightly less ignorant and about to face their first exam on Tuesday. My, how time passes! Secondly, I have been looking through boxes of old photographic slides to try and find some images suitable for a talk. It has been slightly disconcerting to see images I had long forgotten, and very disconcerting to find, on the other end of the slide viewer, a youthful me staring back across the gulf of years. Thirdly, I got the recent Geological Society of London annual bulletin and read obituaries of people including one who I knew pretty well. I struggle with how someone who once existed in a most solidly flesh and blood fashion is now no longer with us.

Time and its passage disconcerts us for several reasons. Firstly, it is of course an ‘intimation of mortality’, a reminder that our tenure of this world is utterly temporary. Second, it is also something of a reminder of the futility of so much that human life is centred on. As I read the obituaries of some of those whose names were unknown to me, I realised that many of them had once had only the briefest and most ephemeral moments of glory. Some had been advisers to long-forgotten governments, others fashionable exponents of now discredited geological ideas, and still others finders of now exhausted oilfields. Time drains the value of most achievements.

Yet the third disconcerting aspect of time is perhaps the most subtle. It is simply this: we do not in any shape or form understand what ‘time’ is. We measure something that we call time; we are aware that time passes (but what exactly does that mean?). Yet we cannot hold time, reverse time or store, buy or sell it. Time remains an utterly alien and unfathomable substance. It is presumed to have started with the Big Bang but even that remains an uncertainty. In every sense, time remains the most remote and elusive of concepts.

And here Christian friends, I draw to your attention the fact that time is an interesting point to consider if you ever find yourself up against a wall in an argument about God. You know the sort of thing; that confident sneer ‘Where is your God? Show me him and I will believe in him. Go on! Prove his existence’. You may at this point choose to refer to time. There are innumerable questions that can be raised. What is time? Can the existence of time be demonstrated? When did time begin? In time we have a commodity whose existence everybody accepts yet which cannot be proved in the laboratory. Time demonstrates the inadequacy of the human mind. It does not to my way of thinking prove the existence of God. It is however suggestive that we ought to be very wary about confidently asserting that only those things that we can touch, see, measure and understand have a reality.

Have a good week. I hope to write again in another seven days time; whatever that really means.

Chris

New Labour and a warning to evangelicals

2009-05-01T19:00:00.000+01:00

At the start, let me say that this blog is not really about British politics; it is about something else far deeper. I actually wonder if it doesn’t touch on something of fundamental and rather worrying importance for the evangelical church. But let’s start with the politics.

One thing that has become apparent in Britain over the last week or so – although it has been looming for some time – is that what has long been called ‘New Labour’ is finished. The financial debacle, the massive rises in unemployment and various other scandals have so doomed the present administration that wherever you look on the storm-tossed ship that is the Labour government you can see people desperately running around looking for seaworthy lifeboats. Indeed so catastrophic is the pending electoral disaster that most of them seem reconciled never to play a part in politics again. A generation in the wilderness looms.

The background is worth repeating. As the Wikipedia article helpfully puts it, the traditional Labour Party ‘was in favour of socialist policies such as public ownership of key industries, government intervention in the economy, redistribution of wealth, increased rights for workers and trade unions and a belief in the welfare state as well as publicly funded healthcare and education’. After 20 years in which good old-fashioned Labour was so out of sympathy with the contemporary world that it was unelectable, Tony Blair and his colleagues (one is tempted these days to use word cronies) created a rebranded and updated version of the Labour Party: New Labour.

New Labour was a subtle creation. On the one hand it claimed complete continuity with the past. Traditional supporters were reassured that it was still Labour: at party conferences, the followers of Blair sung the same old songs, cheered the same slogans and assented to many of the old aspirations. Despite considerable misgivings, long-term Labour supporters were reassured that all that they had held dear was still present. Yet on the other hand New Labour now presented a friendlier face to the public. It was smoother, sleeker, more contemporary and, above all, more acceptable. Much of the old confrontational language about class struggle and social justice was no longer heard: the party was utterly remarketed. The floating voter was charmed and under the chameleon-like Tony, New Labour achieved a massive 179-seat majority in the 1997 general election . It has retained power until the present.

Yet now, as the wheels spectacularly spin off the wagon of the New Labour enterprise, the old Labour supporters are saying that they knew all along that this would happen. All their misgivings as to whether New Labour was actually Labour in any real sense have returned with a triumphant vengeance. It certainly now seems that, beneath all the words and new slogans, whatever the Blairite project was, it wasn’t really Labour at all. It was a charade, the survivors of old Labour say, and the fact that it has come to such a sticky end is utterly predictable.

Well, I have my reservations about both Old and New Labour and Old and New Conservatism too. In fact, I am increasingly thinking that the roots of our national problems lie too deep for politics to change. Nevertheless I think the account of New Labour – so clearly now in its final chapter – is worth us evangelicals thinking about.

Why? The answer is this. Those of us who are contemporary evangelicals claim that we are part of a great and honourable lineage going back through the Victorians as far as the Puritan reformers. We count men such as Bunyan, Wesley, Whitfield, Spurgeon and Lord Shaftesbury as our spiritual ancestors. We sing the same songs (well a few of them, at least). We pronounce the same mantras. We read the same Bible. We have the same creeds and we hate the same sins.

Yet just occasionally when I read some of the older literature, listen to some of the older songs or read biographies about some of those who we are proud to call our forefathers, I look around the contemporary evangelical scene and I do not find their like. Particularly in the areas of godly living and zeal for witness I find something of a mismatch between them and us. Is it possible, I wonder darkly, that while we wear their clothes and use their names, we are not indeed either them or of their party? When I point out such differences of language, outlook and emphasis I am speedily reassured that these are but minor changes of externals done in order for us to relate to a new clientele. The chorus of soothing voices says ‘Relax! Nothing fundamental has changed! The New Evangelicalism is just the Old Evangelicalism reclothed.’

And as I wonder whether that is indeed so I look at the tattered and beaten remnants of New Labour. And somehow, I am strangely afraid.

On time and events

2009-04-24T18:57:00.000+01:00

What's happened this past week?

We've had really very pleasant weather, warm to almost hot, without any rain. After a long cold winter, Spring has, well, sprung upon us, and indeed we have had some days that have seemed on the verge of summer. Given the rather damp nature of our climate such times are indeed welcome. Last Saturday Alison and I had a great walk around a nearby peninsula marred only by the fact that the footpaths on the map were not duplicated by anything remotely similar in reality.
I preached last Sunday night on the principles of evangelism from Paul's farewell address to the Ephesian church. The congregation stayed awake (they are good like that) and some people told me they found it helpful.
Monday to Friday I've been back at college teaching, although the proximity of the exams (our first one is an unhappily close on 12th May) means that we are now in revision mode. I finished marking and grading 58 pieces of coursework. Some were of a quality that was arrestingly good and made me feel good about teaching, while some were so pathetic that I wonder what I have been doing.
On Monday night, I gave the first (and as it turned out last) lecture in a series of evening classes that had been planned with a biologist friend on Life through Time at the Welsh Botanic Gardens. It's a great place but very much out in the wilds so the fact that we only had three attendees was hardly surprisingly. We may redo it next year in Swansea.
We started a week of prayer at church: so far I have not managed to go to much but should be there tonight.
Alison and I watched the Coen Brothers’ film ‘No Country for Old Men’ and both agreed that despite rave critical reviews it was only memorable for the thoroughly irritating way in which it arrogantly trampled over those unwritten rules that good storytellers make (and keep) with their listeners. I will say no more but, for my money, if you haven't seen it you're not missing anything.
I finished (Hurrah! Hurrah!) the book for Hodder that I have written with J. John; it looks almost certain that it will be called The Return: Grace and the Prodigal. As you may surmise from its title it is a fairly detailed study of the great parable of the prodigal son and its implications for how we live.
We heard from our older son John that our grandson Simeon who gave us such concern earlier on is now greatly enjoying life and clearly possessed of a happy and intelligent temperament.
We had a truly appalling (in every sense of the word) budget speech this week which a) made plain the extent of the economic devastation and b) manifestly failed to come up with any truly coherent solution for solving it. We are however promised that there will be a massive recovery next year with astonishing rates of growth. The response to this has been levels of mocking laughter normally associated with protestations of innocence from the villain in the pantomime. The truly curious feature on the national scene is that while everyone is really pretty angry about the financial situation the anger so far has been confined to a few protests. We Brits are a pretty placid folk, it seems. Nevertheless everybody has spent a disproportionate amount of time this week talking about the economy.
I have a lovely letter of thanks for the books from Kentucky (thank you Debbie) and a nice comment from Canada. Thanks one and all.

There is a lot more than I could add but even so you might well ask: what is the point of listing all this activity? There is nothing particularly new, striking or even probably important in this. Indeed, I suspect your own lives are just as complex. Yet the busyness has preoccupied me: it has been a week quite literally of ‘one darn thing after another’. And yet, as I now look back, I see that somehow the gift of seven whole God-given days have vanished.

Did I use them wisely? Most effectively? Did I consider what I was doing in the light of eternity? Psalm 90:12 says “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” It is easy to see that in terms of a quantitative factor: ‘how many days have I got left?’ It may be better to see it in qualitative terms: on those blank sheets of time God gave me, have I written what was worthwhile?

Blessings

Chris

On bobbies and benchmarks

2009-04-17T19:30:00.000+01:00

For those of us who respect the British police force, the last couple of weeks have been rather unsettling. In particular, disturbing scenes have emerged of a least two very aggressive incidents during the G20 summit. One was in which a man with his hands in his pockets was struck hard in the back with a baton by a policeman in the Darth Vader uniform they increasingly wear on such occasion and then pushed to the ground: he died shortly afterwards. Another was one in which a woman was struck with a gloved fist in the face and then pushed very aggressively. In both cases there appear to have been very unsatisfactory attempts to cover up the incidents. One or two other oddities have added to the unease: at least some of the policeman had the numbers on their uniform covered up, something which is never supposed to happen.

The world-famous British bobby is important to us, not just in practical terms but also symbolically. To those of us who are law-abiding members of British society (which I mostly am) there has always been something rather reassuring about the idea of the unarmed, amiable and incorruptible British copper, the very epitome of fair and gentle law-keeping. How we despised those lesser breeds (I name no names) governed by vicious gendarmerie/guardia civil/ polizie /policia with their tendency to beat the heck out of anyone who even looked vaguely troublesome. Unfortunately, even those of us who don’t protest or steal cars are increasingly coming to realise that all is not well in the British police force. One reason why it has taken us so long to realise that there is trouble is because we have been misled by focusing on a single benchmark: the use of firearms. The fact is that (thankfully) our police still do not carry firearms except on very special occasions. (They are hardly ‘unarmed’: their batons and sprays are pretty unpleasant.) Anyway my reading of the situation is that although we have been worried about our police force for many years we have been reassured by the mantra ‘Relax, things are all right because they don’t carry guns’.

Now I could talk more about the police force and may do so; there are fascinating and troubling issues emerging in Britain as the ‘Protestant consensus’ within our society ebbs away rapidly. What I want to do though is comment on the peril of keeping your eye on single benchmark.

In a complex world it is easy over issues of concern to mark a line in the sand at some particular point. You turn your attention elsewhere, constantly glancing back at your line in the sand and, as long as it remains untouched, you conclude that all is well. So, for example, I consider that everything is all right as long as I can walk down to the city centre in daylight without being mugged. There are many such benchmarks in society and in our lives. Indeed I suspect almost all our public and private morality is composed of a series of such benchmarks. So, for instance, we consider that our freedom as Christians is intact because (benchmark issue) they have not closed down places of worship. True, but we ignore the fact that in a dozen other unbenchmarked areas our freedom has been eroded. We consider our political liberty to be unchallenged because we can participate in that great benchmark, democratic elections. We overlook the hundred other ways of freedom has been drained. We imagine that we have free speech because the police do not march into newsagents and carry away particular issues, but we ignore many other ways in which our liberty is constrained. (As an aside I think we work on the benchmark basis in our teaching. Our exams include almost all the key topics that they did 20 years ago, and as this is the case, there is an assumption that therefore everything must be well. However what you find is that in most cases these have been reduced to such a token representation that their presence is effectively irrelevant.) It is rather like denying coastal erosion on the grounds that the key lighthouses still exist while ignoring the fact that they are now on islands rather than on the continuous cliff they once were.

If you are an evil person, being able to recognise these benchmarks is extremely useful. You simply leave them intact and work your way around them. So for instance someone could probably take it over Britain but all would be well as long as you kept the flag flying and the Queen in residence. Perhaps they have…

What’s the answer? I suspect it is the necessity of shunning isolated benchmarks and instead trying to see the whole picture. The problem with doing that is very simple: it is hard work.

Have a good week

Chris

A Good Friday meditation on kings and pirates

2009-04-10T19:20:00.003+01:00

There are a lot of things I could talk about this week, but it is Easter. And I have been preaching once a month at our church in a series broadly based around Christ in the Old Testament. Last Sunday evening I got round to Christ as King and it fitted in very nicely with the Palm Sunday theme. In truth, I find preaching something of a labour because I spend a lot of time preparing but it is extremely helpful in that it forces me to think through things. Anyway this is something that that emerged from my sermon preparation and you may find helpful.

One argument of the sceptics of traditional Christianity centres on the issue of how one man’s death can atone for others. Their argument is simply that what we dignify with the phrase 'substitutionary atonement' doesn’t really make much sense arithmetically or morally. Well, the arithmetical side can be dealt with by pointing out that as God, Christ has infinite merit but that still doesn’t really explain how one man can stand in for millions of others. So how do we answer this?

The first point to say is that to a large extent this is a problem that we have brought on ourselves in western Protestantism. Our celebration of the individual means that we tend to see ourselves as solitary figures isolated effectively from all others. Yet other societies operate on a different basis. Certainly in the Middle East, at least, the family is the fundamental element of society and an individual is always part of a family. One bizarre side-effect of this was that at AUB we had to make students taking the English entry exam display their identity cards, as it was all too common for the fluent Rami to stand in for his much weaker brother Amir. (We are now adopting this policy in the UK: it may be for similar reasons.)

The fascinating point was that, if caught, neither of them would have seen this as being fraud: for them substitution is one of those things that families are all about. So one answer to the problem of the cross is along these lines: as our ‘elder brother’ Christ is fully entitled to stand in for us. Another answer – and this may be more satisfactory – is to remember that in many cultures, a King is not just the ruler of his people but also their representative. As monarch he embodies all that they are. And on this view, Jesus as our Lord and King is of course perfectly entitled to stand in our place. His death on the cross was also his people’s death. (And in some way his resurrection is also ours.) Anyway, that was one spin-off from my talk last week: if it helps, you’re welcome to it.

There was actually an interesting little sideline on the news today which made me think of a third analogy. As I write this, Capt Richard Phillips of the ship Maersk Alabama is being held hostage by Somali pirates. As the story stands at the moment, apparently Captain Phillips offered himself as a hostage in order to save his crew from the pirates. It’s a nice Good Friday metaphor and we must pray it ends up well for the captain. I notice that the French – familiar with the area and untroubled by Protestant niceties – have just launched an armed raid to rescue some of their own citizens held hostage and inflicted a good deal of damage on the pirates in the process. (As an aside, this dramatic incident, which seems to have escaped from the series West Wing, is being seen over here at least as President Obama’s baptism of fire.) And incidentally, if anyone is at all interested, I must sometime tell you about my own modest role in contributing to the Somali civil war and the current state of our piracy. It's not something that one boasts about....

In the meantime have a blessed Easter.

“The more things change, the more they stay the same”

2009-04-03T18:26:00.001+01:00

First of all, no news on the work front except that unknown number of voluntary redundancies have been agreed. Any news on compulsory redundancies will have to wait till after Easter. Although I am most unlikely to be affected there is a general atmosphere of unease around that no one cares for.

Anyway, today at 4:30 was the deadline for my students to submit their coursework. Most of them had known about the coursework for nine months and sadly a large number left it to the last possible minute. Oddly enough most of the worst offenders were on Facebook which I happened to glance at last night. Let me list you some of their comments. I have removed names (to protect the guilty) and in one or two cases slightly sanitised the language.

A: is thinking...coffee....lucozade sweets....cafeine tablets....just anything too keep me awake!!! roll on the all nighter.....who's with me???

B: I am... but without all those caffine things lol... think u'll race me at finishing the coursework ???

C: i'm goin to get it done even if i have to stay up ALL night and have literally no sleep... u think u'll get urs done 2nite? Xxx

D: i've only just finished the methodology thing... i have like everything left to do lol... oh well as long as they're done i suppose :) going to be a long night!!! Xxx

E: quater to five i went to bed... not the best idea in the world seein as its still not done! 3 hours now :O:O:O xxx

F: For those of us who are in the worst mess of our lives... DEADLINE TOMRROW PEOPLE!!

G: im not sleeping 2nite. :| i had a lil kip in the afternoon so ill be awake thru the night hahaha.

H: AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

(And there is always the self righteous one: J wrote ‘I am so pleased I started my geology coursework early and only have spellchecking to do :)’)

Now as it happened I also checked the Blog of one Samuel Pepys yesterday. For those who don't know who he was or need reminding let me cite the introduction to his Wikipedia entry: “Samuel Pepys (23 February 1633 – 26 May 1703) was an English naval administrator and Member of Parliament, who is now most famous for his diary. Although Pepys had no maritime experience, he rose by patronage, hard work and his talent for administration, to be the Chief Secretary to the Admiralty under King James II. His influence and reforms at the Admiralty were important in the early professionalization of the Royal Navy. The detailed private diary he kept during 1660–1669 was first published in the nineteenth century, and is one of the most important primary sources for the English Restoration period. It provides a combination of personal revelation and eyewitness accounts of great events, such as the Great Plague of London, the Second Dutch War and the Great Fire of London. His surname is usually pronounced /'pi?ps/, sounded the same as the word peeps.”

I call it his ‘blog’ because some clever soul has realised that the entries can be turned into one. And reading the entry for Saturday 31 March 1666 I came across this paragraph.

All the morning at the office busy. At noon to dinner, and thence to the office and did my business there as soon as I could, and then home and to my accounts, where very late at them, but, Lord! what a deale of do I have to understand any part of them, and in short do what I could, I could not come to any understanding of them, but after I had throughly wearied myself, I was forced to go to bed and leave them much against my will and vowe too, but I hope God will forgive me, for I have sat up these four nights till past twelve at night to master them, but cannot.

Nearly 350 years separate Samuel Pepys from my students but nocturnal desperation unites them. I suppose we may be undergoing some slight physical evolution as a species but we certainly do not seem to be undergoing any mental or spiritual change.

On bureaucracy and evil

2009-03-27T18:43:00.000Z

First of all, thank you all for writing in; the messages still keep coming and I value them. A good friend in church made the point that this is a biased sample of people who have read and enjoyed my books. He is, of course, right but frankly I don’t know how to poll those who haven’t read and enjoyed the books. Secondly, nothing much has happened at work to do with jobs and reorganisation. But I’m sure there will be news in the week before we break up for Easter.

So let me tell you about something that happened to me this week which I’m afraid is symptomatic of the New Britain. A week ago I had a letter from the local doctor’s surgery which included what was claimed to be the form for my annual test for fasting glycaemia. Very nice of them, you say; yes, but the problem is I have never had such a test. I politely wrote back pointing out that 20 years ago I had been diagnosed with blood sugar problems for a matter of a week before a thyroid issue was diagnosed but that had been 20 years ago and that I have had no such problem since despite a fairly regular battery of blood tests.

On Monday I had a phone call from the surgery. The insistent and unapologetic woman said that the reason for the letter was that they had noticed I had had a marginal result in 1991 and felt a retest was in order. I’m afraid to say I was very cynical about this; anyone who knows the British Health Service will realise that the idea of people sitting around saying ‘We’ve got nothing to do this afternoon so let’s look at 18-year-old test results’ is ludicrous. I mentioned this to a surgeon in our Bible study the following day and was told with that thin, weary smile that our healthcare professionals now bear, that doctors are now being paid for every screening they carry out. So they trawl through the records looking for likely candidates and once found, send them to be tested for no other purpose than financial. So, in the pursuit of spurious statistics and dubious gain, genuine issues of patient health are completely overlooked. I was not terribly surprised; we generate all sorts of figures in order for fundraising and quite a lot have nothing to do with our prime purpose which is (I still believe against all the odds) educating people.

This has led me onto a further meditation about the nature of evil. I always thought when I looked at those 20th-century mass killings of Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany that their awesome administration (all those names, those interminable lists, the sheer organisation) was merely an incidental feature. My logic had been something like the following: you decide to eliminate people so you are forced to create a bureaucracy which enables such a killing to take place. The murderous hatred comes first, the paperwork is second. I am now beginning to revise my opinion. I wonder if there isn’t something about the very nature of administrative systems that actually facilitates evil. All these forms, targets and goals actually create a fertile soil in which other evils, including mass murder, can grow. I am a long way from fully understanding how this works but I suspect that first of all it is to do with the dehumanisation of individuals. The very nature of bureaucracy is to render us faceless ciphers and turn us into impersonal and distant objects that can easily be moved around. In such a virtual world we have no more permanence than this sentence I am writing on the computer screen. A few keystrokes and we are changed; a few more and we are gone.

A secondary feature of this bureaucratisation is the substitution of human good (which ought to be the goal of all our efforts) by statistical achievement. In the beginning, no doubt statistical achievements represent no more than the necessary quantification of human good but all too soon they become not the means to the end but the end itself. It is all analogous to how the idol starts off as an aid to worship but soon becomes the worshipped object itself. So, slowly and insidiously, administration replaces humanity. On this view the tyrant does not so much create a bureaucracy of evil as divert an existing bureaucracy into flowing along an evil path. But I fear that such a diversion is easier than we may imagine. While bureaucracy may not be evil, it clearly lends itself to evil.

I have no idea what the solution is. The anarchist remedy of smashing all machines and systems is beyond credibility. Perhaps, at the very least, we need constantly to be reminded that human beings are in the image of God and that – however disguised by numbers and ciphers – we remain beings of extraordinary value.

Have a good week.

A response to your comments and other news

2009-03-20T18:21:00.003Z

Wow! Who would have thought that I had so many friends? First of all, let me thank you all for taking the time to write. In particular, I want to express my gratitude to those of you who contributed quite long and thoughtful comments. I have considered all that you have written with some care and I might pursue some of the practical approaches suggested. No one actually came up with my own preferred strategy of writing a new volume which is a bestseller and then having the old series relaunched on the basis of a new one. This of course is a wonderfully cunning plan that has just has one small catch in it: I need to write a new blockbuster. Well, I am giving it some thought.

What I have concluded from your comments – and please continue to send them in – is that much of my original dramatic instincts were right: it is better to start with the Assembly and let the shadow fall upon it. To bring in Azeras at the start is just too conventional. However I do think that I could probably bring in Brenito and his dream right at the start. Something on the following lines. ‘On a near perfect world a man woke screaming. It was the first such scream for over 10,000 years and it was heard across one thousand worlds.’ Vero too might be brought in slightly earlier with profit and this would also have the benefit of avoiding the slightly excessive ‘info dumping’ (as I gather it is called in the trade) when he talks to Merral. However, that is all some way ahead. For all I know, even as I write, a certain inhabitant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Washington is looking for something substantial to read on Airforce One. (I sense there may be a market for escapist fiction in the White House at the moment.) Anyway pray on and do what you can.

The main news for me this week has been that the storm clouds of the financial crisis that have so far been on the distant horizon have now swept my way. The institution that I teach at (Gorseinon College, Swansea) has been suddenly hammered with a massive budget cut from the Welsh Assembly and so we are now in voluntary redundancy mode which next week shifts to compulsory redundancy mode. By all accounts the science unit to which I am privileged to belong (and I mean privileged: there are some very fine teachers in it) should be secure but who knows? These are odd times and what is often described as rationalisation is often irrationalisation. Nevertheless I am angry about it all; ours is, by any standard of reckoning, a high performing and competent educational establishment in an area where mediocrity (and worse) is the norm. It is also a relatively ‘lean’ institution; there are barely a handful of people about whom I have wondered what they do to justify their existence. The cuts concerned involve a mere £800,000: a little over $1 million. I used to think that was a lot of money but in these days of billions and trillions it is nothing. So next week could be interesting…

Anyway here's a moral problem for you my fans. If I keep my job, then my financial welfare is more or less secure, at least for the considerable future. If I lose it I will probably have to start writing like crazy. Now do you see the moral dilemma you are placed in? What do you pray for? (The ideal would be a generous offer for film rights to arrive the day before I get given my notice but I suspect such happenings are rarer in reality than fiction.) I would simply suggest that this reminds us of the wisdom of appending to all our prayers that most vital of clauses: ‘Nevertheless, Lord, not my will but yours be done.’

Have a good week.

So here’s what I’m thinking....

2009-03-13T18:35:00.003Z

Two weeks ago I mentioned to you that the entire Lamb among the Stars sequence was not doing at all well. In fact it has largely disappeared without trace and you have to do a lot of hard work in order to even find any of the books, let alone buy them. I asked you for some bright ideas and got some helpful comments for which I am very grateful. Anyway here’s my current – and still rather tentative – thinking and I’m interested to know any comments you have.

Now I need to say that I remain utterly committed to this sequence; I have spent an extraordinarily long number of hours on it and I’m not lightly going to give it up. If the reviews had been negative or critical I might have shrugged my shoulders and said ‘well there we are’ and walked away. In fact the problem has not been the negative reviews; it has been actually getting the series reviewed at all. But your comments encourage me to live in hope that I may yet see ‘the resurrection of the dead’ as far as these books go.

So what I am tentatively planning is this. I shall wait a few more months and see if everything goes entirely dead. If it does, I will write to Tyndale asking whether I can have the book rights back sooner rather than later. In the meantime, I will start rewriting the series. If you aren’t familiar with the books you will realise that the second and third volumes are slightly different to the first in that they include not just what is happening to Merral D’Avanos but to a handful of other people as well. To use the technical term there are ‘multiple viewpoints’. This does not happen in the first book. The single viewpoint of the first book works in one sense in that we are able to slowly watch evil gradually permeating a fallen world. Nevertheless it poses considerable problems, not least that you have to get at some 150 pages in before there is significant action. This is undeniably a flaw with an unknown author in today’s climate. As the wretched (and now already largely forgotten) Da Vinci Code taught us, you need to have a bizarre murder on the first page and keep the plot moving from then on. So, in the first 30 or so pages I might well bring in Azeras and the crew of the Freeborn ship about to land on Farholme and Vero being posted (much against his will) to Farholme by the Sentinels. I might include something of the Lord Emperor himself, although he is a fundamentally a very uninteresting character. (Most evil people are.) As you may be aware Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings in its entirety and then, when he had finished the last volume and before he submitted it for publication, he rewrote it. The result was a better trilogy (although even here a number of modifications and corrections were made in the next decade or so).

Other than that recasting of some of the material of the first book I do not anticipate any other major changes. One minor change would be to put ‘clear blue water’ between the diaries of the books and the iPhone; when I wrote the first few pages 20 years ago my communication devices were clearly fantastic – they are less so now.

So the idea is with all this rewriting done and the creation of the Lamb among the Stars ‘final version’ /’revised version’/’ultimate version’ I would then either offer the books to a publisher who felt they could handle the science-fiction market or find some other innovative way of getting it out into the general public.

I am open for comments on this. It is a long road but the hope is that it would mean that these books would be available for the future. Of course it would also mean that the first edition versions with Tyndale would be collector’s items :-) Well if you have any comments please let me know.

By the way my wife has started a blog of her own entitled Open My Eyes. Rather than summarise what it’s about let me simply direct you to it.

Have a good week
Chris

On two contemporary fallacies

2009-03-06T18:40:00.001Z

Four quick points first.

Thank you everyone who contributed to last week's blog about what I ought to do with the Lamb Among Stars series. I am coming to some conclusions, but will wait for another week as there will probably yet be a few comments from those people who have not so far said anything.
I have just signed a modest contract with Hodder in the UK for a short book on the Prodigal (specifically) and parables (generally), which I am doing with my old friend J John. We don’t have a proper title for this yet but it should be out next summer.
My previous book with J. John – The Life: a Portrait of Jesus – is now close to hitting sales figures of 100,000, which is really pretty awesome.
Our grandson Simeon is continuing to do well and is slowly creeping up the weight charts. I must post some pictures some time.

Anyway several things have come together this week to make me consider that one of the main problems in contemporary society is a pervasive belief in two related fallacies. The first is a belief in the ‘Free Lunch’. This is, of course, a reference to the idea that ‘you need to do nothing in order to have something nice to happen’. Believers in such a creed (and there are many) think that you can lose weight without slimming, pass exams without working, achieve a successful marriage without effort and so on. I wish I could say this was a belief exclusively found amongst the adolescents that I teach. In fact, it seems to me that much of modern Britain (and probably the United States as well) is built on this idea. The present economic system seems to have been based around the extraordinary notion that all we need for national prosperity is a lot of people moving a lot of paper around in London and charging for the privilege. No product of any value is created but nevertheless wealth appears.

The second (and related) fantasy I am provisionally calling the ‘Get Out Of Jail Free fallacy’, although I’m open to suggestions for a better name. This is the negative version of the Free-Lunchism and can be summarised as ‘you can do all sorts of bad things and nothing bad will happen to you’. If the Free Lunch belief centres on ‘blessings without a price’ this majors on ‘sin (or stupidity) without a cost’. It seems to see us as having any number of get-out-of-jail-free cards which absolve us from any responsibilities and penalties, so that ultimately things are consequence-less. So, we can do all we want to whoever we want and it doesn’t really matter: there is no judgement, no price to pay and no penalty. This notion is found in adolescents who seem to be happy to engage in both careless sex and reckless driving. But it is also to be found in those who ought to know better, such as those politicians, heads of industry and bankers who are now exposed as quite happily having believed that they could do all sorts of outrageous things and nothing bad would happen.

Now as a Christian I feel somewhat ambivalent towards the free lunch and get-out-of jail-free fallacies. After all I believe both in grace and forgiveness; concepts which bear some resemblance to both of these. Nevertheless, the fact is that both grace and forgiveness do come at a price – one that is paid by someone else: Jesus Christ. We need to teach people the reality of a hard and fallen world: good things have a price and bad things a cost. In fact, one possible merit of the present recession is that it may be drumming home this lesson with a vengeance.

As a final comment I wonder whether the fact that the Gospel has so little impact in the West may be due to the fact that through a belief in a ‘free lunch’ and ‘get out of jail free cards’ people take its blessings for granted. The Gospel of grace and forgiveness is not good news to those who haven’t taken on board the bad news first.

Not an easy blog to write…

2009-02-27T17:59:00.000Z

There’s a lot of things I would like to discuss rather than this but I thought I’d better write what I have to say here for the simple reason I want advice from you, readers. The basic fact is that it has been obvious for some time that the Lamb Among the Stars trilogy has not been selling at all well. You don’t have to be a genius to read the Amazon sales figures, and although the reviews are splendid (thank you all very much), when your book drops down to around 300,000th place on the charts you know that things aren’t good. You also know it when you don’t hear from your publisher from months on end.

Anyway about ten days ago I e-mailed my editor asking basically what was going on and whether they were thinking up any innovative solutions to the sales situation. I will simply say it took a week to get an answer and only then by dint of contacting the author liaison person. (I now know what leprosy feels like.) The answer was not at all encouraging. Hardback sales are bad, science fiction and fantasy worse. Any plans to do the series in paperback (‘softcover’ Americans call it) have been scrapped. In other words, frankly it’s the end of the line.

I feel pretty unhappy about this. The books had a ropey start with a teen fiction imprint of the publishers that soon went belly up. It didn’t do anything for sales and simply gave them that damning descriptive label ‘youth fiction’. (I know I should have refused the offer when they said ‘it’s our new youth fiction imprint’, but I was anxious to be published). I’m grateful that, when the the youth fiction venture folded, the books were remarketed for adults, but I think by then the damage was done. Significantly, the books have never been reviewed by any formal reviewer and certainly never made it into the substantial fantasy world. Enough said.

Anyway, dear friends, readers and supporters, what do I do? The present trajectory is plain. The books are no longer in shops and presumably I may expect ever diminishing sales until at some point I get some pathetic letter that says that they will no longer be held in the inventory. (I wanted to get some of the extra copies from the States, but the postage is astronomical because US mail services have stopped shipping by sea.) And that is that.

My problem is not, I think, simply personal pride, let alone greed, but irritation and frustration. Some books deserve to fail. I do not think from the reviews that these do. I know there are many people out there who would love to read them but do not even know that they exist. So what do I do about it? Several possibilities are kicking around in my mind but I have no clarity on any of them. Do I try and get the rights back and find someone else who will publish these books? (I could tidy them up into a cheap single-volume massive paperback.) Do I try and get them electronically published? Volume 1 free as an iPhone book?) Do I scream and shout to other contacts in the publishing company that these books have never ever had a chance? Or do I do shrug my shoulders and ‘say so be it’ and let the series die. I do have to say that I am very negative now about Christian publishing and fiction. (And please don’t talk to me about Left Behind, The Shack and This Present Darkness, etc: such books sold in large numbers not because they were stories but because they were believed to be revelations into spiritual reality.)

I really don’t know what to do. I would be grateful for your prayers: you can probably imagine my frustration and dismay. You can always e-mail me with contacts and bright ideas, if you have any.

With every blessing
Chris

On Darwin

2009-02-20T17:00:00.001Z

Astute readers that you are, you will have noticed that we have recently had the 200th[I meant to say 150th] anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species and the 250th anniversary of the author’s birth [I meant to say 200th!]. There is a lot that I could say about Charles Darwin. After all, as you probably know if you follow this blog or read my website, I am (somewhat uncomfortably) in the middle of some of the big debates that have come to focus on this man.

On the one hand, I think much of what Darwin came up with is correct. It would be a very clumsy Creator indeed who did not build into species the ability to adapt to changing environments. I certainly have no problem with vast amounts of geological time and I do have an infinite number of problems with the wretched lunacy of flood geology and the young earth fantasies of certain people.

On the other hand, I find it equally ludicrous to believe that Darwin’s evolution is anything other than a rather basic description of how things work. It certainly does not explain why things work and I am not convinced that it is a totally adequate mechanism for explaining all the glorious complexity and diversity of the biosphere. As someone has said Darwinism ‘explains the survival of the fittest but not the arrival of the fittest’. I certainly do not see it satisfactorily explaining the large-scale creativity within the organic world.

Let me make two observations. By chance, I heard one of our more prestigious palaeontologists, Simon Conway Morris, give a sermon on the radio about Darwin. A Christian (but probably not an evangelical) Professor Conway Morris pointed out that although an excellent observer, Darwin was a rather poor philosopher and rather out of his depth when it came to discussing the big issues raised by his own theory. He also seemed to hint that Darwin had rather let his own faith slide (if you remember, he had been intending to train as a clergyman) and that the rather pitiable confusion that the old man found himself in his latter years was a problem that was, to some extent, of his own making. This fits with the comment I read a number of years ago from someone that Darwin was the classic example of the ‘use it or lose it’ nature of faith.

The second observation is the fascinating way in which various people have been trying to elevate Darwin to the role of prophet. If ever you wanted proof that atheism is a creed just like any other religion then the rather feverish attempts to elevate Charles to sainthood (at least) would give it you. I have been almost expecting to read how wise men visited him while he was a baby and how ancient prophecies were fulfilled in his birth. To listen to the adulation from some quarters you feel that they didn't so much want him buried in Westminster Abbey as elevated above the altar. It may or may not be significant too that the commonest images of him are not of the young and rather handsome scientist but as an old man looking distinctly patriarchal and doing a passable imitation of Elijah's third cousin once removed. Of course, elevating him to this exalted rank does him no good whatsoever. For one thing, it makes discussing his theories in a neutral way very difficult. It also means that he is forced to stand in comparison against Jesus. Here you have to feel sorry for poor old Charles; that is a comparison no one can bear.

On teaching and entertainment

2009-02-13T19:08:00.000Z

An hour ago we started half term. Hurrah! I have to say I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bunch of teachers quite so ready for it. My colleagues are universally excellent and committed teachers and our students are some of the best in Wales but there seemed to be a general sigh of profound and exhausted relief all round today. There are several reasons for the general mood of tiredness: a late-night parents’ evening, uncertainties over whether or not College would be closed due to snow and some pretty heavy and unpleasant colds and coughs. But there are other stresses.

One subtle stress for us to make our teaching entertaining. Now don’t get me wrong, I loathe the idea of boring teaching, I don’t do it and I have a reputation for being one of the livelier teachers around. (Mind you it helps doing geology; I’d hate to teach French verbs.) The problem is that today in Britain – even with relatively well-behaved children – teaching has become almost a branch of the entertainment industry. We must vary what we do, must constantly stimulate and indeed should consider giving them kinaesthetic learning that involves touch, smell, sound and (should health and safety considerations permit) taste. Of course, this is all very difficult. For a start, television with its carefully scripted presentations, skilled presenters and large-scale special effects has set an impossible standard. For another, this is not a carefully controlled stage situation: we grapple with dodgy digital projectors, students arriving late, less than totally satisfactory rooms and so on.

One of the big problems with this is that it’s all rather like sex and violence in films and books; the pressure is to go further. The public demand for entertainment is effectively insatiable. Today’s youth becomes bored so easily that it is hard (nay impossible) to be consistently and permanently entertaining. I have considered a clown suit just to make the point. Indeed the demand seems to be becoming more pressing: what was amusing five years ago is no longer amusing today. This whole matter is very close to the ongoing British debate about ‘cutting-edge humour’. The problem is that was yesterday’s cutting edge is today somewhere pretty close to the blunt end of the blade. The result is that if you’re not careful you end up doing more and more things just to increase the amusement coefficient. It’s all wearying. Increasingly I feel like something like an actor forced to do matinee and evening performances day after day. Another problem is that this permanent attempt to achieve a lightness of touch is very misleading. Most of my students are going on to university and presumably all are (hopefully) going on to the world of work. There they will have to come to terms with tasks that are frankly not amusing or entertaining anyway but which still have to be done.

Anywhere, I realise that this is all rather disjointed. But I think there are interesting questions that can be asked of almost everything we do. Do we have to be entertaining and amusing? Isn’t truth of whatever kind sufficient to hold our attention?

An odd parallel between Uniformitarianism and Evangelicalism

2009-02-06T20:18:00.001Z

Well it’s been an interesting and rather frustrating week. As many of you may be aware we have had an unusually cold winter in the UK and this week it really hit us. The problem was that the weather was rather unpredictable and, in fact, unsporting. So we had snow when we weren’t supposed to have it, and didn’t have it when we were. Because my college has a very large catchment area extending into the foothills of what we call mountains but Americans would probably dismiss as ‘lumps’, we have to be very careful about weather alerts. No one wants several hundred students camped overnight in a freezing college. The upshot was that the teaching week essentially fell into times when the students were either absent (or distracted) because of the expectation of snow, absent because of snow, or disinclined to work because other people were absent because of snow or the fear of it. Out of five working days, I feel I taught only about two properly. As a geography teacher remarked somewhat sourly ‘this would happen the very year they have put global warming on the syllabus’.

Anyway this week I thought I would share with you a curious coming together of something in geology and preaching. In Geology I was discussing the fundamental principle of uniformitarianism; the great rule that we interpret the past according to present-day processes. A key point of uniformitarianism is that it majors on steady and predominantly gentle processes. As an aside I made the point that this idea had really come to prominence in 19th-century Britain and that our society then had welcomed a concept that elevated slow steady change over drastic, traumatic upheaval. The memory of the French Revolution just across the water haunted 19th-century British culture, particularly the aristocracy. (Incidentally to spare some of you writing to me; I have no doubt that most of the time uniformitarianism is the correct view and no doubt whatsoever that the Earth is very old indeed.)

On the Sunday evening following I was preaching on Jesus as Prophet and in passing touching on the extent to which we were to be prophetic within the church. Now my understanding of prophecy is that it is primarily forth-telling more than fore-telling; speaking God’s Word to a particular situation in the present is probably more important than some word about the future. I then made the point that evangelicalism tends to be rather cosy and well mannered, an attitude which often prevents us from being as blunt and open about such matters as social wrongs as perhaps we ought to be. And feeling a vague sense of déjà vu, I realised that the formative years of British evangelicalism were exactly those of geological uniformitarianism. In other words, it was probably not just geologists who had decided to be nice and cuddle up to society but also evangelicals. What we have assumed to be an evangelical standard is probably not that at all, but a two-hundred-year-old cultural one.

It is probably a minor insight but it is possibly a helpful reminder that we need to be very careful to examine what we stand for. Perhaps more often than we realise, our values may be culturally rather than biblically determined.

Have a good week.

On sin and economics

2009-01-30T17:57:00.003Z

I was advising a student this week about potential university subjects. Normally I stay within my own science specialisation but somehow she had ended up in my tutor group despite her geography, sociology and economics A-levels. I realised I found it astonishingly hard to be positive about economics in the present climate. ‘It doesn’t seem to work’, I said, and she nodded with sad agreement. But were we being unfair to economics? Or were we simply asking too much of it?

It is interesting isn’t it, how hard it is to know whether the present appalling economic crisis is due to bad economic theory or bad economic practice. I suspect the problem is a combination of both. I remain unconvinced that we have a full understanding of the way a global economic system works. (If we do, why were there not greater warnings of disaster ahead?) I am definitely not convinced that we had enough safeguards to stop greed and corruption taking over. There seems little doubt now that we have sown not just the wind but a variety of winds and are now reaping the perfect whirlwind. Why did it happen?

I think that our churches must take some responsibility. It may not be attractive but I think it is our duty to repeatedly labour the fact – so basic to the Gospel – that human beings are sinful; that even the best of us find power so corruptive that we need the most rigorous safeguards to prevent abuse. Of course, such a message, even coupled with redemptive grace – is appallingly unattractive. But the fact of the matter is that good breeding and good education are utterly inadequate to give any protection against financial abuse. In fact, as we have always known, education merely makes for a smarter class of sinner. I used to work for a university which could easily have boasted that it had educated more Lebanese warlords than any other academic institution.

Anyway, it is to be hoped that the economic downturn is brief and it is equally to be hoped that we learn our lessons from it and institute global checks and balances that prevent the greed of a few producing the misery of the many. But I trust that I’m not being unduly pessimistic when I say that unless our churches preach more boldly the fallen and sinful nature of man I have doubts about the outcome.

Still let us rejoice. The exchange rate of the Bank of Heaven is unaltered and our investments there are utterly unshaken. That leads me to a final and more upbeat thought: maybe we need also to preach more, not just about sin but also about heaven.

Have a good week.

The inauguration: an aside from a neglected author

2009-01-23T18:43:00.002Z

Well, we watched the inauguration. Having spent a number of weeks talking about the differences between Britain and the States this was a classic; other than a vaguely common language, there was a gulf as wide as the Atlantic between us on this. We just don’t do inaugurations, but of course this was far closer to a coronation than a changeover of a British administration.

Anyway I paid careful attention to Rick Warren’s invocation because I knew something of the furore surrounding it. Frankly I generally approved of what he said. I sensed him footstep very gingerly around a number of difficult issues and I applauded his courage in using the word ‘Jesus’ at the end. A key factor in my approval was simply that nothing remotely like such a public and explicitly evangelical prayer would have been allowed in the UK.

Later on I was directed to a reformed website for a transcript by son number two and made the mistake of commenting on the speech. No one directly answered me but as a result I got the remaining 99 or so e-mails. What astonished (and to be honest appalled me) was the real unpleasantness of tone of many of the comments. I read that Warren had no business making the invocation, that he was wrong to use the Lord’s prayer, that he should have prayed for Obama to be converted, that he should not have made any concessions whatsoever to Islam and Judaism so on.

One interesting one that troubled me was the complaint that he should have used some of the Old Testament prayers directly, such as Ezra’s great prayer of contrition (Ezra 9). Why did that bother me? It troubled me because that was a prayer specifically for God’s own chosen people and however great a view you have of the United States' manifest destiny, it does not replace the Old Testament nation of Israel. Ultimately it seems to me that there is no scriptural mandate or parallel for anything remotely like an invocation at the inauguration of the President of a secular state. Yes, there were things I would like to have changed and added but I am not Rick Warren (much to my publisher’s dismay). I think he did a jolly good job under the circumstances and I felt he came over well as a genuine warm-hearted believer with a faith worth having. His words were carried to the ends of the earth and I pray that God will mightily use them. The fact is there are clearly people – within the Christian community – who so hate him that nothing that could be said would have appeased them. Or maybe they hate Obama so much that he got caught in the spillover.

Anyway as I read the comments I actually found a terrible thought dawning in my mind. I realised that I was beginning to formulate a prayer. It’s a prayer that I have not yet prayed but after being immersed in the vitriol I think I probably could. It is this: ‘Thank you God that my books have not been a vast success because I’m not sure I could handle bitter criticism from fellow Christians.’

Have a good week.

On interesting times

2009-01-16T20:10:00.002Z

When I was a youngster I always wanted to live at a time of crisis. I suspect it was largely because I felt that it would mean that school was closed for ever. I also had the naive belief that having adventures would be fun. The reality is, of course, that what we call an adventure is actually an extremely unpleasant experience that is rebadged retrospectively by the survivors. My recollection is that most of these disasters, whether they were alien attacks, month-long snowfalls or Russian invasions, all started in a rather obvious and dramatic fashion. I was really rather envious of those people who on 3rd September, 1939 had heard that famous radio broadcast by Neville Chamberlain with its spine-chilling announcement ‘that consequently this country is at war with Germany’. In short, I wanted to live in interesting times.

I am now beginning to wonder if gently, rather than dramatically, we have entered ‘interesting times’. Our own government seem to be running around like crazy, companies that were once the very epitome of stability and value (Wedgwood and Woolworths for two) are now closing or worthless, interest rates (in Britain at least) are now lower than they have been for 300 years and unemployment is racing upwards at several thousand a day. There has been no sudden fanfare, no radio broadcast á la Chamberlain, no angry crowds in the streets and no distant rumble of the guns, yet suddenly we are in the midst of the unthinkable. Four months ago people were apologetically daring to suggest the possibility of ‘recession’, now the word ‘depression’ is in circulation.

Let me – very cautiously – suggest two questionable responses to this. The first is I think to seek an eschatological get-out. You know the sort of thing: ‘these are the End Times, brother’, ’the Antichrist will be here any day, mark my words’, or, ‘we see Scripture's prophecies clearly fulfilled’. Now actually, those who utter such statements may, for all I know, be right. But when I look at fulfilled prophecy in the Old and New Testaments, it only seems to have been understood as prophetic fulfilment well after the events had occurred. And, in my experience, an emphasis on interpreting signs often comes at the expense of the more fundamental Christian duties of showing love and bearing witness.

The second questionable response is to gleefully rejoice that God is judging a wicked and sinful world. There is a lot I can say here. Of course, I am in favour of God's judgement and I have no real problem in praying ‘thy Kingdom come’. The trouble is that in this world God’s judgement seems to be a blunt instrument. We see that those who are the worst offenders sometimes seem to walk free. So, in the present economic crisis, many of the entrepreneurs at the heart of this sorry mess sold up six months ago and put their wealth in gold. Others have secure, government-backed, inflation-linked pensions. Indeed, it sometimes appears that those who are suffering seem to be, if not the innocent, at least the relatively guiltless. The problems at the moment seem to be descending on some whose only sin was a naïveté that allowed them to be persuaded by men and women who knew better, to take to out mortgages that they could not afford. In fact, the current crisis seems to be punishing many who held onto the traditional Protestant virtue of thrift and actually saved money on the assumption that the interest would cover their retirement costs. Of course, in eternity, I have no doubt that perfect justice will be done. It's just that at the moment it's all a bit rough-edged.

So what is the right response? Let me suggest that at the core is the simple prayer that God will have mercy on us and on our neighbours, that he would spare the weak, that he would bring out of the present economic mess some good and that his kingdom come.

I'm sorry if this sounds a little bit lacking in the clarity and insight that you might like. It seems to me though perhaps the most useful thing to do at the moment is raise the issues and let us try to work them through. I’m not sure that the glib soundbite is helpful; we seem to have had too many of those. Perhaps that’s part of the problem.

Incidentally it is also incumbent upon us to pray for the man who will shortly be the new president of the United States. It has rather naughtily crossed my mind that the Barak Obama will go onto the platform on Inauguration Day and say that having looked at all the facts he’s decided that he doesn’t want the job. Quite simply, a third dubious response – and I hear a lot of it – is to look to him to sort out the mess. And that, friends, is not simply a questionable response, it is a bad one. For him and for us.

Blessings upon you all.

On study Bibles

2009-01-09T19:02:00.001Z

Frankly I really feel that I ought to write on Gaza and the mess there. However I find it difficult to say anything that will not antagonise some people for whom I have a very great sympathy and affection.

So, instead let me scuttle in a cowardly fashion to the safer ground of study Bibles. I have before me – occupying a sizeable proportion of my desk – two study Bibles published last year: the New Living Study Bible (Tyndale) and the ESV Study Bible (Crossway). We are clearly living in an age of ‘Bible Wars’ where the battle is on to try and find the successor to the New International Version as the standard Bible for the evangelical world. I wish I could say that I felt it was theological truth driving this struggle, but of course it isn’t. If there is going to be a winner who takes all then the profits will be enormous.

Anyway one result of Bible Wars is that these books include everything except the kitchen-sink. They all have indexes, articles, special topic studies, cross references, systematic theology sections, access to online versions, maps and even, in one case, four or five pages of Hebrew and Greek words that you really should know. Both are between 2,500 and 2,800 pages which must be close to the maximum for a printed volume. Frankly, both are excellent resources and represent real bargains. In the old days you used to get a Bible and a separate one-volume Bible commentary. These books largely do away with the latter.

I don’t want to talk particularly about the differences in translation as that merits another blog. Suffice it to say, as far as I can judge, I find the ESV a translation that is accurate to the text. Unfortunately, it suffers from the major defect that the result is not English as it is spoken by anyone today. The sentences are far too long and words such as ‘behold’, ‘distaff’, ‘debased’, ‘lyre’, etc. abound. It is also extraordinarily archaic in the style of writing, as for instance Acts 19:23: ‘About that time there arose no little disturbance concerning the Way.’ No way! Some people may find this more troubling than others but as a writer and communicator let me tell you that it bugs me. The NLT is freer and much easier to read but I always have a slight unease that more may be being read into the text than is actually there.

The ethos of the two Study Bibles is also very different and is those of you who are interested in the future of evangelicalism would probably find it interesting to compare the two. As far as I can make out both seem to take very considerable pains to be doctrinally orthodox and both merit the title ‘conservative evangelical’. The NLT is, I think it’s safe to say, more forward-looking and seems at least on the surface to dialogue much more with modern conservative evangelical scholarship. So although the ‘New Perspective on Paul’ is not mentioned by name, there is a balanced (if short) discussion of what is a major debating point in New Testament scholarship. There is also a short list of recommended further books at the end of each chapter which includes some stimulating volumes. Theologically, the NLT seems much more open-ended and seems to try to balance both Calvinist and Arminian positions.

On the other hand, the ESV Study Bible seems somewhat more backward looking and the level of English much more demanding. It is also much more concerned to promote a particular doctrinal basis, that of the Reformed Faith, and the long series of articles at the end on biblical doctrine are very Calvinistic. I have no problems with that but I’m slightly uneasy about it being pushed in a study bible.

Frankly, I find myself using both. What I am also using is the excellent ESV Study Bible on the iPhone produced by Olive Tree. Here all 2,700 pages can be somehow packed inside my phone and can be accessed instantly. Amazing! The really helpful thing is that in this digital version the notes section is separate from the text so, if you want, you can only see the Bible text. What is also good is that the ESV notes can be used with any other Bible; the result is that I am often using the NIV with the ESV notes. All I really need now is for Apple to implement a proper cut and paste tool. Anyway, if you haven’t seen them I urge you to take a look.

So have a good week. Read the Bible and don’t forget to pray for Gaza.

We know we are here but we don’t know where here is

2009-01-02T20:01:00.002Z

First of all, a happy New Year to all my readers, wherever you are. I trust that 2009 is going to be a year of blessing, at least spiritually (if in no other area) for you.

I am preaching on Sunday night at our church and am giving the first in what is probably going to be a monthly series on Christ in the Old Testament. It is actually far more than just 'fulfilled predictions' and the like, but about some of the great themes such as Prophet, Priest and King. Thinking about it I have recognised a problem that I have come across with my students in a totally secular context.

The background is this. Alerted to something of a general failure to answer a vaguely mathematical problem I asked my students this question. ‘If you had to buy a cupboard for your bedroom, what units would you measure it in?’ The answer was – as I expected – centimetres. I then followed up with a second question: how far is Swansea from Cardiff? The answer – as I feared – was ‘about 40 miles’. ‘I see,’ I said. ‘Can anybody tell me how many metres there are in a mile?’ No one knew. The sorry point that had emerged was of a completely dysfunctional measurement system. They had no real way (at least in a strictly mathematical one) of understanding how things related to each other.

I suspect this phenomenon is far more widespread. Our A level history course results in students only knowing about three elements. If I’m correct they are: Nazi Germany, the French Revolution and a part of 19th century Britain. Only the latter unit covers more than two decades. So you can get a grade A without any knowledge of any other time period and without knowing whether the American War of Independence occurred under Henry III or George III. The problem goes beyond education: with the aid of GPS it is all too easy to find out with utter precision where you are. The only trouble is you don’t really know what that answer means because you have no real concept of regional geography. I have invented the phrase ‘We know we are here but we don’t know where here is’, nevertheless I think it reflects very well the problem. To coin a word, it is the googlisation of knowledge. We have accurate but atomised fragments of information and we do not know how they relate to each other.

Incidentally I do not entirely blame the settlers of syllabi, the Internet, GPS or Google because I think it is also connected with the postmodern mindset. Our local museum has become very trendy and has scattered the formerly systematic layout of knowledge into thousand splintered shards of information so that apparently random facts about population mingle uneasily with images of industry and observations on botany. It’s all very clever but ...

Taken like this can see you how it applies to my sermon series? Our congregations know bits and pieces. These facts are not in themselves fallacious but the problem lies in the way that they are not connected in any real systematic manner. This fragmentation of knowledge is enormously problematic. It makes any sort of logical defence of the gospel difficult, it torpedoes a consistent morality (you cannot argue from first principles because there are none) and it opens the door to making decisions on emotion alone. The cults – and Hell – must be very pleased.

So my challenge this year is to try to hold things together into some sort of consistent pattern. Long live systematics in whatever part of our lives, but particularly in the area of belief.

On dinosaurs, hens and translations

2008-12-27T17:08:00.004Z

I suppose I could be seasonal and entitle this blog ‘three French hens…’ as in that most cryptic of Christmas songs, the ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’. The general background is that I have sitting on my desk two fat volumes: the NLT Study Bible (thanks, Tyndale) and the ESV Study Bible (I bought this one myself). At some point I will talk about their respective merits but not today: simply note that I have been reading both and have therefore been exposed in an inescapable way to the curiosities and difficulties of Bible translation.

The more specific background is that I was reading the French newspaper La Monde on my iPhone last week (as one does) and there was an interesting article on some new dinosaur discovery which suggested that far from being vicious carnivores they may have been papas-poules. (‘Des dinosaures d’avantage papas poules que les mammifères’). ‘Papas-poules’ makes no sense whatsoever in English; it is almost literally translated as ‘Father Hens’. With it being Christmas and me having nothing else to do but write a book or two I did a little bit of reading around. What emerged was that the French and English clearly had very different ideas about what hens represent so that translating almost anything to do with poultry is extraordinarily complex. (And possibly dangerous; I am still unclear whether to call a woman a poule is to show affection, infer that she is a prostitute, or both.)

In English, the hen may mean either the domestic fowl as a genus, or the female of the species in particular. (I'm not going to discuss the male for fear that the diminutive of cockerel may trigger your adult-site-warning software.) The young are generally known for cowardice: as in ‘you chicken!’ however female hens are allowed a certain protective bravery. Yet mysteriously only 20 miles away across the Channel the species morphs. Thoroughly aggressive and very macho French football teams happily display the chicken as a logo; indeed it is even an approved symbol for the French state. Let me quote from the website Gallic Rooster:

History of Le Coq

The Gallic Rooster (Coq Gaulois), or cockerel, is the French national emblem, as symbolic as the stylised French Lily. From the very roots of French history, the Latin word Gallus means both ‘rooster’ and ‘inhabitant of Gaul’. The French rooster emblem adorned the French flag during the revolution. With the success of the Revolution in 1848, the rooster was made part of the seal of the Republic. In 1899, it was embossed on a more widespread device, the French 20 franc gold coins. The Coq Gaulois has often been the symbol on French stamps over the years, although now (in 2006) the generic French stamp depicts a stylised ‘Marianne’.

Anyway, it seems to be the consensus that the only real way of translating papa-poule is by using something like ‘devoted father’ or ‘doting father’ but by doing so you lose all the imagery that was present.

It is faced with something like this that you realise the real difficulty of translation: if we can't easily translate hen-speak from French to English how on earth can we do anything serious? I have no doubt that there are those people who would argue on such a basis that translating the Word of God is impossible. (Islam, of course, gets round it by saying that the Qur'an is untranslatable and you must learn seventh-century Arabic. At the risk of courting controversy I refer them to the three letters Alif, Lam, Mim, which occur widely as a heading to the suras and point out that no one knows what they mean.) The Christian answer lies a) in God’s sovereign superintendence of all things so that he controls even translations and b) the Holy Spirit who can speak through even a poor translation. But I refer you to textbooks on theology to work that one through further.

Anyway whatever Bible translation you use, have a happy and blessed New Year. And be careful when you talk about chickens to the French.

Chris

In which our blogger confesses himself bemused

2008-12-19T17:12:00.002Z

One of the things about being a blog writer is the implicit assumption that you know what you’re talking about. Ideally, one likes to come over as something of a guru, a discerning and reliable guide to a confusing and perplexing world. I live in hope that, around coffee tables and water coolers the world over people are saying ‘You know the British and Americans are different; I’ve been reading some really excellent blogs on this by Chris Walley.’ What follows therefore is something of an embarrassing revelation and I hope you will forgive me.

The fact is I was in our local W H Smith (a big British newsagents/booksellers) the other day when I came across something that stopped me dead in my tracks and which frankly dear reader, I do not understand. It was an entire section simply labelled ‘Tragic Life Stories’. I should at this point have taken out my iPhone and taken a photograph for myself. However just to show you that it isn’t a delusion I have borrowed a photo from Flickr from someone else who was obviously as stunned as me.

Notice the exploitative titles such as Please Daddy No! and He Sold Me For A Few Cigarettes. Note too the extraordinary similarities of titling and imagery. Apparently this sort of thing is called ‘Grief Porn’ and it is quite obviously very big indeed.

Readers, I find myself doubly troubled. I think – no, I know – there is something very badly wrong here. But I am equally troubled because I don’t quite understand exactly what’s going on. Who reads this sort of thing? What is the motivation? Do readers enjoy feeling sympathy with the victims? Or – heaven forbid – do they take some deep (and possibly unacknowledged) vicarious pleasure in the acts that are perpetrated? Isn’t there enough real misery in the world that we need to read about it? (Perhaps that’s the point: we can close the book at the end and put it all behind us.) And isn’t there something grotesquely immoral about people making money out of misery? Oh and, incidentally, why are all the children white? Well if anyone has any clear answers or biblical insights I’d be interested in hearing them.

You may well say this is a miserable thought in the run-up to Christmas. In one sense it is; but isn’t this precisely the point about Christmas? That in the darkness of a very dark world, the Light shone? ‘The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not overcome it’ (John 1:5).

Wherever you are and in however deep a darkness, may you know Christ’s love at Christmas .

Chris

Why we loved Obama

2008-12-12T17:07:00.000Z

I really ought to leave American politics alone and I promise this will be my last post for sometime, but someone did ask why Europe was so fond of Barack Obama. Well without endorsing either him or McCain, let me offer some suggestions.

Obama appealed to what most Europeans consider to be core values. As most Americans are aware (they certainly should be), Europe is somewhat to the left of the USA. Even at their most liberal your Democrats are often to the right of our socialist parties. Obama was presented over here as enlightened, tolerant and flexible. He certainly came over as literate, fluent and cosmopolitan. (The other week I failed to mention that one point about Sarah Palin which alarmed everybody here was the fact that she had only had a passport for two years.) He sounded sensible on issues such as the environment and global trade.
Obama looked good and sounded good and I’m prepared to concede that in Europe image trumps any amount of character and track record. Certainly the President-Elect is not deficient in the area of image. He was portrayed as what we in Britain would call ‘a decent bloke’; a label which, if you can get it applied to you, covers over a multitude of sins. For us Evangelicals, his preparedness to talk of having a living faith in Christ allayed any concerns we might have had over his liberal social agenda. That was barely covered by our media anyway.
If he wooed us by what he affirmed, Obama eased our fears by what he shunned. So we heard nothing of America triumphant, there was minimal flag-waving and references to God’s own country, there were no half-baked plans for imposing global democracy and no clumsy and Russian-irritating references to missile shields. (American readers should note that over here there is a widespread belief that missile shields might work for America but not Europe: we are too close to their most likely points of origin.) In fact, for most of the time Obama sounded like a European. (Actually the thing that concerns me and others is his resemblance to Blair, a man who had a total mastery over words but who was utterly defeated by reality.)
In a world in crisis, Obama came over as the man most likely to fix the mess. He was portrayed here as a man of intellect, vision and discernment and someone who, if the 21st-century demanded them, was prepared to take new paths.
Quite simply, Obama was depicted as the man who was not George W Bush. He was (quite definitely) someone who could string a sentence together and (quite probably) someone smart enough not to be lured into an Iraq style quagmire.

One minor point. Race is a very different issue here than in the States. We have no all-too recent struggle for equality and no ‘Civil Rights’ back story here. Oh yes there are racial and cultural issues here aplenty but they are quite dissimilar to those across the Atlantic. In other words, I do not think his racial background was of note in Europe.

Anyway, I titled this blog ‘Why we loved Obama’: the choice of the past tense was deliberate. You should also have noted how frequently I have used the terms ‘depicted as’, ‘came over as’ and so on. We must now see how the man bears up in the reality of office. It would be an unpleasant (and, dare I say, rather un-Christian) attitude to wish and pray for him anything other than success. In these dark days (and they may easily get darker still) no one needs a failure for American president.

On the American right

2008-12-05T17:12:00.002Z

In a moment of folly some weeks ago I promised that I would try to deal with the vexed issue of why British evangelicals are wary of the American Republican Party. I am aware that for many American Christians this seems like a stab in the back. Aren’t Republicans the true upholders of the faith? Isn’t it a given that to be a conservative evangelical means you must support Republicans? Aren’t British evangelicals concerned about the way that the Democrats seem hellbent (possibly literally) on legalising gay ‘marriage’ and unfettered abortion. I tried to tease out some of the issues for you weeks ago and now want to make some general comments on the problem. I warn you though, it would, in reality, require a book and at least a year of research to truly do justice to the issues.

As I reminded you, for all the similarities of language, Britain and the States are very different countries. And although there is much that resonates favourably with us about the Republican Party (personal freedom and family values to take but two) there are many other things that are a turnoff. As I hinted we are very uneasy about appeals to religion in politics. There are very few American churches without the Stars and Stripes at the front; there are very few British churches with the Union Jack even visible. (If it is present at all, it will be somewhat mournfully draped over a memorial plaque to the fallen.) God may be little honoured in the UK but we do our best to make sure that what slender glory he has is not shared with Caesar. In fact, we prefer to keep the Almighty at arm’s length when it comes to politics. A number of people have commented that, in the manner of claiming divine support, some American politicians seem to imagine that God somehow transferred the Old Testament covenant with Israel to the United States of America. Perhaps. Of course it is perfectly possible to go the other way and not invoke the support of God for even the most necessary and blameless military action. Here, I think we in Britain, plead guilty.

Part of the problems is that republicanism seeks to press buttons which, in the British psyche, are not wired up. So appeals to frontier/homestead/’Little house on the Prairie’ ideals fall on deaf ears here. It is probably half a millennium since we had any sort of frontier in the UK. Equally the right to bear arms worries us a lot. It is probably no accident that the lethal range of the average military rifle is probably considerably greater than the distance between the average British village. Ever since we killed the last wolf, around 250 years ago, the only dangerous animal roaming the British countryside has been Homo sapiens and we would prefer not to see him armed. Appeals to defending the constitution also arouse only apathy here: we have no constitution, only conventions and concessions. Given these things, it is no surprise that, whatever her undoubted virtues, Sarah Palin aroused only two attitudes in the UK: amusement and unease.

We also rather wary of republicanism’s claims that the private sector should be involved in everything. There are very few things in Britain that we are in any way proud of, but one of them is the National Health Service. The fact that no British hospital (yet) demands that you open your wallet the moment you enter Accident and Emergency is generally held to be a very good thing. Since Mrs Thatcher privatised as much as she could nearly 30 years ago, the results have not frankly been very impressive. We have railways that would shame a developing nation, a power system that could easily fall over given a week of cold weather and a secondary education system that is probably inferior to that of urban China.

To be honest, if you are an American Christian of a right-wing political persuasion I really wouldn’t let it worry you. I see it all as being like some tense stand-off in a saloon bar of the old West. Grey-haired Great Britain, propping up the bar, watches on, with air of sceptical world-weariness, while our younger nephew takes his turn to challenge the bar’s unruly inhabitants. In short, we wish you well, but don’t ask us to join in the fight.

Have a good week. And if you must burn my books, do it in front of TV cameras!

A miscellany of topics

2008-11-28T18:25:00.002Z

This week, I was intending to take a brief break from discussing cultural matters to share some local news. However I cannot resist making the point that it seems that no American president will be elected unless he (or she) talks openly and comfortably about God, while no British Prime Minister will be elected if he (or she) does. I would like to think that there has been progress in this area but I’m afraid Tony Blair has rather ruined this because he did bring God into matters and now his stock is very low indeed. I think it will be some time before any politician here has the courage even to say ‘God bless you’ at the end of any talk to the nation. By the way, here is another difference: Americans clearly have not the slightest problem in confidently asking the Almighty to look favourably upon America. Indeed their tone is sometimes so confident that one is inclined to suspect that a certain overlap exists in their minds between the Kingdom of Heaven and the United States of America. In contrast, Britons of the 21st century would never dream of invoking the Almighty in the political arena. Americans get embarrassed when, in the context of politics people do not mention God; we get embarrassed when they do.

And now to family news. The first item of news is that two weeks ago our younger son Mark got married to a delightful young lady called Alice in central London where they both work. I don’t think they would mind if I attached a photograph.

So we travelled up from the provinces and stayed a couple of nights in London in order to attend. It was a great time and the Christian witness took centre stage. In fact the sermon was outspokenly and unashamedly evangelistic and took as its basis the parable of the wise and foolish virgins (‘bridesmaids’? there are hard issues of cultural equivalence here). The fact that both our sons are happily married raises the interesting question as to whether ‘parenting’ is now over for us. In one sense the answer is ‘yes’ but I suppose we probably continue in an advisory role until such time as we are senile. Oh yes, and young Simeon turned up to the wedding looking every bit the normal three-month-old baby. He seems to be responding well to the daily hormonal supplements.

The second piece of news is to do with books. No, I haven’t sold the film rights to Lamb among the Stars; I think that may be a longer haul than I had expected. But I am signing a contract with Hodders to co-write a short book with the British evangelist J. John centred on the parable of Prodigal Son. Of course a lot has already been written on this but we are hoping to come at it from a fresh but authentic angle. I have a lot of Lebanese anecdotes which clarify matters and bring some of the issues into sharper focus. Anyway the nice thing about Hodders is that they get their books out into the secular market; here they differ from the specifically Christian book companies who seem to be fishing in the ever smaller pond of Christian book readers. Once I get this out of the way, all being well in May, I want to talk to them about future fiction projects. So it’s no television for me for the next five months.

Anyway I have a sermon to finish for our Chinese Fellowship in Swansea so must dash. The problem is that I feel it incumbent upon me to e-mail the text to the translator beforehand; she is very good but I think it’s helpful that she has a chance to read it all through first.

Every blessing

Chris

On why this small island is so very odd

2008-11-21T20:22:00.001Z

It would seem self-evident that Americans (and here I mean inhabitants of the United States; Canadians are somewhat different creatures) and Brits are very close to each other. We share a common heritage, seem to have similar aspirations and (for the most part) possess a common language. It would seem equally self-evident that such links ought to be even closer between evangelicals. After all, we are all children of a heavenly kingdom and have a shared unity in Christ. Yet in my 30-odd years as a Christian I have come across frequent occasions where there has been substantial confusion and disappointment as both sides trip up over very real differences. One reason for these confrontations is something I touched on last week; each side misreads the other as being its mirror image when the reality is otherwise.

Now I promised that I would tackle the troubled issue of why British evangelicals are extremely uneasy with American Republicanism/conservatism. I cannot here explore all of this. Indeed today I want to simply point out some of the things that make Britain what it is. Now I am no social scientist and this is a fairly hastily constructed blog so please forgive me if I make some major oversimplifications. Equally can I make it absolutely plain that I’m not in the business of saying we Brits are better than Americans? All I am saying is that there are some very deep differences and it probably is a good idea for all sides to appreciate them.

Anyway let me suggest there are at least four major factors that make us different from Americans.

1) The British are fundamentally wary of radical politics, whether of the left or the right
One part of this is ecclesiastical and reflects the fact that the Church of England ended up occupying the uneasy middle ground between the Reformed and the Catholic churches. Another part is no doubt due to the fact that the fairly regular upheavals over on the continent (with the resultant dismal trickle of refugees arriving on our shores) have constantly reminded us that most political revolutions come with a very high price tag. We have been badly scared by (on the left) the notorious French Revolutionary experiment of the 18th century and (on the on the right) by Hitler’s rise and demise. The result is a deep cultural caution which generates the irony that in some ways we are actually more conservative than most US Republicans.

2) In the UK evangelicals do not possess any large-scale idealism
It is widely noted that when American Christians start becoming lyrical about their great schemes for the improvement of the world, bringing progress to all and ensuring global godliness, any Brits can generally be seen quietly tiptoeing out of the room. There are many reasons for this. One is that in the 17th century what we might class as biblical Christians did indeed have large-scale political aspirations and in a revolution undergirded by theology seized power in the English Civil War. Yet the Puritan Republic that was the Commonwealth was not a success and within 20 years Britain’s experiment with radical nonconformism was at an end. We have long memories and no one since has really wanted to repeat Cromwell’s great adventure. It is probably also true that at this point anyone with what we might today call a politically directed evangelicalism faith headed over to America. We lost our visionaries. The result is that in Britain evangelicals do not fantasise of building a city on a hill shedding light on a dark world. If we dream of anything, it is sitting round a warm fire with the curtains drawn while outside the storm rages. Indeed sometimes, far from dreaming, we are merely content not to have nightmares.

3) Our lack of space forces social survival strategies.
I think there are important issues to do with Britain’s small and rather overcrowded nature. In the States there has been until recently enough space that if you don’t get along with someone you could simply harness up the wagon and head west. We have no such luxury here. We have to coexist. I am convinced that this not just encourages us to seek toleration rather than confrontation but also to see things in terms of shades of grey rather than black and white. It may even be that the famous British humour is in fact a defence mechanism to handle the fact that we must live with those whom we dislike.

4) We are both somewhat weary and wary of Empire.
We have had our time as a global superpower; it was good while it lasted but we are still counting the cost in every sense. As with my comment on idealism, we hold no large-scale aspirations other than a) to survive and b) pay the bills.

These are generalities that I throw out as debating points. Next week I want to talk about some family news and then I will do my best to discuss more specifically some of the problems that we have with American republicanism. But I hope this has helped you understand a little bit where we come from.

Have a good week

Chris

The problem of proximity

2008-11-14T20:04:00.000Z

Well last week’s blog raised a real storm didn’t it? What to me seemed fairly cautious comments on Obama-mania appeared to have annoyed the man’s supporters and detractors alike. The fact that either you (or I) so badly misjudged things is actually profoundly revealing; there are major cultural differences between Britain and the States. It has occurred to me that over the next few weeks I might explore something of these differences, that have been exacerbated by the election of Barrack Obama. But before I do, I want to lay some groundwork by pointing out that a peculiar problem exists when you get two very different things that appear the same.

When you compare two organisations or countries it is tempting to be lazy and look merely at the surface. So for instance the alien might wander into both a Catholic church and an evangelical Protestant church and assume that the cleric leading the service was functionally identical and that any differences between a priest and a pastor were merely a matter of words. Now I suspect most readers of this blog will not need me to point out that actually any similarities conceal fundamental differences. A classic example which I hope will not offend is that it is all too tempting to look at Islam and Christianity and see in both cases a central figure, Jesus/Mohammed, and a holy book, the Bible/Quran. What more natural than to assume they are functionally the same? Yet in reality this is profoundly misleading. The Christian view of Jesus as the perfect revelation of God and the Eternal Word is actually far closer to how the Moslem sees the Quran. (Incidentally, some Moslems say the Quran was uncreated; a view disputed by others because it comes perilously close to the blasphemous attribution of the properties of God to something else.) Conversely, in Islam Mohammed (the earthly vessel through whom God reveals his word to mankind) is far closer in functional terms to the Bible (the earthly vessel through whom… well, you get the idea). Appearances can be deceptive.

Now I mention these cases (and I’m sure you could multiply them) because it is all too easy to see parallels and similarities within the British and American system that, at depth, do not actually exist. And this is often the source of some friction. For instance Americans often assume that, in contrast to the extraordinary reverence for the Stars and Stripes in the USA, the British are culpably careless about their own national flag. (Readers across the Atlantic may be interested to know that I have not the slightest idea where I could purchase a Union Jack even if I wanted to.) The fact is that the national flag in Britain and the States represents something totally different. In functional terms, the British equivalent of the Stars and Stripes is actually her Majesty the Queen. She, not the flag, is the emblem of ultimate authority, historical tradition and the validity of the British state. Even at the most basic level we are very different. Someone repeated the old quip that we are ‘two nations divided by a common language’. That is never truer than when we think we are talking about the same thing.

This is very much a precursor to a blog in which – if courage has not failed me – I will try to point out why the British, as a whole, are somewhat uneasy with the Republican Party. Stay tuned...

And so victory was won…

2008-11-07T18:51:00.000Z

Even over here the event of the week has been the election of the new American president. I’m aware that many of my readers will have voted for the other side and quite a few will be sick to death of the whole thing. It certainly seems to have been going on for ever.

Like most people in the UK I was happy to see Obama elected, partly on account of his personal qualities and partly to draw a line under the dreadful Bush years. I must also say that many of the much touted virtues of the Republican pair (being either a Vietnam War veteran or adept at shooting large furry mammals) did not cross the Atlantic with the same attraction that they have in the States. Yet I have to say on Wednesday morning I was not ecstatic. The fact is I remembered Blair’s equally stunning victory in 1997 over a similarly entrenched and dilapidated Conservative party. There was then a golden dawn of hope filled with an extraordinary euphoria; yet before long the style had evaporated away revealing a minimal substance and the result has been a bitter aftertaste. Now barely ten years on Blair is now one of the most despised figures on the British political scene. (Actually he is rarely here; it is not just prophets who are without honour in their own country.) So time will tell with Barak Obama, but the good book is wise: ‘Put not your trust in Princes’ (Psalm 146:3, AV).

Indeed I feel the first shadow has already fallen with the appointment of Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff. I am tempted to comment on the unease already emanating from those parts of the Middle East that had been most positive about Obama’s election, about Rahm Emanuel’s links with Zionism and the way he is being acclaimed in Israel as ‘their man in the White House’. It is certainly clear that he has strong loyalties towards the preservation and expansion of the State of Israel; you can read Wikipedia for all the details. I do not want to say much more on the subject. One problem is that even to make the slightest comment on such matters is to run the risk of being considered anti-Semitic. Of course, it is not his Jewishness that is the issue but his Zionism. Another problem is that it is to run the risk of encouraging the numerous lunatics (and there are many on the web) who blame Israel for all the world’s evils, from a ‘Holocaust that never happened’ to 9/11 itself. Excuse me if I distance myself from that lot. However, I do hope that when Rahm Emanuel’s duty to the United States conflicts with his duty to the State of Israel (as it will), it is the former, not the latter, that wins out.

Yet even if we lay this aside there are issues. If you read the commentators – and I have read many – Rahm Emanuel is variously described as ‘scary‘, ‘ferocious’, ‘profane’, ‘vicious’, ‘an attack dog’ and ‘out of a Mafia movie’. This all seems at odds with the image of a gentle, vaguely Christian, consensus politics that Barack Obama set out as his target in the campaign. Or did he? Or was that me reading into Obama what I wanted to see? Perhaps it is here that the real ability of a modern politician lies. They know – as we know – that in the information age you can’t really become all things to all people. But perhaps you can become something of a mirror or a projection screen onto which people throw the image that they want. Perhaps the master trick of the modern politicians is to make us, not them, the agent of deception.

To end let me reportedly the comment of a delightful colleague who is a saintly but slightly otherworldly Christian. On the morning of November 5 she came to get some coffee, and said with wide-eyed genuine surprise. ‘I’ve just seen a photo of this Obama fellow. And do you know? He’s black.’

Have a good week.

So where did half term go?

2008-10-31T20:03:00.003Z

One of the great blessings of the teacher’s life (apart from a salary that does not depend on the state of international finance) is the holidays. Given that much of the teaching week is basically a non-stop theatrical performance for six hours each day you do need the breaks. Yet on this Friday night as I look back over the half term just ending I wonder where it all went. What actually did I do?

Well, we went up to stay with my mother-in-law in the Midlands for the first part of the week and that means we spent a total of six hours driving. It was a good time and we had the first snow of what promises to be a cold winter. What was especially valuable was that we were able to catch up with relatives. So we met up with my brother-in-law’s and sister-in-law’s families, but we were also able to see our elder son and his wife and young Simeon. I am pleased to be able to report that Simeon is doing well and now looks (and sounds) like the average ten-week-old baby. His parents seem to have come to terms with his CAH well and are handling the need to dose him regularly with saline and steroids with commendable skill and diligence. So there’s an answer to prayer. Thank you all!

What else did I do? I attended a funeral of a dear saint in our church. I did a solid day and a half’s work on writing a whole lot of new notes for the new environmental studies syllabus. I put various programs on my iPhone and digitally processed a number of photographs. I also wrote a rather difficult sermon on the stark subject of ‘Sin’. It is one of those topics that on the surface seems fairly easy but which has all manner of trickiness in depth; original sin, total depravity and (not least) the fact that you don’t want to make everybody feel utterly gloomy. So that took time.

I’ve also been waiting for word from a British publisher on a collaborative non-fiction project which should take up much of my spare time over the next six months. I was due to hear this week but that seems to have slipped away. Linked with this apparently is an interest in a possible fiction project so I have also been accumulating a very large number of notes on a new book. Yes, I have a lot on the epic fantasy trilogy of the ‘Seventh Ship’ but frankly I’m not ready to start that and I’m not sure it’s that attractive for a publisher at this stage. So I have been putting ideas together for a standalone volume that will grab the reader from the first line, involving theology, the supernatural and a fair amount of violence. I’m afraid there is a need for pragmatism!

So with all these things the week has slipped by so fast that now it is in the rear view mirror of life. Did I use it wisely? As I look back at it before much of it disappears entirely from memory I am reminded that the Psalmist wrote: “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” (Psalm 90:12). Hmm.

Some time I need to spend time thinking about how I use time.

Confessions of a failed evangelist

2008-10-24T17:47:00.001+01:00

A colleague with whom I share an office and all sorts of things (including probably his cold) has just decided that he’s going to buy an iPhone. Curiously enough this news makes me depressed.

How so? Well he’s buying an iPhone on my recommendation; I’ve talked a lot about it, expressed how pleased I am with it and let him have a play with it. He loves it. So even though he already has some time left on his old phone contract he is going to get one. So why am I depressed? It is that I seem to be better at selling iPhones than the gospel. We’ve talked a lot about Christianity and he’s made some interesting comments, but he’s buying into the phone and not, as yet, into the faith.

Of course it’s easier to talk about a mobile phone than it is to talk about faith. Phones are everywhere, everyone has them and everyone is using them. Phones come up naturally in conversation. These days faith is not anywhere near so frequent a topic of discussion. To talk about it can actually seem rather forced and unnatural. Phones also somehow a much more concrete topic; it’s much easier to say to someone – as I did today – ‘have a play with this’. It is much less easy to say to someone ‘here, try my Christian faith’. And of course it’s easier for people to risk getting involved with phones than with faith. An unhappy experience with a phone will, at worst, leave you a few hundred pounds or dollars out of pocket. An unhappy experience with faith could be far more costly and open you to considerable embarrassment. Nevertheless I’m sure you understand my unease; shouldn’t it be much easier to talk about a faith that means everything and a phone which, however nice, means very little?

And yet. A year or so ago I extolled the virtues of C S Lewis to my colleague who greatly enjoyed Surprised by Joy. The other week he said that he'd picked up a copy of the Screwtape Letters and here his tone grew pensive, he ‘found it very thought-provoking’. Well maybe the dead Lewis can do better than the living me. Actually from what I’ve heard, the living Lewis wasn’t that great an evangelist. Maybe death will improve me, but I’m in no hurry to try the experiment.

Incidentally I had some lovely fan mail from Ghana this week. These nice comments count, they really do.

Have a good week

Chris

On admitting guilt and offering forgiveness

2008-10-17T20:13:00.003+01:00

There’s a lot to be said for a careful reading of the popular press and a careful listening to what people say on the TV and radio. Getting dressed this morning, I listened to the excellent Today programme on BBC Radio Four where the redoubtable editor John Humphrys was interviewing Angela Knight, head of the British Bankers’ Association. Towards the end of the interview he said it was an awful pity that the head of one of these banks would not come onto his programme and admit they had made dreadful mistakes and offer to make it up. The smooth answer came back: ‘John, let me tell you that there is not a single person in the banking industry who is not extremely concerned about the state of things.’ And despite further pressure that was as far it went: no admission of guilt, no confession, only an expression of that wonderfully ambiguous concern. Concern about what one wondered – loss of reputation? loss of earnings? Who knows?

And of course isn’t that the way of the world today? Admission of guilt is extremely rare. We try not to even say sorry. There has been a recent and rather sordid case involving the head of Formula One and what was claimed to be a Nazi-themed orgy. What has emerged in the legal cases (and, friends, I have not followed it closely) is that there is no question that this married man was involved in the orgy; only the Nazi theme is disputed. The upshot though is striking: far from admitting any wrongdoing, the man concerned is now brazenly trying to implement legal measures to prevent newspapers reporting anything that infringes on an individual’s privacy without consulting them first.

I’m reminded of my conversations with the number of Lebanese in the 1990s about what history calls the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-88, in which some appalling events took place. (I know: I was there for some of it). ‘Oh it wasn’t our war,’ they would say dismissively with a shrug of the shoulders, ‘it was the others. The Israelis and the Syrians (or the Palestinians) fought each other on our territory. We were innocent bystanders.’ Well, of course that is a big, bold lie; many Lebanese were active participants. But denial is easier than admission of guilt.

Let me make one obvious, and one less obvious, point. The obvious point is this: although denial of guilt is attractive, it is not a wise strategy. To deny that you are ill is one of the few things that utterly rules out any possibility of healing and to reject guilt is to completely eliminate the possibility of forgiveness. The less obvious point is this: admission of guilt is only really likely where there is a culture of forgiveness. The problem is that we are now in a post-Christian culture where any idea of forgiveness has largely been overlooked. The result is a vicious circle: to admit guilt is to invite a merciless punishment so we don’t admit guilt. We have no culture of forgiveness so we do not dare to seek forgiveness.

I have no idea which comes first: the readiness to forgive or the readiness to admit guilt but we need desperately to bring back both.

Blessings.
Chris

Finance, faith and fantasy

2008-10-10T18:32:00.001+01:00

I thought it was time I made some comment, however brief, on the world’s financial state. So far for many of us it appears to be like thunder on the edge of the horizon, something of a dramatic novelty but not a matter that directly affects us. Of course very soon it is going to be having a direct effect and not a benign one. In fact in our church it looks as though we are going to create a finance subcommittee whose brief will be to offer aid and assistance to those who will have been affected. At least that’s the plan.

Let me make two other observations.

The first is that I find myself troubled by absence of any prophetic Christian response; not to this present crisis (which may come) but to the bizarre and reckless boom we saw over the last ten or twenty years. Where were the prophetic voices saying that ‘it’s not going to last’, ‘it’s a house built on sand’ and ‘what goes up must come down’? I am happy to include myself in this critique. Frankly, even those of us who were not avid supporters of the prosperity gospel seem to have been content to receive the benefits of a financial situation that we now realise was based largely on irresponsible property speculation. I wish somewhere there was some prophetic figure who could say ‘I told you this would all end in tears’. Perhaps there is and I will be glad to hear of him or her.

The second observation is this. If there was a failure of the prophetic nerve there was also it seems to me a failure in the area of imagination. Quite simply no one seems to have been able to conceive of the scale of the pending disaster. It is almost as if an assembled mass of lemmings had peered over the cliff before them only to mutter ‘Well, it certainly looks a long way down, but I don’t suppose it can really hurt.’ Perhaps everybody should have read a few more fantasy books and a few fewer property magazines.

Other news quickly. Simeon continues to do well and gain weight and has survived his first cold. There are also some developments occurring with my writing career that I am not at liberty to discuss but which sound promising. Your prayers are welcome on both counts.

Whatever happens to the markets, have a good week.

Chris

Field trips in a wet climate and the problem of unresolved gratitude

2008-10-03T19:30:00.001+01:00

I don’t often write about my job on this blog, which is just as well as I found out today that at least one student regularly reads it. Hi Ioan! Teaching geology has one slight problem attached to it: the need to do fieldwork. In theory this is fine, as in South Wales we live in an area where, within a day’s drive, we can see some very fine geology. But when am I supposed to take my students out? Term starts in early September, but for the first few weeks my first-year students know very little geology and fieldwork presupposes at they have least some knowledge. And by the first week in October temperatures have started to drop and the autumnal gales and rain are upon us. So should I leave it and do it all in late spring? That is hardly acceptable from the teaching point of view and anyway, in some years the weather doesn’t really improve until mid-April. But as our exams start in mid-May we are already in revision mode by then and my colleagues are less than happy at losing students from their classes. So my habit is to try to get the fieldwork in at the very end of September.

Yet here matters are made even more complex by the fact that almost all our best rock sequences are on coastal sections. ‘So what?’ you say. Well, we live in a part of the world that has the second highest tidal range in the world (9-10 metre tides are perfectly common) and the omnipresent health and safety legislation means that I can only really work on a falling tide. So the dates of my field trips are more or less chosen for me and this week was the week: I had three full-day trips. The weather was bad on one day but good on the other two; by the miserable standards of 2008 a very good result. In fact even the field trip on the wet day went well and I actually had some pleasing feedback. I’ve been very glad to get them out of the way because the temperature today has really dropped and there is a feel of late autumn in the air. We also had on the radio that message which is for Brits the first harbinger of true winter: a warning of snow on the Scottish Highlands.

Anyway I’m very grateful for the good weather and am happy to attribute it to answered prayer. I am well aware of this raises lots of problems (what about those who, for whatever reason, prayed for bad weather?) but I’m content to let my praise sound out. This whole issue raises for me one of the most telling arguments against atheism and one which I think is insufficiently discussed. It is this: when faced with some potentially disastrous situation that, in the event, goes right, we all – atheist and believer alike – feel the urge to give thanks. Yet for the atheist this is the most frustrating of all desires: there is simply no one to give thanks to. It may be that if the problem of pain is the strongest objection to Christian belief, the problem of pleasure is atheism’s Achilles heel. The atheist cannot admit for a moment the existence of ‘blessing’; that would require the existence of a Blesser.

Sermon illustrations and a nice letter

2008-09-26T18:40:00.003+01:00

Another week flies by. I will treat physicists far more seriously when they can account for a) the missing 80% of the mass of the universe and b) why time goes by so much faster than it used to.

Young Simeon continues to do well and is now – six weeks after his birth – back to his birth weight. That is progress. Thanks for praying.

Searching for a sermon illustration this week I came across the following: “Irish novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett received great recognition for his work — but not every one savored his accomplishments. Beckett’s marriage, in fact, was soured by his wife’s jealousy of his growing fame and success as a writer. One day in 1969 his wife Suzanne answered the telephone, listened for a moment, spoke briefly, and hung up. She then turned to Beckett and with a stricken look whispered, “What a catastrophe!” Was it a devastating personal tragedy? No, she had just learned that Beckett had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature!”

It is a fine illustration of how jealousy works and as it focuses on a man who was pretty anti-Christian, quite a satisfying one. But when I read the story something about it didn’t quite ring true and I did some homework. The reality it seems is thus: In October 1969, Beckett, on holiday in Tunis with Suzanne, learned he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Suzanne, who saw that her intensely private husband would be, from that moment forth, saddled with fame, called the award a ‘catastrophe’. On this basis, far from being an expression of jealousy, Suzanne’s comment seems to have been a sensitive statement of concern for her husband. (What is beyond doubt is that it seems to have been a fairly stable marriage, continuing until her death twenty years later.)

I suspect the sermon illustration is at fault; partly because I have heard all too many exaggerated statements from the pulpit, particularly where non-Christians are concerned. Exaggeration in the case of unbelievers seems legitimate. Hmm. Can I make a plea that if you do preach or write you check your sources? In the age of the World Wide Web and Google it’s not hard. Honestly is important.

Finally, yes I know the books aren’t doing very well and most people have never seen a copy let alone heard of them. But even in the darkness I get the odd ray of light. I had the following this week.

“Thank you. I just finished reading The Infinite Day tonight. I wrote you about 9 months ago. I read aloud all three of your books to my children, age 10 and 6, as a bedtime story. We spent some time discussing the characters, reading perhaps a half chapter per night. I tried to relate the moral decisions the characters face to biblical characters as well as our own temptations and opportunities to serve Christ. I never thought we would read a book series that we would enjoy as much as the Chronicles of Narnia, but I must say, you proved me wrong. I hope your works will become as timeless as those of C S Lewis.

“Although no eye can see, no ear can hear, nor any heart imagine what God has planned for us, I was brought to tears by those last pages of your work. I can not wait to see and experience even more than what you have imagined. The picture painted by your hand is an encouragement to me and my children to live every day for our Lord because of his great love for us. I know we will lean on the memories of your books for support when we are facing the trials of life. Thank you Chris. If not in this life, we look forward to giving you a big hug when we are together in ‘above space’.”

It makes it all worthwhile.

Have a good week

Routine

2008-09-19T21:42:00.002+01:00

Here’s a question for you. Is routine a good thing or a bad thing?

I ask because, as happens in a teacher’s life about this time of the year, routine has settled in. Last week, I had an entire change of timetable and five new students. This week I have had merely one change of room and two new students. Next week I suspect neither rooms nor students will change. I even vaguely know where I ought to be at any one moment and without consulting my colour-coded timetable. Looking ahead over the next nine months or so which is all that the teaching year realistically is, I can broadly sketch out the highs and lows ahead. After four years full-time in my college I pretty much know what is going to be on my desk every week or so. Routine has set in.

Now don’t get me wrong: there is a lot to be said for routine. The regular cycle of the week, without crises and changes, is surely good for us. To be honest, as I get older, I find I can manage without crises. All the medical evidence seems to be that it really isn’t very good for us either. And who doesn’t ultimately like that monthly pay packet? You could even argue that the institution of the Sabbath in the Bible sanctifies routine with its call for ‘six days work and one day off’. Repeat ad infinitum.

And yet... isn’t there something rather soporific about it? Something terribly, worryingly, deadeningly numbing? Doesn’t routine force us to stare at the road immediately ahead of us and to neglect that distant (but perhaps not that distant) horizon where this world ends and eternity begins. I suspect we need to be wary of routine and its accompanying myopia. Forgive me, incidentally, if you are in finance; this has not been a routine week. Yet one of the curious effects of routine, it seems to me, is that it deadens us not just to our own relentless march to heaven or hell but to the trials of others. We stay locked in the furrow of our daily labours. Perhaps the words of the writer to the Hebrews ought to come to mind: ‘For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.’ (Hebrews 13:14) Just so.

Simeon continues to make good progress by the way; thanks for all your prayers. The books alas, need something to generate more interest, but I know not what.

Have a good week

Chris

Latest news

2008-09-12T21:05:00.001+01:00

First of all many thanks to those who prayed, because things are now a lot better with young Simeon, our young and somewhat ailing grandson. On Monday the diagnosis of CAH (Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia) was confirmed (although there are various different types). Anyway Simeon will have to be on steroids for the rest of his life, but the specialist is quite encouraged and encouraging and it sounds like he should be able to live a normal life. His parents will however have to do quite a bit of chemical juggling early on and there will be some fairly regular blood tests. At the moment he is still in hospital but merely to see his weight built up. But the outlook is good. Thank you Lord.

What else is news in this part of the world? Well, today was something of a small but significant landmark for me. I taught nothing but geology today in all four 1.5 hour teaching slots. In other words I have enough students who want to do geology that I now have two groups at AS level (year 12) and two at A2 (year 13). In fact my total student numbers are now around 70 which is a college record. Clearly I must be doing something right. This, of course, feeds into the whole issue to do with writing. Yes, I would love to do nothing but full-time writing but teaching provides a regular salary and frankly this year I am probably going to make nothing whatsoever from my fiction books. Not only that: I am apparently quite good at what I do as a teacher. My college is also actually a pretty good place to work; a fact brought out by the kindness and sympathy of my colleagues in the last week. So I really don't know when you're going to get this promised Seventh Ship manuscript. I also seem to be preaching almost every Sunday for the next couple of months as well. I really must learn to say ‘no’!

A good friend and sometime reader of this blog sent me an article from the British newspaper The Guardian pointing out that in a recent survey of nearly a quarter of a million university students geology achieved the highest satisfaction level with 95% of students being happy with the subject. Why this should be the case is not immediately clear but I suspect several factors contribute to it. Geology is very varied and you never stick with one topic too long, we do lots of nice field trips and at the moment there are lots of jobs available at the end of the course. There is one other factor and it is this; geology has resolutely resisted postmodernism and almost all of types of modern philosophical outlook. It is something of – to use an apposite phrase – a dinosaur. Unlike some geography departments (on whom be peace) we do not do such things as ‘Concepts of Lesbian Space’ and ‘Masculinity and Maps’. Geology departments are much more prosaic, and again to use an apposite phrase, are ‘down to earth’. They centre on facts and the training to use those facts in life outside the campus. I suspect there are implications here for Christian ministry but at the end of the first full week of teaching I am too tired to draw them out.

Blessings on you all.

A family crisis

2008-09-06T09:40:00.001+01:00

I suppose it takes me around ten steps to get from our bed to the phone in the hall. So when, around three o’clock on Thursday morning it rang, I was already partly awake and prepared for something unpleasant by the time I picked it up. No one except Swansea drunks getting a wrong number calls at that hour unless it’s an emergency. And emergency it was: our grandson Simeon, 15 days old, was in intensive care, anaesthetised and ventilated, with something unknown, but serious, wrong with him. Three hours drive away, all we could do was pray and lie awake hoping that there would not be a second phone call.

Thursday was the first proper day of teaching for me and I can assure you it was not a good one. However I do have to say my colleagues were universally superb in their sympathy and support. Bit by bit during the day the details came out and a tentative diagnosis (still not fully confirmed at the moment) made of what is called CAH or Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia: courtesy of the web you can read all about it. But over the last couple of days Simeon has gradually recovered, being shifted first to high dependency and then to a normal ward while he recovers some weight and, I presume, more tests are done. If it is CAH the prognosis is reasonably good although with current technology he will have a lifetime of being dependent on replacement steroids. Which, as someone said, means that he will probably be ruled out from ever competing in the Olympics.

Let me make three cautious observations. The first is that we have come to take for granted the wonder of childbirth and healthy children. When you think about it, it’s a pretty amazing for a baby to shift from being effectively a parasitic creature taking food and oxygen from the mother to being a (more or less) self-sustaining and self-regulating organism. Somehow we have come to consider it to be a right that this proceeds automatically and without trouble. We shouldn’t do so. Two of my colleagues have had neo-natal fatalities recently.

The second observation was that things like this make you realise the true importance of family, friends and the faith. As I lay in bed my thoughts turned to last week’s blog on the iPhone and the whole topic seemed pathetically insignificant. Perhaps being reminded of one’s true priorities is no bad thing.

The third observation is that contrary to what you might expect I don’t think I ever once rounded on God and angrily demanded ‘Why Simeon?’. I suppose if things had turned out worse (and of course he is not out of the woods yet) I might have done so. I think – intellectually at least – I have come round to the view that being a child of God does not exempt you from suffering. I think I would almost be embarrassed to be in a situation in which I was granted immunity from the world’s woes. No one respects those who dodge military service or jury duty through family influence. In a world full of wounded people perhaps we need to have scars.

Anyway I will keep you in touch. Have a good week.

New additions to the family: Part 2

2008-08-29T12:38:00.001+01:00

First things first: many thanks to all of you who congratulated me, and by extension, my son and daughter-in-law on their new offspring. We went to see them at the weekend along with Alison’s mother and it was a great moment to have all four generations present. (Although, for those of you who have forgotten, four-day-old babies do very little.) The significance of the event was enhanced by a newspaper report the day before saying that Britain now has more elderly people than children. I’m afraid I can’t remember exactly the statistics and how they defined ‘elderly’ but you get my point. We are an ageing population; babies are getting to be an endangered species.

Anyway, the other new addition I promised I would talk about is my new iPhone 3G. As readers of my books will know, my protagonists in the Lamb Among The Stars use a ‘Diary’, something so close in shape and size to the iPhone that if we do come to filming (and thanks for those suggestions, by the way) there will have to be some clever work done to stop people from saying ‘oh look he’s just copied the iPhone’. My diaries have vastly superior facilities: most notably a ten-year battery, which is clearly fantasy; you’d be pushed to get an iPhone 3G to last 10 hours. Anyway when I started writing the books, this type of thing was very much science fiction; laptop computers were weighing in at 20lbs and had coarse green-on-black screens, and mobile phones were brick-sized. Is it any wonder people write about swords and sorcery rather than technology?

The reason I got one was that my old phone had come to the end of its contract and I felt that an iPhone would save me having to fire up a computer quite as frequently. So, after two weeks use, what do I make of it?

Well, I’m pretty impressed. I have been using Windows Mobile/Pocket PC organisers and phones ever since they came out around eight years ago and have amassed a considerable expertise in handheld computing. And you know what is the best thing about the iPhone? I don’t need to use any of it. The thing just works. One of the most damning things about the Pocket PC was that you never saw a woman using one. This isn’t sexism: women, of course, are far more sensible than men and shun any sort of technology that is far more trouble than it’s worth. They took one look at the tiny screen and saw that they had to poke around with a toothpick on it and decided that it really wasn’t worth it. The iPhone however is very different. Not only do you not need to know anything about computers, you are positively discouraged from fiddling around with the insides. You can only get applications (for the most part sensibly priced at a dollar or less) from Apple. This means that your phone is never contaminated by poorly written bits of software which you can never completely uninstall but which gradually accumulate, slowing your phone down. Towards the end I used almost every day to have to reset my Windows mobile phone and each time it took three or four minutes before the thing would boot up properly. I don’t even know how to do a reset for the iPhone; it doesn’t seem to need them.

No, in almost every way it’s a super piece of work and I’m looking forward to some of the applications that we are promised. One slight negative is that so far there is no real word processing software, probably because Apple, in their wisdom, have not yet got round to creating a cut and paste facility. So you don’t get to write a book on it. Yet.

But everything else just works. Ultimately, in terms of operation, it’s made not for geeks, but for users. And the beauty of that is that the iPhone itself rather retreats into the background. In that respect it’s a little bit like a good writer; the tale – not the teller – is what engages our attention.

Have a good week

Chris

On seeing the next generation

2008-08-23T17:41:00.002+01:00

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that our elder son and his wife were expecting their first baby. Well, on Tuesday, after some delay, Simeon John finally emerged into the world. He is doing very well and we hope to see him and his family this weekend.

Inevitably one’s first grandchild brings back memories of his parent’s birth.
John, Simeon’s father, was born in Beirut in the spring of ’82. It was a jumpy, uneasy time as we were expecting an Israeli invasion any day. After seeing the new baby, I remember heading off through the badly lit streets of West Beirut where PLO gunmen lingered nervously in doorways, up to the bright lights of Commodore Hotel which was one of the few places where you could guarantee getting a phone line out of Lebanon. The place was full of journalists trying to file stories about the war brewing in the south. Eventually, at what seemed an enormous expense, I managed to have a few minutes on a crackly, distant line and passed on the good news. The next day I took some photographs and got a roll of film developed (some of you youngsters may not remember this process), had duplicate photos printed and sent them off by airmail to the grandparents. I think it must have been two weeks after the birth when the photos arrived in the UK. With Simeon’s birth, the happy father (who has inherited an interest in photography from both sides of the family) e-mailed us some good digital images within hours. Technologically the world has changed a lot.

Incidentally, six weeks after John was born the long predicted war erupted with appalling violence and where we lived and the hospital came under sustained artillery and aerial bombardment by the Israelis. We fled an already encircled West Beirut and then Alison and John were evacuated courtesy of the French Navy while I stayed on for another few days. We were out of all contact for the next week or so. One would like to think that the technological changes over the last quarter of a century have been matched by political progress and the Middle East is now a saner and safer place. Oh well….

Anyway Simeon’s arrival means of course that we are grandparents; we will by agreement be ‘Grandma’ and ‘Grandpa’. Frankly, I’m still coming to terms with this. I only just seem to have got out of adolescence and now I am a grandfather? Well I can live with it. The main thing is that it is a great blessing. To have children is a blessing and to see them have children is doubly so.

Anyway next week I hope to talk about the other new addition to our family, my new iPhone 3G, which currently carries on it – amongst other things – yes you guessed it, pictures of Simeon John.

Have a good week.

A sign of the times?

2008-08-15T12:00:00.001+01:00

There are lots of things I feel inclined to comment about at the moment; including the great topic of British conversation: what happened to the weather? We seem to have seamlessly slipped from a wet and windy spring into a wet and windy autumn. Hang on, isn’t there supposed to be something in between? I’ve also got an iPhone 3G which I think is fantastic and I want to make some observations on it coupled with some damning comparisons with Microsoft’s offering in this area. But that can wait. And no, the phone hasn’t yet rung to say ‘you’re a grandfather’. Mind you given the weather, I can understand why the baby is staying inside as long as possible.

Curiously enough, the topic this week is that of Hamlet, that most curious of plays. Having watched the excellent Kenneth Branagh version recently I felt that it is really one of those southern European Catholic revenge dramas which has mysteriously (and not terribly convincingly) been transposed to a Protestant Denmark. Anyway, as you may or may not know depending on which part of the globe (no literary pun intended) you’re in, a new production of Hamlet has opened at Stratford starring David Tennant as dithering hero. That is of course the David Tennant, the current Doctor Who. To round things off nicely, the villain of the piece, Claudius, is played by no less than Patrick Stewart. That is, of course, the Patrick Stewart, formerly Captain Picard of Star Trek. And the reviews have been very good indeed. The reviewers have, however, all gone out of their way to remind us that both are highly trained actors and had good credentials well before they became famous in science fiction.

To be honest, I’m not quite sure what to make of this. Does it indicate that, in order to make the fantastic credible today you need to get the best possible actor or actress you can? Or does it indicate that fantasy/science fiction is now coming in out of the cold and is something that no longer blights an acting career? Frankly I rather hope it’s the latter. Indeed, I hope that Hollywood will realise one of the advantages of filming epic fantasy is that actors are prepared to fight for what is a proven career-building privilege. If they want an epic fantasy to test this theory then I suppose I can think of a trilogy that might be suitable.

Have a good week

Chris

The problem of encountering excellence

2008-08-10T20:46:00.005+01:00

As previous posts have explained, we have just had a great holiday in France which was also something of a stimulus in many areas. Yes, I did get some notes jotted down towards new books but frankly, dear reader, I am still recovering from having produced The Infinite Day and am reluctant to commit myself to the vast number of hours of labour necessary to write the sequence I want to. (An attractive offer of a publishing company/wealthy fan/visionary could change all that.)

Anyway, while we were in France we got the chance to look at two sites in the Dordogne, that vast area of dissected limestone plateaux that drape onto the western edge of the Massif Central. The two sites were the village of Rocamadour and the small town of Sarlat and both feature highly in any tourist guide.

Rocamadour is a suite of ancient churches and chapels spilling down the steepest of slopes. It is all steps, spires and dizzying vistas down on to red roofs. At times you feel you could be in some mediaeval romance.

Even if you have very little sympathy with much of the religious elements (and I am too good a Protestant to be fond of the multitude of statues and icons) it is an awesome place. Allegedly it is the number two tourist site in France and understandably so.

Sarlat is supposed to be France’s best preserved mediaeval town. When you finally get in past the traffic you are soon in lost a tumbling maze of ancient buildings. Winding streets present a constant succession of half timbered and honeyed stone buildings with the steepest of roofs pressed together with endless and varied doorways, courtyards and arches. It is one of those places that that it belongs more on the film set than in reality.

Having visited both of these places a problem emerged. We went to what we would have once considered an attractive French town a few days later with some lovely old buildings and both concluded that sadly ‘it wasn’t Sarlat’. In other words the good had been spoilt for us by our glimpse of the excellent.

It is a phenomena I have come across before. There are three sites in the Near East of global stature: Lebanon’s Roman temple of Baalbek, Syria’s sprawling Crusader fort of Krak des Chevalier and the jawdropping city carved into rock that is Jordan’s Petra. Baalbek is the greatest Roman temple preserved anywhere; Krak the greatest castle anywhere; and Petra the greatest… well, ‘city-carved-into-rock’ anywhere.

I am grateful that having seen these things, and especially, this summer, Sarlat and Rocamadour. But they expose the danger of focusing on excellence to the point that we overlook that which is merely good. I suspect there is a spiritual lesson here. Maybe we need sometimes to turn our eyes away from superstar excellence (which, in all probability, is utterly unattainable) and focus instead on a more down-to-earth ordinary kind of goodness.

On living in France

2008-08-05T20:29:00.003+01:00

Anyone who travels to France cannot fail to be astonished at the number of British people there. We visited one small town where in the centre literally one in three people seemed to be British. It wasn’t just holidaymakers either: the cafes were run by Brits and there was even a fish and chip shop. Many shops had either advertisements that were either bilingual or in English alone.

Which raises the question: what is so attractive about France to Brits? The answer seems to be that it is no single thing. An almost universal attraction is that the weather is so much better. And here one can sympathise: for instance in Swansea we have had heavy rain for the last two days with not a glimpse of the sun. Other people like the food and the cheap wine.

Still others relish the fact that you can buy a large property relatively cheaply. Certainly it seems to be a cheaper place to live than the UK. There are other things: for people of my age and older it is the still largely rural nature of France that is attractive. It has widely scattered, quiet villages, rustic hamlets, hedgerows, tree-lined lanes, vast rolling woodlands, abundant wildlife, dark starlit night skies and the absence of the eternal roar of roads that is almost universal in most of Britain. The irony here is that the attraction of France is not because it is France but because it is like a long lost Britain.

I haven’t heard that many people go to France because they like the French. In fact the quite revealing fact is that most Britons buy up country properties out of the towns. They say it’s because they want the peace and quiet; I have a niggling suspicion that, in some cases at least, it’s so that they don’t have to deal with the locals. In some places the Brits were trying to create an alternative community of English-speaking shops, hairdressers, electricians and plumbers so that you wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of a) learning French b) having to be nice to Pierre and Sylvie. Once or twice we had to insist that people spoke to us in French rather than English. They seemed grateful for our efforts.

Let me hear make two Christian points. After all I suspect that something equivalent to France occurs in most countries. From what I gather, California or Florida often seems to have the same role in the northern US.

The first point is that there is a real danger that you see in this France or its equivalent, paradise. It is the place where, finally, everything will go right; the place where joy will be yours eternally. And of course expressed like that, you see the fallacy of the argument: there is no paradise other than God’s paradise and we are separated from that by more than the English Channel. (Indeed from passing comments, we heard much of France can often be bitterly cold in winter. The bureaucracy is often impenetrable. The inner cities have dreadful problems. The state is bankrupt. And in the rural areas over winter you find large numbers of people traipsing around blasting little birds to bits in the course of la chasse. I get the impression from a few of the expats we talked to that disillusionment can set in very quickly.)

The second point is that we cannot – and should not – divorce ourselves from people. There is probably a whole theology that centres on the incarnation about getting involved with local life.

Anyway I’ll make no bones about it. If I could sell the film rights I would very seriously and prayerfully consider moving to France where I would continue to write and my wife would continue editing by e-mail. With the fast rail and plane links we properly wouldn’t be too far away from aged parents. But on the one hand we would be under no expectation of paradise and on the other, we would make every effort to get involved with the local community and especially that rarest things, a French evangelical fellowship. Anyway, it’s all a fancy at the moment. But cannot a man dream? Especially a fantasy writer?

I hope to get back to a regular Friday pattern as soon as possible. Oh, and no news on the baby front yet.

Back from France

2008-07-30T08:36:00.001+01:00

Dear readers, you have probably noticed that posting of comments, etc., has been a bit delayed the last couple of weeks. The reason was, as I partly hinted, that we were actually on holiday in France. And of course, where a little bit of detective work will reveal where you actually live, you have to be an utter nincompoop to announce to the world that you will be vacating your premises for a few weeks! On the other topic I mentioned, our daughter-in-law is still pregnant but the due date is coming up early next week.

Anyway we had a great time. For us holidays are not so much a time of doing nothing as a time of being stimulated by seeing new and different things. I have just been glancing at some of the 800 or so photographs I took and they include a vast numbers of chateaux, mediaeval towns, rocks, flowers, dragonflies, battlefields and landscapes: all that sort of thing. It keeps the brain working and makes you realise that actually the rest of the world operates on a different basis. Which is no bad thing.

Last year we went to Ireland and it was pretty cold and wet and the rest of the summer in Wales was much the same. So this year it was very pleasant to be able to say again things we haven’t really been able to say for two years (when we were last in France). Some of the things we enjoyed saying were:

‘I seem to have run out of short-sleeved shirts.’
‘I think I’ve caught the sun.’
‘The tarmac is melting.’
‘Can we park the car in the shade?’
‘Look at the lizards.’
‘Have we brought enough water?’
‘I really ought to get some prescription sunglasses.’

Anyway, I will write more about books and writing soon.

Reflections on history

2008-07-19T12:30:00.000+01:00

I was a small boy by the end of the 50s and a somewhat bigger boy in the 60s. In those dimly remembered days, the Second World War loomed large, not just as a great event, but as a recent one. At my first school we had big earth air raid shelters in the grounds that were frustratingly (but sensibly) sealed off from our attentions. When we played soldiers it was always as British and Germans. My father worked in the aerospace industry and many of his colleagues had been in the war: one had flown in Lancaster bombers; another, a Pole with an impossible surname, had flown with the Polish Air Force element of the RAF. It is possible that the proximity of the war was heightened by the fact that in Britain rationing did not end until something like 1953. Well into the 60s no one ever wasted food.

All this came to mind because in our church there is a small bronze plaque to the memory of Lieutenant Fred G. Beeny, East Lancashire Regiment, killed at Caen, France, 29th July 1944. As we will be passing through Caen later this summer I thought I would find where the grave was and make a visit. So I have been doing some very basic research on the lieutenant. Apart from the wonderfully efficient Commonwealth War Graves Commission website which pinpointed the grave within seconds, I have largely drawn a blank. If I had a spare day I could trawl through the microfiche records of the local paper and probably come up with more information but I don’t have that luxury. The trouble is, as you are probably aware (or ought to be), the D-Day casualty figures were so horrendous that they seem to have overwhelmed the system. For example, The London Gazette (which is in digital format and hence easy to search) only records Fred’s death in November 1944. However the local library has archives that include the minutes of our church, so I may unearth something there.

What was interesting was asking even the oldest members of our church and finding that none of them knew anything about Fred or his family. Part of the reason is that most of our very old members joined the church after the war. But another element is simply this; what was once so close to me has now been removed into the far distance by time’s remorseless march. The lieutenant himself was 25 and so would have been born in 1919. In other words, any of his contemporaries will now be thinking about their 90th birthday celebrations next year. It will not be long before we hear someone described as being the ‘last surviving combatant’ of this or that Second World War battle.

I suppose at this point I should shift to discussing how vital it is that God is eternal. Well that’s true. But I am more struck, I think, by the other side of the coin: the sheer brevity of human life. Not just this one life cut short at the quarter century, but the fact that an epic struggle will soon have passed from the realm where it is discussed by living witnesses, to that faraway state testified to only by cold, flat, written records. History is like a leisurely treadmill whose pace is so slow that you do not think it moves at all. Events like this remind you that time does pass and all too soon the greatest of events slips over the horizon of knowledge into mists of history.

Paraphrasing Psalm 90 Isaac Watts wrote:

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the op'ning day.

Like flowery fields the nations stand
Pleased with the morning light;
The flowers beneath the mower's hand
Lie with'ring ere 'tis night.

Our God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Be thou our guard while troubles last,
And our eternal home.

Just so.

Chris

Soli Deo Gloria

2008-07-12T12:30:00.001+01:00

When I finished writing the final sentence of The Infinite Day I signed off with three letters SDG. Since then one or two people have asked me what it means and I am left wondering if it was a bit of an affectation. I think I thought its meaning could easily be found through Google: but having tried it that is not as easy as I had thought. So here you are.

SDG stands for Soli Deo Gloria: the Latin for ‘Glory to God alone’. The background to it is that during the Protestant Reformation the theology of the Reformers came to be summarised in the five solas. These are:

Sola Scriptura - Scripture Alone
Solus Christus - Christ Alone
Sola Gratia - Grace Alone
Sola Fide - Faith Alone
Soli Deo Gloria - The Glory of God Alone

The ‘alone’ bit refers to the fact that the Reformers felt that the church of their time had added to these truths and so it was important to ‘get back to basics’. I would have thought the meaning of all five were reasonably obvious but there are a number of websites that will give you text and verse on all of them. The last of the five – Soli Deo Gloria – was I suppose a bit of a dig against the medieval church’s glorying in ceremonies, the priesthood and the Pope. (Lest I be accused of anti-Catholicism here, let me point out that since the time of the Reformation a number of Protestants have managed to very successfully swing the spotlight off the glory of God and onto themselves. But I name no names; I don’t want to be preached against on the God Channel.)

Anyway it’s a rich phrase. In fact, my younger son so likes it he has it tattooed on his arm. (It’s his body not mine.)

I have a soft spot for it because the great Johann Sebastian Bach signed off almost all his own works with the same three letter motif.

So I am in good company. Of course, by adding SDG, not simply as a motto but as something that is meant, I was of course asking that God be praised, not me. That’s a bit tricky as I am no different from anybody else and actually rather like praise. But I suppose it was also, in a sense, a commending of the whole artistic enterprise into the divine hands. In effect, over to you Lord. Amen.

Have a good week.

Software I use

2008-07-04T18:42:00.000+01:00

Just occasionally I get asked various things about the technicalities of writing and what software I use. Unsurprisingly, I do the final editing of anything in Word, which seems to have become the universal format for documents. But for what it’s worth – and it isn’t a lot – let me tell you about a couple of favourites for writing.

The first of these is the flawed-but-when-it-works-absolutely-wonderful Dragon Naturally Speaking speech recognition program by Nuance software. Once you have trained the software, you put on the microphone and click the little icon on the desktop and then speak away. And after an initial pause your words start to appear on the screen with the barest minimum of delay. I’d say the accuracy is around 95%, maybe 98%. Or at least for me. I have a fairly deep voice and speak standard English: for higher frequency voices and people with pronounced accents I don’t know what the rate would be. But it gives me the ability to input text as fast as the best typist and allows me to keep going for several hours if I need to.

It is not perfect: for some obscure reason it really doesn’t like the word 'because'; it is resource intensive and for me only works well with 3 Gb of RAM and even here I try to close down most other background programs. But it’s the only way I can manage to do a blog at the end of a long and wearying week. One curiosity is that unlike dictating to a human, the most satisfactory results are to be had by speaking in a slow, deliberate, monotone. So if you are writing something thrilling you have to not reveal the excitement in your voice or the computer will get confused. Weird! Anyway I recommend it, but I’m hoping that the next version will be better.

A second software package is probably less well-known and one that I have only just acquired. It is a program called PageFour by the splendidly named Bad Wolf Software. Let me simply repeat how it describes itself: “PageFour is a tabbed word processor and outliner for creative writers. Where other word processors were designed with the business user in mind, PageFour aims to meet the needs of a different class of writer. It does not improve your prose or make you a better writer – only you can do that, but PageFour does make your job just that little bit easier.”

That’s pretty much it. It’s a fairly basic and pared down word processor coupled with a fine outlining/card file element. So if I’m writing a book and I want to access information on a place or a person I shift the mouse over a mini-directory in the corner and call up the relevant note. This database type of thing is of course something that Word manifestly fails to do. The PageFour program is not terribly expensive and if you’re thinking about writing a novel you could do far worse. There is a programme for the Mac called Scrivener which does pretty much the same thing, but in a slightly more stylish fashion. The problem is, these wonderful tools notwithstanding, at the end of the day you still have to get down and write.

Now a word of warning. Our elder son and his dear wife are due to have their first baby very soon. When the event happens we will head on up to see them, and as a result, dear reader, this blog may hang fire for several days. We have also got some holiday occurring at some point and – trusting soul that I am – I am not going to announce the dates on the blog. So over the next six weeks or so this blog may be slightly interrupted and posting your comments may be delayed. Never mind: all being well I will be back.

Have a good week.

A curious communication

2008-06-27T22:08:00.000+01:00

Well it’s been a quiet week on the book front but I did get one fascinating communication. It was an e-mail from a PhD student in New York, who we will simply call John, saying that he was including a chapter on my series in his doctoral dissertation and asking me some questions.

As far as I can make out John’s thesis is on the attitude of evangelicals writing fiction to technology. He has sent me the chapter, which I have so far merely skimmed over at great speed. My initial response is that he’s got some things about my books right and some things badly wrong but I hope to spend an hour or so putting together some comments. But it’s a strange feeling to have yourself written about. I have read a fair amount of literary criticism and it’s very odd to be involved as the subject rather than as spectator.

I confess to having any slightly jaded view of literary criticism. A formative experience was when in 1982 the American University of Beirut, where I was an assistant professor, had a centennial conference on James Joyce. Having read a fair amount of the old man (I gave up on Finnegan’s Wake but finished Ulysses) I attended. One speaker, becoming extraordinarily esoteric, began to discuss the significance of the coinage that Leopold Bloom had on him when he took the bus journey recounted in Ulysses. We strained to concentrate and as we did, heard no more than a few miles away, the deep boom of artillery fire between East and West Beirut. Somehow, as the air in the room began to gently vibrate and our thoughts drifted to death and destruction, the importance of literary criticism faded away.

Anyway what makes this review particularly interesting is that John is not an evangelical: he says that he is a ‘secularist, though I grew up in the evangelical church and still consider myself at least “culturally” evangelical, if that is possible’. Hmm.

Well I guess I’m flattered. I normally consider this sort of thing to be the prerogative of the dead author but I have checked my pulse and I appear to be alive. It’s nice to be taken seriously.

Have a good week.

Reviews and news

2008-06-20T18:30:00.000+01:00

The Infinite Day has been out now for best part of three weeks and so I am more or less able to take stock of where things are going. The good news is the reviews (all Amazon, my Facebook site or e-mailed to me) are excellent. Let me share three with you from last week alone.

From email
This is some more random fan-mail ;-) I’ve just finished reading The Infinite Day, and wanted to say a big thanks to you for writing the Lamb Among the Stars series. It’s been the most enjoyable series of novels I’ve read in the last 10 years. Not only did I enjoy the story and the characters, but their world, faith and technology was well done, intrigued me and kept me hooked.
You’ve managed to write novels where the story revolves entirely around the Christian faith, yet kept subjects of the faith very natural and integrated, and without any of our modern day jargon. As a Christian, I found it quite thought provoking. I felt you did a great job of presenting the essentials of our faith and how it works out and yet without dogmatically presenting a fixed view of the end times etc.
Please keep writing!
Oh, and – good ending to The Infinite Day! Certainly not what I expected by the time I got there.

From Amazon.com

5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant finish! June 13, 2008
By E. M. Tennessen (The Windy City)
The Infinite Day is the concluding book in the Lamb Among the Stars series by Chris Walley. The book brilliantly finishes the adventures of Merral D’Avanos and his friends as they battle the return of evil to the universe. Chris Walley is adept at combining science fiction with Christianity. While the Christian worldview is mostly Protestant, as an Eastern Orthodox Christian I found much that resonated with me about how God is and how much He loves us. The Assembly was a wonderful preview of how the Kingdom of God may be acted out. And Jorgio is very much a “fool for Christ.” While the book deals with the evil one and his minions, the story is more about how the characters battle the growing evil and corruption within themselves, how they throw that off, and how they continue to struggle to be like Christ. The ending had definite C.S. Lewis overtones--resembling the ending in The Last Battle (Narnia)--where all is revealed and beyond imagining. It was thrilling and brought tears to my eyes. If you enjoy a good tale about the triumph of good over evil with characters that will touch your soul and heart, this series is for you. And it’s superb science fiction, too! Highly recommended.

Bravo Chris Walley! June 19, 2008
By Patricia Cummings “dogs5” (Maryville, MO USA)
The final book in this series was not only well worth the wait ... it shows the author’s growth as a writer throughout the series. The first book was a slow read, but the profound concept of a sinless world once again having to battle evil made it worth the effort. The pacing picks up in the next and the theology deepens. The final book is a masterpiece of Christian fiction. The author balances multiple plot points, a host of believable characters, and never loses the reader’s interest. The battle against evil occurs on many fronts ... there’s a real enemy to be fought externally but it must be done in community and within each individual human heart. It’s beautifully done. Add to that mix the dimensionality of heaven and hell and probably the most satisfying ending in modern fiction... wow. Well done, Mr. Walley! May the REAL force be with you!

It’s hard to complain about things like that. I find it particularly satisfying that I am praised for effects I have tried to achieve.

Anyway that’s the good news. What however is less good is that sales figures are not particularly high. The most obvious source of information on how the books are actually doing is Amazon.com. Here I find a slightly worrying phenomenon: while the final book is doing okay-ish, the first two books have shown no pickup in sales. In other words, it seems that people who have started the series are happily reading the conclusion but the final book is not lifting the series as a whole. As you can imagine I find this all rather frustrating; had the series being critically damned I would have shrugged my shoulders and said ‘well I guess I deserve low sales’. But to get praise and low sales seems perverse. But then perhaps the whole point is that the universe is indeed just that; perverse. Short of that rather naive theological reflection has anybody got any bright ideas what we do about sales, promotion and the rest?

Chris

Of church constitutions and global evil

2008-06-13T19:10:00.000+01:00

I thought I would take a short break from talking about my books this week. We writers need to remember that there is a real world out site there! However, to the curious, let me say that the books seem to be going reasonably well with some obviously very happy readers. But I would still like to get some really good serious reviews that would have people ordering them from their libraries, buying them from their shops and denouncing them from their pulpits!

And so to something else. I was doing freelance writing in September 2001 and on that fateful day clearly remember seeing in a glance at the BBC web news a garbled newsflash about ‘a plane hitting the World Trade Center’. It wasn’t long before I found myself glued to the television. Had I not been in the middle of a book project, I might have suggested to the reasonably big name evangelical I was working with at the time that we do something fast on the event and its implications. After all, I could with some justification claim to talk knowledgeably about the Middle East and terrorism. Anyway I’m glad I didn’t; much of what has happened in the seven years since would have confounded my predictions.

Some things I would have got right. I would have guessed at George and Tony’s Big Adventure in the Middle East but would, I think, have assumed that Afghanistan was going to be its sole target. Even then I was never convinced of Saddam being a fan of Al Qaeda. I would have guessed that we would be increasingly nice to many very horrible people in the Middle East as long as they were ‘our sort’ of horrible people. That sadly has proved to be true: we don’t talk much about human rights in the Arab world now. I would have foreseen the rise of the security culture but not I think its scary extent: I doubt I would have predicted the way in which Brazilian plumbers can be executed by the police on the Tube, the way that we now lock people up without trial or the extent to which torture is now allowed.

There are many other things that I would probably either have not seen or got badly wrong. I would have predicted that Islam would become very unpopular. What I did not foresee is that Christianity, a much softer target, seems to have suffered a great deal of abuse in its place. Indeed there is an unfortunate irony (which the British government came close to admitting earlier this week), that the past few years have – at least on the surface – been good for Islam because the state has actually invested much in working with Muslims at the expense of Christianity in order to try to neutralise radical Islam. I don’t think either I would have seen the breathtaking audacity of some within the Islamic community in blaming us in the West for causing 9/11 through heavy-handed and partisan involvement in the Middle East.

The one major thing that I probably would not have predicted is how far ranging the repercussions of 9/11 would actually be. This was brought home to me last night in the seemingly unrelated context of a church leaders meeting to discuss our new constitution. The British Charities Commission has come up with various new rules on what constitutes a charity; this has been refined by the Baptist Union and we have been looking at implementing it for our church constitution. The extraordinary fact is that much of the wording is clearly designed primarily to keep mosques out of the hands of fanatics. Charitable religious organisations now need to have detailed published accounts, a defined quorum for meetings, transparent administrative structures and measures in place to stop sudden shifts of power. You almost expected to come across a clause which said ‘all documents need to be submitted to the Security Services’. Truly, in falling, the Twin Towers cast a long, dark shadow across the world

Which brings us back to literature. Those who read the final book in the Lamb Among the Stars series will realise that the matter of evil and the way in which it can contaminate those who seek to battle against it is a major theme. It is always hard to keep your hands clean: the more deadly the evil the more likely that we will be contaminated ourselves.

PS: My website should be up shortly with a new design. Let me know what you think.

What didn't happen this week

2008-06-06T16:59:00.000+01:00

By definition we fantasy authors are blessed with imagination. As it happens the good Lord has ensured that there is an appropriate price to pay for this blessing. (No blessing comes without its dark side). In the case of fantasy authors it is that things never totally live up to our greatest expectations.

As proof of this, let me tell you about the many things that have not happened in the week or so since The Infinite Day made it out into the big wide world.

I have not had phone calls from Oprah in the States or her equivalent in the UK, ‘Richard and Judy’.
I have not been contacted by my local library asking for copies.
Christianity Today has not asked me whether I would mind my face appearing on the cover.
Barack Obama has not asked me for my endorsement.
Spielberg has not phoned me saying he has some spare time on his hands now he is not doing the Olympics and could he please have the film rights.
I have seen no mention on Amazon that they are out of stock and are waiting urgently for the reprint.
No literary agent has e-mailed me asking me if they can please deal with the next series of books.
No pre-millennial, post-dispensational, pre-tribulation preacher has threatened to burn my books.
The local press have not rung the doorbell.
The bank has not been in touch offering me a special account for high earners.

Well, it could be worse. I have had two good reviews on Amazon, some nice comments and been emailed by a student wanting to do a Role Playing Game based on the books. (Being an old Beirut hand, when I read the e-mail first, I assumed RPG meant rocket-propelled grenade and got excited that I annoyed someone so much I was going to be attacked.) Anyway it’s early days and lots of people are still ploughing their way through what is after all a long volume. And, I don't earn my living from writing. It could be worse indeed.

Have a good week

Chris

Of books and plate tectonics

2008-05-30T18:00:00.000+01:00

I am away at my mother-in-law’s in the English Midlands this weekend so I’m writing this a couple of days early on the basis that we can set up the automated blogger system to post this on the Friday as normal.

First things first: if you read last week’s blog early you will be under the misapprehension that I was subjected to some capricious editing. Not so: the ‘mistake’ friends, was mine. Anyway please note the correction.

Word has it that copies of The Infinite Day are now out in the wild at least in the United States and so I am hoping for reviews fairly soon. Can I make a plea here that, if you are thinking of posting a review (and do post favourable ones come the summer) that you avoid spoiling the plot? I went to quite a lot of trouble to put in some twists and turns and a little bit of bluffing in the book, and would appreciate it if that went unexposed. Certainly on this blog site I reserve the right to edit, prune or delete anything that I think may spoil the enjoyment. On the Facebook fansite there is a special discussion section for those that have read the book. Gosh, that all sounds rather miserable doesn’t it?

I have been keeping an eye on Amazon.com and have been pleased to see my ratings briefly rise up to 6,000 or so for The Infinite Day. Of course we really need to get them down to the thousand mark but it’s progress. I saw somewhere that they reckon the average book sells 99 copies. So I guess I’m a success. Hmm.

Anyway, with it being a wet half term I have been sitting indoors either scribbling frantically or working at the computer putting together ideas for the next book series. Some of you may be fascinated to know that something of a priority has been to get my geology right. So I have been playing around with plate tectonic models to produce convincing lines of volcanoes and the right sort of coastline. Well if Tolkien could spend years tweaking his grammar then I can do the same with geology.

Incidentally, if you are at all unfamiliar with plate tectonics it really is astonishingly powerful in its ability to explain landforms and ‘the way the world is’. It is so compelling that although commonly termed the Theory of Plate Tectonics it has the much merited status of fact. I have only ever heard of a single reputable geologist who disagreed with it; and he dissented over one aspect of it. I rarely talk about creationism here; I am already suspect as far as eschatology goes. (If you really insist in pigeonholing me I am an Old Earth or Continuous Creationist.) However I cannot resist mentioning my suspicion here that the shift in focus of creationism from ‘The Flood did it all’ to Intelligent Design reflects the fact that plate tectonics makes an overwhelming case for an ancient Earth. Plates a hundred kilometres thick can hardly race around the surface of the Earth hitting each other, separating and hitting something else over a few months. It must take an awful long time: but given that the Bible talks about a long timescale for the earth (Habakkuk 3, Psalm 90:2-6, Micah 6:2) that isn’t a problem.

Anyway have a good week,

Chris

On books, basketball and forgetful authors

2008-05-23T16:35:00.000+01:00

Dear Reader, if you previously read this blog, read again! This is an updated version.

On Monday a package was awaiting me when I got back from College; my own copy of The Infinite Day. Three quarters of a million words finished! I was tempted to mutter ‘Lord, now let thy servant depart in peace…’, but there’s plenty of other things do yet. Anyway it looks very fine and to those who like to see such things, here are all three together in a complete set.

Frankly, there have been times when I thought we wouldn’t get this far. And we have! Well God is faithful but I am also grateful to you, my fans who have kept the project alive.

I have barely dared open the new book for fear that some horrible spelling error or grammatical infelicity would leap out and assail me. However Alison, my wife, editor and dedicatee, started to read through it again and seems to be enjoying it. However she was extremely irritated about one petty point. On one page Merral and his team are described as playing basketball on the ship.

Now if you read the first version of this blog, you will note that we presumed an editor or proof-reader had changed this from the original teamball. But no, after writing the blog I received a very gracious message from my editor. She pointed out, which I had completely forgotten, that the author himself decided to ‘revive basketball’ because there was not enough room for teamball on the ship. I apologise profusely to my very careful editors, another of whom queried what I’d done on the grounds that in the other books the game was always teamball.

Actually, the invention of teamball (which is never properly described in the books) is significant in a deeply profound way. How so? The fact is, almost all sports have national overtones: Brits play football, Americans play baseball, the Welsh like to think they lead the world at rugby, and so on. And basketball is, largely speaking, American. Now this is important because in the Assembly we are envisaging some sort of millennial society and I was trying to do my best to avoid it sounding no more than ‘Yanks in Space’ or the ‘Return of the British Empire’. (Incidentally one of several unwritten rules in this household is that if ever anyone wants to make the films, one condition will be that the emblem of The Lamb Among The Stars must bear no resemblance whatsoever to any current national emblem, whether it bear stars or not.) But let us allow the Assembly to play any game they like, without our nationalist overtones. (I will let you spot a reference to another widely-played game for yourselves when you get the book.)

Teamball or basketball is a minor point. The Infinite Day is a super production and I want to publicly thank Tyndale for all their hard work.

Have a good week

Chris

The End is Nigh

2008-05-16T17:20:00.000+01:00

1) We have a publication date for the Infinite Day, 1 June in the States. I suspect the UK release will be about a week later. Please nag your booksellers to get a copy and use all means to promote the book. Above all try to get it removed from the subcategory Futuristic of the subcategory Fiction of the category Religious.

Possible lines to persuade people to read the series include:
1. He names the Antichrist.
2. Tim Lahaye is going to burn it.
3. It’s intelligent.
4. It terrified the life out of the kids.
5. Hollywood are looking at the film rights.
6. It’s by this really cool Welsh author that nobody knows anything about.
7. It’s actually translated from Serbo-Croat.
8. The author has been arrested by the Israelis for terrorism.
9. There’s a really good joke about Swansea right at the end.
10. He’s very damning about topology.

Almost all the above are false, irrelevant or unlikely to be effective. Eight is more accurately expressed as 'arrested by the Norwegians (on the orders of the Israelis) on suspicion of terrorism'. And it was a mistake: it was Mount Hermon, they should have marked the border and a geological hammer isn't a weapon And I still say the helicopter gunships were quite unnecessary. Nine is true but unlikely to sell many copies.

2) I did an article for the very helpful High Calling website on leadership. I was rather astonished to be asked because I feel ‘I don’t do leadership’. Anyway I like the result and hope you do.

3) I am probably going to launch a no-holds barred article on the Speculative Faith website in the next 48 hours on why Christians ought to write about nuclear conflict aka the ‘end of civilisation as we know it’.

Anyway have a good week and pencil in some reading time early in June.

Chris

Waste and publicity

2008-05-09T22:03:00.000+01:00

About a month ago I mentioned that I was involved with a big cleanup project by many of the evangelical churches on the southern edge of Crymlyn Bog, a large wetland that has somehow survived on the edges of Swansea. It is the largest area of lowland fen in Wales and of international significance for its birds, plants and insects. The cleanup was scheduled for last weekend – the Bank holiday – and as one of the organisers I was somewhat nervous. The weather in the days before had been very cold and wet and we had made something of a public promise that 200 people would turn up and clear up the rubbish over two days.

In the event it all worked out magnificently. People from churches all over Swansea responded in large numbers: the first teams were sent off at ten but people kept on coming! By half eleven there were already 200 people working on the clean up and all our careful plans were in ruins; teams were already working on areas we had reserved for Sunday. New projects were urgently assigned and people were reallocated. By the end of Saturday, we had done all that we had hoped for. Two skips were full and mounds of plastic bags covered the edge of the cycle path. The end result was the removal of over 80 car tyres, three mattresses, one bath, three shopping trolleys and over 800 bags of rubbish.

Over three hundred people had been involved and to those of you who live in the States this is a very large number from a fairly slender church community. (The number of active Christians in Wales is probably now under the hundred thousand mark.) Anyway, if you wanted a single event to show that Christianity is not all talk, this was it. It was a tremendous and very visible witness to the vigour and enthusiasm of Bible-based churches in Swansea.

One interesting point is that we didn't really get the local press properly involved. I think we justified not pestering them to turn up on the Saturday because we were concerned about a poor show. I suspect we rationalised not begging for publicity as protecting the honour of the church. Yet I wonder whether it was really a lack of faith. We prayed for the weather to be good and it was. Perhaps our prayers did not really extend to it being a successful witness.

It's an interesting thought partly because in a month’s time I have a book coming out which I expect will get very little publicity. Is the fact that I am not seeking publicity for it here evidence of my modesty, my spiritual maturity or, more worryingly, a lack of faith?

Have a good week
Chris

Knowing the beginning from the end

2008-05-02T18:39:00.000+01:00

In the nine months since finishing the manuscript of The Infinite Day I have been busy teaching and also involved in an editing project for a friend that, though worthwhile, has been very time-consuming. But that – and the teaching – is shortly coming to an end and I am beginning to think about my next fiction project, which has the working title of the ‘Seventh Ship Series’. I envisage it as another trilogy, though on a slightly more restrained scale than the heavyweight Lamb Among The Stars series. I have already compiled a lot of notes but in some spare moments over the last few days I have been trying to clarify that most important of things: the ending.

Yes, that’s right, it’s half a million words away from being written, but I want to know my ending. In fact, I’m not really sure I can properly start writing until I know, at least at a very general level, where I am going. I’m sure many fiction writers feel the same; there needs to be a goal, a fixed point to which we can write. It is however certainly not true of all such writers: I have certainly read many books (and given up quite a few more) where it was evident that the writer really didn’t know where they were going. Rumour has it that Robert Jordan’s enormous and unfinished Wheel of Time series that stretches on for 11 or so books attained its gargantuan length because he didn’t know where it was going.

What is so significant about the ending? Three things strike me. The first is that it allows you to distinguish that which is essential and that which is irrelevant. In fantasy, where an infinite number of things are possible, you need that discipline lest you become lost in endless subplots. The second thing is that creating a solid architecture like this allows the build-up of tension and its release at the key moment. I sometimes think of books as being like those situations where you have a thousand dominoes all lined up and then you just tap the end one and they all tumble down in a most satisfying manner. Knowing where you are going helps you set up that situation. Thirdly, the ending confirms, in a deepest sense, what the book is all about. And be assured, my books are about something more than just the tale.

Well I’m not sure that I have a proper ending yet. I’m in no hurry: I want it to be good. Popular wisdom says that ‘Coming events cast their shadows before them’. Maybe. Another and truer saying may be this ‘You can’t know where you are until you know where you are going.’ I suspect that may be true of life too.

Lewis, the Magic Flute and being logical

2008-04-26T08:33:00.000+01:00

I have a really bright student of strongly mathematical bent and enquiring mind who is currently reading C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. Yesterday he protested with some force that he found Lewis illogical in places. It was not the time or place for a defence so I let it pass but I found it an interesting comment. Personally though I have always found Lewis to be highly logical, but I am neither a good mathematician nor a logician. We had one other brief comment on the matter but I will save that till later.

Now the reason I didn’t post last night was that we went to the opera. It was Mozart’s The Magic Flute done by the Welsh National Opera from whom I have borrowed the image. Now if you know anything about the Magic Flute you know it’s got some strong points: some great tunes, some awesome soprano bits and it all ends happily. It is also something of a problem opera. The plot revolves around the Masons of Mozart’s day and their rituals, and we have such mysterious elements as dragons, bird catchers, three boys, a Queen of the Night and an order of priests. It’s all very Masonic, full of ritual and symbolic elements and it swings between rustic comedy and high drama. The performance by WNO seemed to catch the bizarre atmosphere well with sets that made a blatant nod to the surrealist art of René Magritte. There is also a lot of talking but thankfully in this performance it was in English. I’m still not at all sure what was going on (and I gather no one really knows anyway) but it was great art and made you feel good about life.

Now the interesting thing is that of course it fails at every level the tests of logic and rationality. Any supercomputer would be driven mad trying to analyse what was going on. Why were the priests of the Order dressed in orange? (Was it merely a bad pun ‘the Orange Order’?) Who are the three boys? And what about the lobster? Yet it was not meaningless or pointless. Indeed you could say of the ending of the opera that it achieved what art is supposed to do but rarely does: it was moving.

My student made a second comment later in a gap in the teaching. I forget the exact words but it was a question as to whether I considered logic to be the ultimate test of truth. My fumbled answer was that to try to do that involved a circular fallacy: you could never logically prove that logic was the ultimate criterion because to do it you would have to use logic. I quoted Pascal at him (actually I misquoted but he got the sense). ‘The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.’ I think The Magic Flute – and a million other things – demonstrates that.

Designed to inspire. Or not?

2008-04-18T18:46:00.000+01:00

OK guys here’s a puzzle for you. I have taken this from the advertising blurb of an organisation which I am here dignifying with three letters: XXX. What’s it about?

“The XXX vision will be achieved through XXX’s Mission statement:

To provide a spirited visitor experience through a range of high quality facilities and activities in beautiful surroundings.
To deliver this experience through exceptional service provided by a highly motivated and welcoming team.
To exceed our guests [sic] expectations, provide them with inspired memories and to ensure that they leave us having refreshed their inner selves.”

To put you out of your misery it is not a church but a countryside residential complex in the countryside about an hour’s drive from here. The fourth mission statement objective does talk about enjoying the local environment. Here's an image....

I have three observations to make. The first is that linguistically it is all pretty desperate; what on earth is a ‘spirited visitor experience’? What are ‘inspired memories’? What are ‘our inner selves?’ An entire herd of clichés seem to be running free and wild here. The impression you get is that the words are just piled up one upon another; their meaning is actually irrelevant. All they wanted was some phrases that sound good. I feel that something awesomely vital has been lost here: and that is the concept of words as sense. What we have here is nothing more than a mantra to be repeated until something – numbness? Enlightenment? Who knows what? dawns on us. The curse of Babel was that men lost their unity of language; is the curse now renewed so that language itself is lost? Maybe Armageddon is closer than I thought.

Secondly, it is fascinating to see how spiritual the language is. This is a countryside experience not a worship conference or religious retreat. There are several ways of looking at this but perhaps the most profitable is to say that religious experiences are now fair hunting ground for advertising men and women. In the theological void of contemporary British life, the language of the sacred is hijacked to try to make the mundane sacred. God is dead, but let’s try and make Nature/experience/the project divine.

The third point is how close the XXX mission statement is to what some churches say of themselves. We have come perilously close to aping the world here. I am preaching on Sunday morning on the third of the seven letters to the churches in Revelation that to Pergamon. The issue there was that there were a group of Christians who were going along to idol feasts and either literally (or metaphorically) engaging in adultery. Now when I do a sermon I tend to do a bit of a web trawl for other sermons on the same passage to see if I have missed anything. What is interesting here is that most preachers seem to major on the heady combination of illicit food and sex. Yet that does not seem to be the most pressing issue today; I am not aware that many western towns have a Balaam’s Bordello (with special discount rates for church members). I think we have missed the point: behind the sneaking away to idol feasts and worse, was the sorry but understandable desire to be just like everybody else. We need to resist this temptation in whatever form it comes to us: the church needs to be the Church. In terms of language, we need to set out what we are clearly and plainly and avoid this sort of touchy-feely inspirational verbiage. It is the height of irony that when the world starts adopting ‘spiritual’ language it is probably time for us to stop using it.

Have blessed, inspired and spirited week and may your inner selves be renewed. Err, whatever.

Symbolism, nature and conservation

2008-04-11T19:02:00.000+01:00

I barely remember my grandfather on my mother’s side; he must have died 50 years ago. He had fought in the First World War, been gassed and did not enjoy good health: he succumbed to a heart attack in his 60s. But he was a keen gardener and his extensive garden, increasingly less well-tended by my grandmother, long outlasted him. What I do remember is a cheap stone plaque in the garden, the words of which are still clear in my mind although I cannot have seen it for 30 years: ‘The kiss of sun for pardon, The song of birds for mirth, One is closer to God in a garden than anywhere else on earth.’

‘One is closer to God in a garden than anywhere else on earth.’ The line came to mind as I looked over Boaz’ comment of last week. It’s an interesting question: to what extent does the natural (or in this case the cultivated) world display or reveal God? I know enough theology to know that it is a vexed and complex issue to do with what is called natural theology. The key text is Paul’s statement in Romans 1:18-20. Let me remind you of it “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.”

As a good Baptist and a child of the Reformation I am wary of the symbolic. We are told plainly that God speaks in a saving manner only through his word and I would not want to dissent from that. The downside of this rule, if applied strictly, is that neither nature nor aesthetics has any real value. In Welsh nonconformity the practical working out of this can be seen in the chapels. For the most part these are functional buildings with very little to commend them in architectural terms. If you are lucky you may get a blue painted ceiling or some slight ornamentation on the pillars of the interior but otherwise they are self-consciously spartan affairs. All too often one’s first view of them is of some hard monolith looming up desolate against a grey moist sky. Anglicans, and others, at least have the benediction of stained glass in their churches.

Although I could quite easily trample theologically over my grandfather’s mantra about God being in nature, I will not do so. I think there is a faint but important vestige of truth in it: there is something about the natural world that speaks of God. I think the reason is this: all things, statues, music, books and yes, worlds, reveal something of their creator. The natural world does in some (undoubtedly limited) measure speak of the one who made it. After all what is the alternative? The city? That most certainly speaks of its maker: mankind. Skyscraper after skyscraper, mall after mall proclaims the boastful status of the human race: ‘behold what I have made’. Nature is a healthy counterbalance to the blasphemous man-centred atheism of the urban world.

As wiser people have said, the natural world acts as something of a mirror of God. If we stare at it and ponder it we see something of the one who made it. Oh we need a lot more – an awful lot more – to save us but it’s a first step. This, of course, is a reason why the natural world should be preserved. We may not, as some do, worship nature as God but in seeing it as an image of God we find it no less valuable.

Rock and Revelation

2008-04-04T19:10:00.000+01:00

I seem to have been involved quite a lot with images this week. My new Dell came with Photoshop Elements on it and I have been playing with that, and briefly we had a glimpse of summer yesterday, which always makes me think of taking photographs. The temperature rose 10º to a magnificent 17º yesterday before plummeting back down to 8º today. Groan!

I have also been busy finishing the last of my PowerPoint sets with accompanying handouts for my courses. So I spent many hours browsing the web for suitable images and importing them, or in some cases, making my own. I have a section on volcanic and earthquake hazards to cover with my geography students and there’s some really good imagery of squashed buildings and buried towns for them to gawp at. A key case study is Montserrat in the Caribbean where the southern half of the island has been an exclusion zone for 10 years due to the risk of pyroclastic flows. For the uninitiated: they are high-temperature aerosols of molten rock droplets travelling at up to 100 miles an hour that kill you with external and (shudder) internal burns. Anyway I couldn’t resist a little bit of Photoshop-ing to brighten things up and keep the children awake.

I am also down to preach this Sunday morning on Revelation chapter 2; the letter to the church in Ephesus. And anyone preaching on Revelation has to come to terms with the imagery. The odd thing about this: it is imagery that you really shouldn’t try and imagine. To paraphrase a wise commentator, it is symbolic rather than descriptive. The illustration they used, which I thought was very helpful, is the symbol of the skull and cross bones, which (unless we are sailing the Caribbean) is normally seen on bottles of weedkiller and disinfectant. It does not signify that there is a skeleton inside and to have a stubborn realism that thought there was one would be utterly silly. Instead, it refers to something more abstract, and in fact, impossible to visualise: the danger of death. The point is that the imagery in Revelation is of a similar sort. The last thing that you ought to try and do is actually think of what is mentioned in pictorial terms; instead you need always to ask ‘what does this signify?’ I suspect this is linked with that specific mention that Revelation is a book to be read aloud and heard: there are blessings promised for the hearers.

But this raises a question. We seem to be shifting from a verbal/oral culture to a one in which the visual seems to reign supreme. Will one result of this be a greater difficulty with the symbolic language? Oddly enough, what reassures me is the genre of rock videos, about which I know almost nothing. The glimpses I have seen though suggest that here, at least, the symbolic is alive and well. Revelation as rock video? Hmm, there’s a thought.

Have a good week.

Books, BigDogs and Wetlands

2008-03-28T18:01:00.000Z

This has been a particularly cold Easter in the UK and even down here in Swansea we have had flurries of hail and chill winds. I’ve been busy despite being on holiday, but some sun would have been nice.

Two items of news first. First, Tyndale have kindly let me post the typeset first chapter of the Infinite Day so if you want to read it try this link. Whether it is related or not but the pre-orders for the book are looking quite nice on Amazon. Secondly, I came across some fascinating video of a large mechanical/robotic dog (the BigDog project) on the web this week, an impressive feat of engineering and electronics. It’s some way away from my Krallen but not that far. I note that they are talking about these things carrying ammunition on their backs to the battlefield. That’ll be the first generation; the second generation will use the ammunition; the third won’t need it.

What else is news? Well, we have an joint churches initiative in the UK this year called Hope 08 and I have been getting involved with the environmental project side of this in Swansea. The planning is that on the May Bank holiday we will gather as many volunteers as we can from our churches and go down and try and tidy up a very unloved cycle path and sports ground next to a rather fine wetland. It’s in an area of Swansea that is distinctly post industrial and some of the rubbish/trash is dreadful. I thought this would be cue to put in a couple of photographs; so let’s see whether this works.

I don’t talk as much about the environment on this blog as I ought to as it is something that I am very interested in. There is a new book by the head of A Rocha, Peter Harris, called Kingfisher’s Fire: A Story of Hope for God’s Earth which I intend reading when I get the time. It updates the history of A Rocha and gives a lot of thought to the basic of Christian environmental involvement. It includes a chapter on the Lebanon project that I was involved in starting up. Peter gives a not entirely flattering picture of me but, hey, I guess he has to be honest.

Anyway there is a major role to be had by Evangelicals in environment for all sorts of reasons, some of which I may develop in other blogs. It is often assumed that it's New Agers who dominate the environmental world. Actually, I think that is an utter misrepresentation. In my experience, New Agers love the countryside and nature and have a deep sense of its mystery and beauty but they do not have the doctrine of incarnation or a model of servanthood that Christians have. The problem is that an awful lot of environmental work is actually not very mystical or spiritually uplifting; for example, we are going to be doing a lot of picking up of plastic, scrap metal and worse. Anyway it needs doing and it will be a great witness for the evangelical churches in this town if we can get a couple of hundred people out to help tidy things up. Mind you, a pack of those BigDogs with panniers wouldn’t go amiss.

Every blessing.

Figures in a darkened landscape

2008-03-21T20:32:00.000Z

It's been a busy week. I have been desperately trying to finish off all the critical teaching before the Easter break and doing various other things too. I also wrote – in some haste – my monthly blog for Speculative Faith; called Clarke’s Blind Spot it addressed the late (and genuinely lamented by me) death of science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. The blind spot, I said, was his failure to recognize the propensity of the human race to sin. In the course of writing the blog the following sentence came to me. “To make a Holy Week link, there is far more of the range and diversity of human sin in the few chapters of the passion story (think Caiaphas, Judas, Peter, Pilate, the crowd, the unrepentant thief, the callous soldiers) than there is in the hundred plus books that Clarke wrote.”

Thinking about this subsequently I have come to the conclusion that this is actually a very remarkable feature of the passion narratives. It is not just that here one or two people do things that are disastrously and tragically evil. It is that, with the exception of Jesus, almost everybody does evil but in different ways and from different motives. I feel I could write a book of seven chapters on the different but wrong (albeit to varying degrees) reactions of the protagonists. Let me then, as part of an Easter contribution, briefly sketch some of them here.

To me, Caiaphas represents religion gone wrong. He is a man who is so zealous for the externals of a faith that he is prepared to rip out its moral core. If you don’t take this in the wrong way, I can honestly say as an elder in Baptist Church I now have a much greater understanding of Caiaphas’ decisions. The system must survive…
About the motives of Judas much has been written and much of that is contradictory. I almost wonder whether his real motivation is deliberately left blank lest we pat ourselves on the back and say that we have avoided his sin. Whatever the precise trigger for his betrayal I think we can be fairly confident about the soil in which the betrayal sprouted; he was disaffected and disappointed and any spiritual affection he had for Jesus had clearly grown cold.
Peter’s near fatal over-confidence is surely that of a man who sees courage and dedication in himself but fails to recognise that it is only a thin veneer over a great hole.
In Pilate, I sense a weariness with things that ultimately dulls any scruples. He is out of his depth and in survival mode. I see him going back to the villa and smashing a bitter fist down on the table in sheer frustration at the way things have frustrated him.
Time does not allow me to treat the jaded, bitter crowd, the brutally efficient soldiery and the snarling unrepentant thief. But I – and you – recognise them.

Three thoughts:

If the gospels are the human invention that some claim, then to have this menagerie of human evil so briefly yet finely drawn is one of the wonders of ancient writing.
The failings here are all too scarily human. Let us pray, reader, that neither you nor I ever see them in the mirror.
In the almost total moral gloom of the crucifixion there are small flickering lights, notably the women and John, but all around the scene is darkness. The state of the human heart portrayed here serves not just to point up the nature of mankind but to highlight the Jesus who is at the centre of it all. Nowhere in the Gospels does the Light of the World shine more brightly than when the darkness in deepest.

Unholy alliances

2008-03-14T17:25:00.000Z

Last weekend Alison and I went to see There Must be Blood, the Oscar-winning film dominated by Daniel Day-Lewis who gives a performance of such conviction that his character Daniel Plainview seems more real than some living people I know. I enjoyed it, although it’s somewhat depressing, and rather long. In being centred on California and focused on the very unhealthy interaction of oil with a bizarre charismatism it is rather too American for most Brits. But it made for interesting viewing and there is some interesting religious symbolism.

I mentioned a vaguely parallel instance in my classes a few weeks ago. To understand it, you need to be aware that any traveller in Britain knows that he or she is in Wales when they see place names such as Llandovery, Llandudno and Llanelli. A llan was a clearing in the woods and was traditionally named after a saint or holy person; so we get Llansteffan after St Stephen or Llandeilo after St Teilo. Now the history of the modern Middle East is often dated to the moment when, almost exactly a hundred years ago, William Knox D’Arcy found oil at Masjid-i-Sulaiman in Iran. He subsequently became the founder of what is now British Petroleum and achieved a dubious immortality near Swansea when in the 1920s BP was setting up a new refinery in the area; casting about for a name they created Llandarcy. The oil finder was thus beatified.

Now let me indulge in a segue to bring us into Passion week. One very much overlooked aspect of the whole sorry business of the last week is the nature of the opposition to Jesus. The Jewish writer Josephus helps by claiming that, at one Passover alone, the number of animal sacrifices offered at the Temple was 256,500. Let us assume that here, as elsewhere, he exaggerates and that in Jesus day the figure was a mere hundred thousand lambs. Using modern day values, let’s say each sacrifice cost $100 or £50. So it is quite probable that over three or four days transactions of the equivalent of many millions of dollars were conducted in Jerusalem. My feeling (and remember I have lived in this part of the world) is that this was a very ‘nice little earner’ for all concerned. During the Lebanese civil war the bitterest of enemies collaborated when it came to hashish growing and transportation; I am pretty certain the same applied here. There would have been a cut for the Roman leadership, a cut for the military and very healthy backhanders for priests and administrators. Is it any wonder when Jesus of Nazareth threatened to undermine the entire Temple system that the bitterest of enemies collaborated to destroy him? Money can bring out the worst in people; religious enthusiasm can do the same. But marry the two together and you have something spectacularly appalling.

Perhaps we should pray that God should keep us and our churches poor.

Have a good week,

Chris

Welsh author

2008-03-07T19:01:00.000Z

As part of the blog tour I was asked to write a letter to accompany the book. So I did and what follows is the part of it which deals with who I am. You may find it of interest.

A sleepless student of mine started a Wikipedia article on me and I refer you to that for factual details. Theologically, I am in British terms, a conservative Baptist with Puritan sympathies. In terms of nationality, I see myself as Welsh; I am Welsh by name (family legend gives me a twelfth century ancestor, one de Walys “of Wales”) I was born – and born again – in Wales – and am now a Welsh resident. There are Welsh distinctives in writing and they are there in my books. We Welsh are a people who have a fondness for their land, fields and trees; we prefer villages and fields to towns and streets. We are marginal folk; a little people whose fate has long been determined by others. We are sceptical of empires and suspicious of kings; our sad monuments record the names of too many who left our villages to fight and never returned. When we lift our eyes up from these wet, stony soils our thoughts rarely turn to the practicalities of rule or wealth; instead we dream. We dream of the past, preferring epics that look back to when we were a mighty people and – more rarely – we dream of the future. Above all we dream of things beyond this world: for us – as for all Celts – the boundary between the natural and the supernatural is thin and often breaks. We are well aware of sin and evil and, sometimes, grace. We are emotional, given to laughter, tears and the impulsive gesture but have a weakness for nostalgia: we are a people happiest – if that is the word – with twilight rather than dawn. We have a love of tales of many words and a great liking for music although we are perhaps too fond of slow, mournful tunes but then we have much to mourn. Yet for all our frailties, we produce heroes and we endure. Such things you may find echoed in my books.

Have a good week

Chris

Blogs, criticism and abuse of words

2008-02-29T18:28:00.000Z

First all some further feedback from the blog tour. I have had some nice e-mails from Marcus Goodyear, who is involved with a website/organisation called The High Calling. The ‘High Calling’ of the title turns out to be the workplace and he is very much involved with helping Christians to live out our lives in the workplace to which God has called us. I rather like this as I have been fed up for many years with that particular view which creates a hierarchy which has ministers and missionaries at the top and those of us who teach or manage pretty much at the bottom. Anyway, I have enjoyed their very sane daily mailings and I commend the website to you.

No less than three separate blogs were devoted to the Shadow and Night by Steve on the Back to the Mountains blog. The first two were very positive indeed and the third dwelt with what he perceived as weaknesses. Two he picked out were that I had failed to understand quantum entanglement and also that there were issues with my angelology. On quantum entanglement he writes ‘There is one place, however, that is just plain wrong: the invocation of quantum entanglement as a means of instantaneous interstellar communication. It doesn’t work that way.’ I have to say I am puzzled at his confidence in a field in which certainty is a rare beast. A physics researcher who is a friend of mine, and who regularly travels to Los Alamos to work on anti-hydrogen had no problems with it. Anyway I am gratified in achieving a unique literary status: I do not imagine any other author has been criticised for their handling of both angelology and quantum entanglement. Do read the site; he has some interesting things to say.

Finally, let me make an observation on words. I was at a Bible study this week, where we looked at the celebrated passage in James on the misuse of the tongue. We all dutifully lamented our wayward words, cynicism and gossip. Then, as we came to a time of prayer, someone mentioned a relative who had been badly mishandled by the government program/ initiative called ‘Care in the Community’ which is responsible for those who are psychologically vulnerable. It has resulted in the closing a lot of specialist care units and sheltered facilities. The motives are of course saving money, and the whole thing was so desperate that instead of ‘care in the community’ it is widely named ‘neglect in the neighbourhood’. Anyway, it struck me that that here was a whole new dimension of abuse of language: the concealment of evil by the language of good. What would James have said?

Have a good week,
Chris

Surviving the blog tour

2008-02-22T18:36:00.000Z

Well the Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog Tour on The Shadow and Night is coming to an end and I seem to have had a vast number of reviews. First things first; I would like to thank all of you who read the book, particularly those of you who seem to have found it, as we Brits would say, ‘not my cup of tea’. Had I time I would individually answer some of these reviews, particularly those that have raised helpful or challenging points. But you can’t do everything.

I will try to compile some of what I consider to be the more insightful reviews and post them on my blog. Yes, there were some negative ones but the general tone was surprisingly positive. One or two people – apparently sane too – praised my books with adjectives that went beyond those I would personally have used. I loved being a ‘fabulous Welsh author’; the word fabulous of course has a double meaning: ‘excellent’ and ‘mythical’. Anyway I need to go over all these reviews and think about them. I actually find reading reviews difficult: bad ones nag me and good ones make me feel vaguely guilty of pride. But I am very grateful to all who have been involved; it’s been a very helpful exercise.

Let me make a few comments. Some people consider the books have been misclassified and one or two clearly felt disappointed that the books didn’t fit in their definition of ‘fantasy’. Well, I have secular colleagues who plainly felt that the books are fantasy simply by dint of their invoking a God who acts. Perhaps we had better call them ‘genre-breaking’ or ‘speculative fiction’. (I have discussed this more at length on my monthly speculative faith blog). A few others felt that the tagline, ‘a fantasy in the tradition of C. S. Lewis and Tolkien’ was misleading because (surprise, surprise) I don’t write as well as they did. I am surprised anybody thought that such a phrase was a claim to quality.

One of two people frankly found the books rather hard going. Fair enough. Are there any books that everybody likes? Well, to this day I agonise over as to whether I should have speeded things up in Book 1. Yet, on balance, I think I made the right decision. Tall buildings need deep foundations and what I was doing in the first hundred pages was laying the foundation for the remaining 1,600. One theme which recurs on almost every page of the books is that of innocent men and women grappling with the novelty of evil. I do not see how this could have been remotely effective had I not, perhaps clumsily, tried to draw something of the world of innocence first.

One slightly curious point was that I expected two objections, but failed to get either. The first was that, unless I am mistaken, no one was terribly upset that I had deviated from standard North American imminent pre-millennialism. I also don’t recollect anyone getting terribly upset that I seemed to be happy with an old age of the universe. I suspect they made allowances for me being a Brit. and therefore de facto theologically suspect. Incidentally, a number of people were clearly struck by the accompanying letter I wrote, which talked about what I felt it meant to be a Welsh author. At some point, I really ought to post this on my website.

And now I better get back to my college work! With every blessing.

Blog Tour

2008-02-19T15:19:00.000Z

Yes, I know it isn't Friday, but The Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog Tour, as I've already mentioned in a few blogs, is on now until Wednesday.

Check the links to find reviews and see what people are saying. Thanks to all who are participating!

Brandon Barr
Jim Black
Justin Boyer
Grace Bridges
Jackie Castle
Carol Bruce Collett
Valerie Comer
CSFF Blog Tour
Gene Curtis
D. G. D. Davidson
Janey DeMeo
Jeff Draper
April Erwin
Marcus Goodyear
Rebecca Grabill
Jill Hart
Katie Hart
Michael Heald
Timothy Hicks
Christopher Hopper
Heather R. Hunt
Jason Joyner
Kait
Carol Keen
Mike Lynch
Margaret
Rachel Marks
Shannon McNear
Melissa Meeks
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Mirtika or Mir’s Here
Pamela Morrisson
Eve Nielsen
John W. Otte
John Ottinger
Deena Peterson
Rachelle
Steve Rice
Ashley Rutherford
Chawna Schroeder
James Somers
Rachelle Sperling
Donna Swanson
Steve Trower
Speculative Faith
Robert Treskillard
Jason Waguespac
Laura Williams
Timothy Wise

Two ways of writing a book

2008-02-15T19:40:00.000Z

Some news first. I am away in the Midlands at the moment at the end of half-term and so am somewhat technologically isolated. Let's hope then that this blog makes it out into cyberspace. Secondly, next week, there is a concerted series of reviews on Shadow and Night by various reviewers associated with the Christian Science Fiction and fantasy group. So all sorts of people will be visiting my blog and hopefully saying nice things. So regulars, please be on your best behaviour!

Anyway I am busy with an editing project at the moment which, in addition to my normal job (the one that pays the salary) is keeping me pretty busy. I'm also finding myself preaching fairly regularly and am standing in for someone this Sunday; your prayers would be welcome. Nevertheless in my spare moments my thoughts are turning to the next sequence of books: provisionally entitled the Seventh Ship trilogy. At this stage, all I'm doing is putting thoughts and ideas together. Yet as I do this I have noticed that I am proceeding along a double track and think it worth sharing this.

One of the things I'm doing is factual. I am creating a world. What is the geography? What is the climate? What is the economic system? Who speaks what language? What is the level of technology? I am writing all those things that would be included if the CIA factbook or Wikipedia had articles on my imagined world (and know I don't have a name for it yet). This sort of thing is very intellectual, very logical and in one sense a long way removed from writing narrative. It is also frankly very dull; if you don't know how dull such things can be you have never read Tolkien’s Silmarillion. Much, perhaps most, of the information will never make it into print but will hopefully lurk in the background giving some sense of depth and reality.

Yet the second thing I'm doing is much more disorganised. It is, as it were, seeing pictures. I am imagining, or perhaps being, given images – snapshots – clips, if you like, of people, places and events. So for instance the other day I came up with a long line of steep-sided volcanoes rising up out of the sea and the fading away into the cloudy distance. I have pictures of a dispute in a dusty library, of a warm and sweaty night in reedbeds with something nameless lurking in the rippling waters nearby, I have seen people looking up to a distant range of mountains with fear in their eyes. These images are all largely disconnected. I had no idea how they fit together, if they do fit. Frankly, I do not really know whether I will use them all.

What is interesting is how contrasted these two strands are. The first is clearly much more cerebral and surely factual; it comes from the head. The second is much more intuitive and it emotional, sometimes it defies rationality. It clearly come from the heart or whatever organ it is that is genuinely creative. Both however are essential. I presume that readers want lively events in a living world and it is hard to see how one could write a long series of novels without doing both the creating the background situation and the dreaming up of the tale. Even in fantasy worlds, facts must be matched with experiences.

Normally I try and end my blog with some sort of meaningful theological observation. I'm not sure I have one here. But it does seem to me to demonstrate the intricacy both of writing and what we are as human beings. There's a complexity to us, my friends, which speaks to me more of us being made in the Master’s image than being the product of blind chance over however many million years you want.

The Archbishop makes people think

2008-02-08T19:37:00.000Z

Well, the winter’s monsoon seems to have ended and we've finally had some dry weather. Yet it remains very mild and today as I drove back from College in sunlight, spring didn't seem far away. Hurrah! Increasingly winters seem to pass us by in the UK. Oh yes, every so often a cold flurry will blast down out of what is left of the Arctic and rampage across Britain, depositing a few inches of snow, but within hours it's all gone. Down here in the moist southwest of Great Britain we have had nothing remotely approaching snow all winter.

But enough of the weather: there were lots of things I was thinking of talking about this week but then yesterday the sort of the big story blew up that I cannot really resist commenting on. I'm not sure whether it has made it over to where some of you dwell, but it's not the sort of purely local news that you good citizens of Tallahassee, Des Moines or even Brisbane can dismiss with a shrug of the shoulders. On the contrary, here we may just be a few steps ahead of the rest of the world.

Basically, in case you missed it, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, said, in as many words, that he felt that some form of Sharia law in Britain was probably inevitable. The result has been an enormous row, and for the first time that anyone can remember, people are seriously asking for the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Now as someone who has lived abroad in the more or less Muslim world of West Beirut for eight years I have some interest – and experience – in this matter. I have also, frankly, an interest in the Archbishop of Canterbury. It is not just that he is a Swansea man and a poet of some repute, (we Welsh writers need to stick together) it is because about seven years ago, before he was promoted to being head of the entire Anglican Church, I actually had quite a long chat with him. In his capacity as Archbishop of the Anglican Church in Wales he had been speaking at a Swansea Christian leaders meeting and at the meal that followed I found myself, quite inadvertently, sitting opposite him. We chatted about all sorts of things, the longer ending of Mark, Christianity and the environment, N. T. Wright and various other things. I remember asking him what he was reading at the moment. He then waxed lyrical about an obscure (and, I gathered, not just to me) Eastern European theologian from the Orthodox church. I came away with the impression of a man with a brilliant mind (he had held a distinguished post at Oxford) but one who was only questionably Anglican. I felt that, given half a chance, he’d quite happily have defected to the Orthodox.

Anyway, shortly afterwards, he got promoted to the big job. Several things have marked out his primacy, and both the sympathies with the Eastern Church and the intelligence I had been struck with have been a dominant feature. But as yesterday showed intelligence and wisdom are actually separate things and as innumerable commentators pointed out, he showed a great lack of wisdom in suggesting that some form of Sharia might be inevitable in the UK. One of the problems with Dr Williams is that he doesn't do clear, concise sentences. His language is rich, wordy, multi-layered and nuanced. Even people with a high level of English have to reread his articles to be sure of what he is saying. Try this for an example: "The rule of law is thus not the enshrining of priority for the universal/abstract dimension of social existence but the establishing of a space accessible to everyone in which it is possible to affirm and defend a commitment to human dignity as such, independent of membership in any specific human community or tradition, so that when specific communities or traditions are in danger of claiming finality for their own boundaries of practice and understanding, they are reminded that they have to come to terms with the actuality of human diversity - and that the only way of doing this is to acknowledge the category of 'human dignity as such' - a non-negotiable assumption that each agent (with his or her historical and social affiliations) could be expected to have a voice in the shaping of some common project for the well-being and order of a human group." Welcome back!

Anyway he seems to have meant that Sharia was, in some way inevitable. There is a lot I could say about this. After all, we have a large, diverse and troubled Muslim community, and how Muslims relate to traditional UK values is unclear. It's not of course helped by the fact that, notoriously, we British have no constitution and suffer from a mindset which could be summed up as ‘we’re sure it will work out somehow’. Anyway, as many people have rushed to comment, this opens up all manner of problems. For one, Sharia varies across differing Islamic communities and in some cases seems to be little more than a formalised way of preserving traditional culture. No one really seems to know exactly what it means and what are its limits. For another, if Islam is allowed exemptions from the law why should not Judaism, Rastafarianism (with its dedication to hashish) or even Chris-ianity – my own personal form of hedonistic religion – also be granted exemption?

Three points, I think can be made. The first is that quite simply, the Archbishop could have been much clearer. There are constant claims by his office that he is being misquoted, but given his style of language it's hard not to misunderstand what is happening. Words and phrasing that would work very well in an Oxford common room are inappropriate for today's world. It is clear the man needs the discipline of writing a blog every week.

Secondly, Archbishop seems to have the sort of rosy view of Islam and Sharia that is commonly found amongst academics who deal only with highly educated representatives of other faiths who are on their best behaviour. The reality on the ground is, as many have pointed out, very different. So for instance, for all the fine words about the rights of women under Islam, their lot is not a happy one. Equally, the fact is that the blasphemy laws within Sharia can clearly be used to take down any critic of the system. Islam is not really a religion in the sense that Christianity is. I recall an interesting conversation with a very bright, ex-Muslim-but-not-yet-Christian, who said to me “Chris, you know, I don't see Islam as a religion.” “You’d better explain that,” I replied, nonplussed. The answer was memorable: “Chris, I see it as a social structure, a system of organising society. It is that much more than a religion.” It’s a fair point. In short, the Archbishop needs to paid more attention to the harsh reality rather than the benign dream. To make a literary point; maybe he should have read less philosophy and theology and more tales of genuine experience.

The third point is that he has, at least, raised the matter to the level where it must be discussed. Presumably by accident – he seems genuinely surprised at being either understood (or misunderstood) – he has made the point that multiculturalism does not work. After all, if we are going to let different communities go their own separate way then it is surely inevitable that the most legalistic of those religions will demand that its legalism is enforceable. That is probably a ray of silver in the cloud of the dispute.

Another and brighter gleam of silver is this. Atheists and their kind may not like Christianity, but it is now plainer than it ever was that to remove Christianity from Western society creates a vacuum. That vacuum is clearly unsustainable and there is one obvious major contender to fill its void. Today, my atheist friends were only too happy to agree that the Christian faith might perhaps have something in its favour. You could tell from the way they phrased things that they clearly felt that there were far worse possible systems to live under. Indeed, there are.

On badges

2008-02-01T18:45:00.000Z

About 18 months ago, suddenly, without any warning, the college where I work issued us all with name badges, complete with barcode and not terribly good picture. We hang them around our necks with a ribbon with a special easy snap link so that, should students wish to do us harm, we cannot be throttled by our own name badges. I hasten to add this is an extremely rare and even unlikely occurrence; we count ourselves fortunate (I hope we do) because it is very rare indeed for students even to shout at members of staff.

I have decided that I am distinctly ambiguous about my badge. On the one hand, it gives me a sense of belonging. We dress very informally so this is the only thing we have that’s like a uniform. It says to anyone who comes in that I am a member of the college and not a parent, a tradesman or workman. In troubled times it is also a useful security measure and I suppose, in a small way, it gives us some sort of esprit de corps. It is also useful with a number of new teachers who frankly look so young that I might otherwise be tempted to mistake them for students.

And yet, I am also uneasy about my name badge. This was brought home to me this evening when coming in, laden with marking, at a quarter to five I found that almost the first thing I did was go upstairs and take my badge off. I found this interesting: Monday to Thursday evenings, I don't seem to have too much of a problem with a badge and sometimes my wife has to remind me to take it off before a Bible study. But on Friday nights, even if I have to work in the evening, I feel it is essential to get rid of the badge. I have no doubt there have been deep and penetrating studies done on badges and their significance but my feeling is that we see such a badge as a mark of ownership branded on us by someone else. The weekends I see as my own, and so here I reject any subliminal claims that I belong to my employer during this time. I would imagine those people who wear uniforms must feel something similar; the need to get out of them. There is something proprietorial about wearing the badge of one's employer.

My difficulty is that I cannot decide whether, spiritually (and surely this is the key point) my unease about the badge is a good thing or a bad thing. Is my wish to separate myself from my employer a good thing (a measure of the freedom I have in Christ? an unease about anything hinting at the Mark of the Beast?) or a bad one (my selfish and sinful desire for independence rearing its ugly head?)? How can I tell the difference?

Quickly, some other news. During February, a Christian fiction site is running me as the blog author of the month and we are hoping that this is the little push that will start the snowball rolling on the slope of fame. Mind you, things are already moving, my Facebook Lamb among the Stars fan group now has 96 names on it (and most look sane! :-) ). This week alone, I have had a request for a website interview and a separately blog site asking for review copies of the books. Well, we will see: I have been in the writing game too long to build my hopes up too much. Indeed, the measure of fame and following that I currently enjoy is probably more than I might have expected.

Blessings one and all.

A worrying vista

2008-01-25T18:30:00.000Z

Curiously enough for a blog, I don’t often talk about technology. After all, rumour has it that we blog writers are technology freaks: at best geeks, if not nerds. Anyway, in addition to many good things this week (the next generation down for a wet weekend, generally keeping ahead of work and students and even a few hours of sun), I have been also trying to make the most of my new Vista-equipped Dell computer.

In theory, it is a bit of a beast: 3Gb of RAM, fast Core2Duo 2.66 GHz chip, pretty reasonable graphics card and 22 inch monitor. All ought to be sweetness and light after my rather elderly machine running Windows XP. And don’t get me wrong: most of the time it looks wonderful, and acts wonderful. But I worry about what I see.

The main thing is that operating system has become so vast as to become almost incomprehensible. When I first started using PCs 22 years ago, I used to worry that there were files in MS-DOS that I didn’t know what they did. Then with Windows 95 I was concerned about the subdirectories that I didn’t know what they did. Now, with Vista, I worry about entire directories (occupying tens of megabytes) that I have not the slightest idea what they do.

Here Mr Gates might say, ‘Chris, that’s the price you pay for full stability. Ignorance is the price of bliss.’ Well, I might believe that if I felt I knew what Microsoft is doing. But clearly, it doesn’t. So, for instance, I have cancelled the automatic download of security updates because every day Vista downloads a 5.4 Mb Security Update (KB927978 for those who are interested) and then tries to install it when I try and shut down. But it never fully manages to do this, and so repeats the procedure. Every day. At this rate, my hard disk will be filled with useless security updates. The only way round seems to be to switch off the automatic download so that I get a little red cross in the corner to nag me that my security system is deficient.

As someone who has an environmental commitment I am also irritated by the fact that Vista seems to prefer that you put it in sleep mode rather than switch off mode. The naughty thought comes to me that this is to make the machine appear faster than it really is; it is pretty slow to start up (yes, I have removed most of the superfluous programs that it came installed with). The machine is also prone to long periods of doing nothing. I gather I am not alone in experiencing these things.

This is the point at which I expect the great army of Mac lovers to leap in and say ‘Yes! You should have bought a Mac.’ Well, I have a Macbook, and it’s good but it’s not perfect. Leopard shouldn’t have been released in the buggy form that it was and I also think that the Mac operating system seems to be heading very much to the state that Windows has already reached, of ever greater complexity and ever greater incomprehensibility. Anyway there are so many programs that I need Windows for. (Except of course that I have had to reinstall – and in some cases repurchase – programs in order to get them to work on Vista.)

The whole trend towards bloated and inscrutable software troubles me. It is probably not an original thought that operating systems are like religions. They are there to lead you to God and not get in the way. Vista reminds me of the worst sort of high church ritual; glorious to behold, completely incomprehensible, encrusted with all sorts of completely over-the-top additions, and ultimately, largely unnecessary. I have a determined Protestant desire not to be fobbed off with the pompous, the irrelevant and the bloated. I just want the job done quickly and securely. Let’s have a computer Reformation!

The problem of blessing

2008-01-19T08:38:00.000Z

A number of years ago I had a slightly unpleasant experience. We had just come back to Swansea from Lebanon and I was at a church meeting where one of the current evangelical gurus from London, a suave, smart-suited fellow with not a hair out of place, was holding forth on the subject of workplace evangelism. In the best tradition of not lecturing at people without a break he made us do some exercise on, I think, what our work colleagues liked. I stared at the blank sheet of paper for some time. The suited man strolled over and stared at me. “Are you finding it a bit too easy?” he asked. “No,” I said. “I’m unemployed.”

I was reminded of this salutary tale last night, when feeling like some dynastic Victorian father, I gazed over the table at not just my wife but Son I and wife, and Son 2 and fiancée, just arrived for the weekend through rain and wind, all discussing the Puritans. I felt blessed and want to share it but, mindful of my readership, feel uneasy. For there are those who are not so blessed.

I know I am not alone in being made uneasy by blessings. In our church, for example, we have taken a decision not to mark Mothering Sunday. We have too many failed marriages, single women and infertile couples. (If your church is different, please don’t tell me.) In a city where unemployment has never really gone away, we try, unlike the besuited speaker, not to assume that everyone has a job and a pension. In writing this blog to a largely unknown readership I must assume that not all out there are as blessed as I am. This raises a problem: what am I to do with my blessing? How am I to express my pleasure at friends, family, health, a measure of wealth (at least by the standards of most of the world) and yes, blog readers and fans? And all entirely undeserved.

In fact, I suspect that this last phrase is the key. It is a grace gift: it is all undeserved. (By the way isn’t it the unfortunate and probably inadvertent implication that blessing has been merited, one of the things that makes the prosperity gospel so unappealing?) So friends far and wide, I am blessed: I give thanks and I wish there was some way of sharing it around.

On various other matters, I apologise for the delay in writing the blog; it’s been a busy week. It’s that time of the month when I write a blog for Speculative Faith and I have had a lot of other things to do. And now, back to the family.

Answers please

2008-01-11T18:33:00.000Z

Well, back to teaching this week. The way the UK system works is that there are now major exams at the end of the year 12 when the kids are aged 16 or 17. These are actually extremely significant exams as any university application largely depends on the results. So, my students have come back from Christmas and you can see it dawning on them that very weighty matters which will affect the rest of their lives are just a few months away. It concentrates the mind wonderfully.

Anyway I want to throw out two questions to you today. I have been asked about both and I have no answer to either.

The first was a serious inquiry as to whether or not I had ever considered turning the books into a graphic novel. Frankly, I used to be rather scathing about such things until we went to France, the land of culture, and noticed that in the bookshops they always have a big section of graphic novels which they call bandes dessinée. (As an aside it is worth noting that whereas on British holidays visiting bookshops is pretty much inevitable due to our weather, we have been weeks in France and never considered visiting a bookshop.) It turns out that the French (as with the Japanese but not the British) are big on these things. I actually know very little about them, but I am now much less cynical. At best, they clearly are a distinctive and attractive art form of their own. In fact, I am reminded as I write that we once had a graphic story book of the Bible, which was so impressive that we lent it to someone and have never had it back. Given that many of my students, some of whom are otherwise very bright, do not read traditional books it seems to me that these are an interesting genre. Anybody out there know anything more about them? Anybody write them? Draw them? Know anybody to contact?

The second question, which occurred on the Lamb among the Stars Facebook page was on how appropriately to celebrate the release of the Infinite Day in June. Incidentally, if you have not visited that page and joined the fan club please do. I take a small – and possibly pathetic – pleasure in the fact that the number of people who are subscribed to the fan club has now just edged up over 70. Anyway there was the suggestion that we might try to have a virtual launch party. It is complicated, because in some parts of the world the books will not yet have arrived or been released. And I really don’t want plot spoilers occurring. But it would be fun to come up with an idea to celebrate what is a small, but clearly global association of fans. Something new that would be good publicity might be a good idea. Anyway over to you again: any ideas?

On suicide bombers and cultural suicide

2008-01-04T16:55:00.000Z

Over the last year or so, I have found myself wondering about my hearing. Conversation in crowded places and restaurants has seemed difficult and I have, on odd occasions, misheard students in class. Anyway I got my ears tested this morning and was pleasantly surprised to discover that my hearing was perfectly normal. The sensitivity of the left ear was very slightly down but it was still within normal parameters.

As I thought about the results, two related (trust me) thoughts came together. The first was sitting at my desk, eating lunch in Beirut one Monday in April 1983. In a paroxysm of sound somehow incarnated as brute force, I was picked up off my chair and thrown to the floor. As I staggered to my feet I could see through the door to left of where I had been sitting, shattered windows. Beyond them, a billowing black and grey cloud was angrily boiling rising up from the American Embassy, barely a hundred yards away. It soon transpired that a truck had driven in with what was later determined to be nearly 1,000 kg of high explosive. As stood amid the broken glass, my ears ringing, I heard the surprise in the voices of my Lebanese colleagues as they passed on the rumour that it had been a suicide bomber. Despite nine years of civil war it was an novel concept; it is now generally held that this was first suicide bombing of its kind.

I also remember going up to the American University Hospital shortly afterwards for some reason I cannot now remember. As walked up I saw a young couple – evidently Americans – walking away from the hospital, holding each other for comfort, their once smart clothes, their hair and their grief-stricken faces covered in a fine pale dust that made them look like as if they had returned from the grave. When I saw their kind again on 9/11, I shuddered. So I do wonder whether my slightly weaker left ear is a tiny scar of that blast. In which case I got off lightly: sixty-three people died.

The second thought was this: if it isn’t my hearing, is it my students? Actually I think there is something in this. My students – bless them – as a whole no longer read and they no longer read to people. Many of them have lost the art of clear speaking or any sort of verbal clarity. Their music shouts at them and they mutter at each other and mumble back. With exceptions, they do not express themselves with either clarity or coherence. I’m probably oversimplifying and I’m not blaming them. But I do think we have lost the art of speaking properly and what that portends seems to me far more worrying than any number of suicide bombers.

On a more cheery note; our younger son, Mark has just announced his engagement to a splendid lass, Alice. We heartily approve and the wedding is set for 15 November in the rather tasteful (and more importantly) very evangelical London church of St James Clerkenwell. Hurrah!

Christmas and "The Children of Men"

2007-12-28T18:40:00.000Z

Well, I hope you all had a good Christmas. Ours was pretty uneventful. For the first time for 26 years we had just the two of us for Christmas Day lunch, and I’m almost afraid to confess that we thoroughly enjoyed the break. Mind you, I made up for it on Boxing Day, where I spent literally twelve hours at church, helping manage Swansea’s Chinese Christian Fellowship in their big Christmas celebration. It was very impressive: I think in the end, they had over 200 people there. Well done guys!

What else to report? My article on Pullman on the Speculative Faith website aroused the attention of a very earnest atheist who wrote a long response. Unfortunately, this sort of site is not ideally suited for this sort of thing and actually, I don’t think most of the readership are terribly interested in apologetics. Equally, as someone pointed out to me, I believe we haven’t really worked out a proper way of doing debates on the Internet. Certainly not on blogs. Anyway, this thing got more and more sprawling as every time I answered the point he would retaliate with a response of greater length. As I have a life to lead, I curtailed it rather hoping that someone else would weigh in. It was a pity actually as he came up with the usual rather feeble comments about Jesus at the end. You know the sort of thing: if anything in the Gospels is challenging and striking it’s borrowed from Judaism or made up by the early church. The problem with this sort of thing is that it fails to explain how the church got started in the first place, least of all on that pretty improbable claim that Jesus had been resurrected from the dead.

Anyway, we got the DVD of the film Children of Men and watched it last night. If you haven’t seen it it’s worth borrowing, although the language is pretty strong. I suppose you could describe it as the curious offspring of the high Anglican English novelist P. D. James and the Mexican ex-catholic Alfonso Cuarón, but actually it’s more a loose meditation by Cuarón on themes from James’s novel than an adaptation. It’s an compelling dystopic tale of a near future where childlessness prevails, although a very major (and added) theme in the film is immigration. There’s a lot of catholic imagery too. Perhaps the most impressive thing is the compelling look and feel of an England that has fallen very much to nasty pieces. The urban fighting scenes seemed to me to be excellently done; there was an authentic and visceral (in every sense of the word) feel of places like Civil War Beirut. The interesting thing is although the film ends on a positive note, it is very open ended. From the relevant Wikipedia article this seems to be deliberate. In other words, it is the sort of typical post-modern offering in which it is the viewer's task to make sense of what is happening.

I would dearly like to know what P. D. James thought of it all. I think I shall have to insert a clause in my will that I do not allow my books to be creatively reinterpreted in this fashion. I’m afraid I am old-fashioned; I feel that in writing the text the way I did, I imposed my meaning on it at birth. I feel almost inclined to say 'dear reader, if you want another version that tells another story, then go away and write a tale of your own'. I hope that doesn’t sound grumpy!

Happy New Year to one and all. And Alfonso Cuarón, don't call me; I'll call you.

Chris

A Christmas story

2007-12-21T17:31:00.000Z

I thought I would tell you a true story of the most memorable Christmas I ever had. Twenty five years ago exactly, we were living in Beirut in a very fine apartment overlooking the Mediterranean on the campus of the American University. Now, by way of background, you need to know that 1982 was the year the Israelis invaded Lebanon, pounded their way up to Beirut, besieged it and drove the PLO out. I was a helpless and rather scared bystander of the first part of that episode; it was horrendous (it is now generally admitted to have resulted in 17,000 plus deaths). It was also ultimately futile; the war was planned and a success, the subsequent peace unplanned and a failure. (Sound familiar?) Towards the end of the fighting, a thousand plus Palestinian civilians were massacred at Sabra and Chatila by “Christian” militiamen: to what extent the supervising Israeli army knew – or even approved of it – is debated. The upshot was that a horrified West sent in a peacekeeping force, a large component of which were US marines. By the end of ‘82 the peace was still holding, although fighting in the mountains was beginning as various parties tried to settle old scores. But that December, a quarter of century ago, US troops were still driving around the city without body armour and weapons.

Through the Southern Baptist church that we attended, we invited three US marines for Christmas lunch. They arrived at church in their battledress, took part in the service and then walked down with us through the protected greenery of the campus to where we lived. They were polite and reserved but glad to be away from barracks; we ate good food and talked of all sorts of things. In the afternoon, we walked around the campus; it was a dry, cool day and the sun shone on the snows of the mountains above Beirut. We came back for more food and we have a photo of our eldest, John – just eight months at the time – sitting on a Marine’s lap, all smiles, his head almost buried by a forage cap. At some point, we would have made the inevitable observation that if there wasn't a heavily defended border in the way, we could have driven down to Bethlehem in a couple of hours. As night fell I prepared to take them back to their barracks and before they left they signed our visitor’s book. I have it before me now and their names were: Walter T. Kennedy of Duxbury, Mass, William H. Bowman of Marlow Heights, Maryland and Hector Colon of Vieqeus, Puerto Rico.

I drove them the five miles or so back along unlit, ruined roads and between wrecked buildings. On the way we passed Sabra and Chatila and the mass graves: we fell silent. Evil was about us and you could believe that in the dense shadows by the roadside, ghosts lurked. At the barracks – an ugly, four-storey building on the edge of the airport – we said farewell.

Yet if there were the ghosts of the past that day, there were also ghosts of the future. Almost exactly ten months later, on 23 0ctober, 1983, just after six on a quiet Sunday morning, a driver with a truck full of explosives drove into those Marine barracks and detonated a massive amount of explosives (5,400 kg of TNT; “the largest non-nuclear blast ever detonated on the face of the earth” ). 240 Marines were killed as the building was instantly turned to rubble. The blast woke me; a second blast, minutes later, that hit the French contingent, kept me awake. Looking at the list of the killed years later on the web I found that none of our guests had been slain; presumably their tour of duty was long over and they had been rotated out.

Now this point I hear the protests. Chris, you promised us a Christmas story. This is not one. It is awkward, it is troubling and doesn't have the happy glow, the chestnuts-roasting-on-an-open-fire factor that we like. No, it doesn't. But let me turn this round: who said that this sort of Christmas – the one promoted by Dickens, Hollywood and a billion Christmas cards – is authentic? Haven't we created – and connived in – (for all for the best reasons, of course) something that goes against the Christmas story? Read the biblical narrative again; isn't it all set in dark times? Do you see much cosiness in the stable? Much seasonal joy In Herod? (He would have understood Sabra and Chatila!). Have we erased the greedy brutality of the Roman occupation? What has happened to the warning of Simeon in Luke 2: 35 “And a sword will pierce your own soul too”?

Isn't Christmas all about God intervening in a thoroughly messed up and horrid world? Isn’t celebrating Christmas itself a declaration of faith – sometimes proclaimed in darkness – that despite the reign of evil, good wins in the end. In fact, and here’s a theologically worded thought: have we gutted Christmas by taking eschatology out of it? Doesn’t the mess that is this sad world only make sense in the light, not just of the first coming of Christ, but the Second?

Anyway, whether at peace or war, have the best of Christmases.

Chris

Philip Pullman: an odd letter

2007-12-14T15:37:00.000Z

Using similar methods to those alluded to by C. S. Lewis in the Screwtape Letters I have recovered the following recent letter from a senior devil to his nephew.

My dear Sneerpate,

Rumour has reached me that you are delighted that your patient’s son has started to read Philip Pullman and is going to see the film the Golden Compass. I am appalled at your enthusiasm. I see this as yet another indicator of the declining standards of the Tempters College. I suppose it is inevitable that, after generations of persuading humans that idiocy is a desirable state of mind – with some startling results – junior tempters are stupid themselves.

Do you really believe that these books or this film will ensure this child stays out of the Enemy’s hands? Oh, I can hear your pathetic answer, “Please Uncle Gnawbone, in the last book God is killed off.” And so he is. But do you really think that even the most naïve human child would recognise in that feeble caricature the dreadful reality about whom we can barely think without terror?

However, that is not the real issue. That is simply this; what is the price we pay for them to be tempted by such works? Oh yes, ’god’ is cast down, but those who read these books are expected to put their faith in all manner of things that human scepticism or what is called ‘rationality’ denies: magic, daemons, witches, wizards! You see what you are encouraging? Far from leading this child into the barren deserts of atheism with its insistence that the only things that exist are those that can be seen and felt, you are running the risk that this boy will develop a hunger for fantasy. Do you really not understand the danger? He may acquire a hunger for the supernatural, a longing for that which his everyday world will never provide. Fantasie is a perilous land for us. In those realms, it is all too easy for the Enemy to appear. Weren’t you strictly instructed that the safest route to the flames of our Father’s house is that wide, well populated path that shuns any hint of magic? Indeed so perilous is fantasy even when it is marketed as ‘atheistic’ that there are those amongst us who suggest that under all his many words (how these humans talk!) this Pullman is in fact an agent of the Enemy.

No, Sneerpate, keep the child from all fantasy. Indeed, better still, from reading. The Internet, with its encouragement of disorganised and incoherent knowledge and its promise of instant gratification of every whim is far, far safer. If the child must read, then let it be magazines or catalogues. A healthy taste in materialism can’t be started too early.

Your affectionate uncle

Gnawbone