I have a new article out. ‘How to be Wise - Confessions of a Recovering Idiot’ is about recovering more of an emphasis on wisdom teaching in church. Basically, certain strands of Christianity are always looking for revelation, for God to tell us what to do. But a hug chunk of the Bible, including a lot of Jesus' teaching, is based in Jewish wisdom teaching, which is all about how to decide on the best course of action, when God isn’t around to advise.
I am still working on my book on the history of Britain’s churches, a book which has taken is taking me much longer to write than I anticipated. The book is about rediscovering churches, rediscovering, in fact, the idea of sacred spaces. And one of the things I’ve experienced while working on it was how, throughout all my research and writing so far, I’ve felt like I have been treading a path walked by many others before me, albeit in very different ways.
So, the question I posed was this: ‘Why does God get all the praise when I did all the work?’ By which I don’t mean that I necessarily need or want more praise (being English I find any praise rather embarrassing anyway. Not to mention ill-judged) but I was trying to explore the relationship between human skills, creativity and effort and the inspiration and work of the Divine. Of course all things come from God and of your own do we give you, as it says in the Prayer Book.
Woke up to discover that Logitech had installed AI tools as part of my keyboard and mouse software. A little digging shows there’s no official option to officially disable it. (Although it can be done.) Apart from the fact that I detest the whole hype around AI, the idea of having your mouse require it is ridiculous. And to just install it and dump a folder on your Home Screen without asking is outrageous.
Lots of stuff in this week’s episode, but it seemed to me to have a common theme of depth. We talk about reading the Bible not more widely, but more deeply – learning a passage, or simply taking one verse and dwelling on it for a long time. And following on from last week’s recap on the idea of stages of faith, we discuss how the Mid-faith Crisis could simply be motivated by a desire to go deeper, to find out more, to go beyond the superficial.
On the podcast this week I reference T. S. Eliot's lines from Little Gidding: We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. This week I am angry at the state of the world and the state of the church, I am grieving the loss of an old friend. But poetry is comfort.
In this week’s episode, we revisit the idea of stages of faith – which is really what this podcast is all about. The idea of Mid-faith Crisis was also behind my book The Dark Night of the Shed. During the podcast, however, we also touch on how this isn’t just a spiritual journey: you can see the stages reflected in stories, worked out in relationships and patterned in life itself.
The Assembly is a wonderful programme. Michael Sheen is interviewed by a group of autistic, neurodivergent and learning disabled people. It’s fresh, joyful, surprising and moving.
In our latest episode, Joe and I discuss our themes for the New Year.1 (Our New Year begins on March 25 as was the custom up until the late eighteenth century.) My theme for this year is focus. I’ve been struggling against the endless waves of distraction for a long time now, and I need to do something to arrest the slide. Moving to micro.blog was one way to avoid distractions of social media whilst still having an online presence.
I am reminded of the grace of reticence, the power of discretion, and the possibility of being utterly private and autonomous yet deeply aware of and receptive to the world. If I am enchanted by staying out of sight, it is because such behavior seems so rare in our own species. In recent years, we have been more preoccupied than ever by the question of how to stay in view…
Visibility has become the common currency of our time, and the twin circumstances of social media and the surveillance economy have redefined the way we live. In his landmark 1979 book, The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch noted that “success in our society has to be ratified by publicity.” Forty years later, our cult of transparency shows his prescience, as do the enabling new technologies. It has become routine to assume that the rewards of life are public and that our lives can be measured by how we are seen rather than what we do.
From Akira Busch, How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency