Mid-faith Crisis Episode 282: Custard is holy ground

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.

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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.

Mid-faith Crisis Episode 281: The Desire to go Deeper

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.

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Little Gidding

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.

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Mid-faith Crisis Episode 280: Throbbingly unsettling

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.

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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.

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Mid-faith Crisis Episode 279: Focus and…er…something else

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.

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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

Mid-faith Crisis 278: The Easter Journey

In this episode we reflect on what the Easter story means for us this year. I’ve been particularly thinking about how the shape of the week – from triumph and joy, through perplexity and darkness, to new life and resurrection – is one of the basic human stories and also the shape of so many of our faith journeys. Listen and subscribe

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You ask Amazon, "What's your cheapest batteries?" and it lies to you. If you click the first link in a search-results page, you'll pay 29% more than you would if you got the best product – a product that is, on average, 17 places down on the results page. Amazon makes $38b/year taking bribes to lie to you

Pluralistic: Meatspace twiddling (26 Mar 2024) Cory Doctorow