Wednesday 24 November 2010

Trains and tracks

What is it with trains that is so exciting? Is it the sense of adventure? Or of passively travelling (as a passenger) but in such a way as to see and recognise landmarks? On a plane travel is too quick and nothing identifiable is ever really seen except for huge landmarks.

With trains you travel at a speed where all things are viible but at a different speed and from a new perspective. Slightly aloft and different from the road but somehow remaining similar but yet different.

As the train passes through known and unknown places a glimpse can be had, but it is fleeting and all too quickly its gone again. There is no way to resist the sheer power and speed of locomotion.

Even if you wanted to linger, you can't and all too quickly you are moved on in your passive observation to whatever lies ahead.

Perhaps part of the mystery of the experience of travelling on trains is that a train can only go along a particular route. A route actively chosen by someone else to move people efficiently to some place else.

Sunday 21 November 2010

Looks like i'm staying.

Recently i registered a blog at a different blogging site, but it turns out that my little mobile phone isn't supported by that site. So it looks like my online identity will remain confused. God's lonely man, psalm 62 and the beat liturgist all rolled into one.

Its morning and i am drinking coffee while my amazing daughter sings and squeals with delight at a praise baby dvd while we have our "morning prayer" together. Who needs common worship?

Thursday 18 November 2010

Books to reflect on:

In my training so far, I have encountered a good few hundred books: I've read great chunks out of some of them and snatched at the purse strings of others, never really getting to know the book, just stealing quotations and the odd bit of inspiration. Over the course of a number of reading weeks I've touched down on the fertile ground of some incredible books and then had to swiftly lift off again to pick up the threads of other books that have needed to be read for assignments. On rare occasions I have been able to read a book from cover to cover for an assignment, such as the magnificent Colossians Re:mixed (which I'd wanted to read for about three years!) for a Biblical Literacy In A Digital Age course I am on. But these occasions are rare. With my undergraduate dissertation I managed to read some fantastic things, but not cover to cover.
I love reading theology books; I'm enthusiastic about it, but I am also a really slow reader: what I read isn't easily retained. So I often find myself having to highlight, underline and make notes on, if I want to have any chance of not having to do an immediate re-read.
It looks like the course load has provided a lot of opportunities to encounter a wide variety of texts of all academic levels: but less time to really digest them thoroughly. It is to this venture that this blog is pointing.
I'm really keen not to forget what books I've encountered that I want to read cover to cover; to scrawl on, highlight, underline and get to know. This may need to be done in curacy, or over the next ten years: but either way, the ever growing list can be found below:

John Howard Yoder, The Politics Of Jesus
Michael Frost, Exiles
Stuart Murray, Post-Christendom
Stuart Murray, Church After Christendom
Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination
Walter Brueggemann, Hopeful Imagination
Walter Brueggemann, The Word That Redescribes The World
Kenneth Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes
Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character
Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens
Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence
Bruxy Cavey, the End Of Religion
Capes, Reeves and Richards, Rediscovering Paul
Tom & Christine Sine, Living On Purpose
Stephan Bevans, Models of Contextual Theology
Jurgen Moltmann, the Crucified God
Alan Mann, Sin In A Sinless Society
Nancy Eisland, The Disabled God
Walter moberley, Prophecy and Discernment
David Platt, radical
John Kavanaugh, Following Christ In A Consumer Society
Avery Dulles, Models of Church
David Augsburger, Dissident Discipleship
Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation