Nick Clegg – Deputy Prime Minister – has travelled to Pakistan to ‘see for himself’ the horrific destruction that the recent flooding has caused. It annoys me that politicians always feel the need to do this, especially when environmental issues are involved. Everyone has to fly off and see the melting polar ice caps for themselves to ‘prove their green credentials.’ Not content to see the images of chaos and suffering, political leaders have to fly half way round the world to ‘see for themselves.’ I can understand politicians within Pakistan needing to go and visit, I can understand Obama needing to go to the gulf of Mexico, I can see why Bush not going straight to New Orleans was wrong.

But imagine if a leading figure from each nation had to fly with their entourage to ‘see for themselves’ what had happened when disaster struck. It becomes absurd. Especially given that these floods, hurricanes and melting ice are caused by global warming which is itself caused by the huge increase in human movement – flying in particular.

Though I am critical of the ‘virtual world’ in many ways, I think it’s also hugely beneficial: people can experience something of other areas without having to travel, without having to add tonnes of carbon emissions to confirm for themselves what must be patently true anyway. Did Clegg doubt the scale of the disaster until he’d seen it for himself? Did he not trust the television pictures or the words of his civil servants?

I’m reminded of Jesus’ words to Thomas – the disciple who had to physically witness his resurrection before he would believe:

“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

I wish more people would take that line when it came to being able to act compassionately in the face of terrible disasters.

Fantastic time at Greenbelt. Was brilliant to meet up with old friends and have some time to catch up. It was also really good to be able to speak about ‘Other’ and engage with people about the ideas that it throws up. I hope that those who came to the talks or just bought the book will find their way here and continue the conversations about pirates, violence, prison, TAZ, institutions and all the other stuff we managed to cram into the debate!

If you didn’t manage to pick the book up at the festival, then you can get it on Amazon here. Be great to hear people’s thoughts if they want to leave reviews on the site too. I’m still really excited about the ideas in the book and want to get them out to as wide an audience as possible, so do recommend it if you feel able to. The above is one of a number of little interviews I did around the site at various points, which will be uploaded to Greenbelt’s media section over the next few months.

The Intelligence² Debate – Stephen Fry (Unedited)
Uploaded by Xrunner17. – Full seasons and entire episodes online.

Absolutely fascinating programme on BBC Radio 4, looking at the cases of Sidney Bradford and Mike May, both of whom lost their sight very early in life, and were then lucky enough to be able to have it restored years later.

What is it like to grow up blind, and then be able to see again? One might think it would be happy and miraculous. But in the case of Sidney Bradford, it was far more complex. ‘He was a very successful blind person, who became a rather disabled seeing person.’ Having fantasised about seeing for so long, the visual world, when it finally opened up to him, was a huge disappointment. He became clinically depressed, and died only two years after his sight was restored.

Sight, it would seem, is not the ability to see, but the ability to understand and comprehend the visual information that is presented to us. “Without accumulating visual experience from which the brain can make sense of what the eyes see, vision is of little use.”

Like all good radio, I’ve been left with lots of interesting thoughts which need some time to process. If Jesus did restore Bartimaeus’ sight, did he do anything to help him cope with this trauma of seeing? Indeed, after all of these miraculous changes that we read in the gospels – people being brought back to life, cured of life-long illnesses – there’s little sense of the huge pastoral task that Bradford’s case suggests should be in place to bring people to genuine wholeness.

May has been more successful at coping with his new sighted life. But has also had to deal with disappointment. Seeing was the be-all-and-end-all that he hoped for. When it came, he realised it was only one sense among many, and he was far better using the special skills he had learned as a blind person to help him to continue to negotiate this strange world that ‘crammed so close to my eyeballs.’

The report into the horrific bombings in the village of Claudy in 1972 – in which 9 people were killed – has been published today. It appears to make sickening reading:

The Police Ombudsman found talks between the Catholic Church, the police and the government led to a priest suspected of involvement in the attack being moved to the Irish Republic. No action was ever taken against Father James Chesney, who died in 1980.

Detectives in 1972 believed that Father Chesney was director of operations for the south Derry IRA and was involved in the planning of the Claudy attack.

However, after discussions between the police, the Northern Ireland Office and the Catholic Church it was decided not to pursue Fr Chesney and he was moved to a parish across the border in County Donegal.

In the light of the recent child sex abuse scandal that has rocked the Catholic church, one has to ask serious questions about the effect of ‘divine authority’ on personal morality. As I’ve written here before:

Institutions mystify ideologies and this can both sustain and excuse behaviour which would otherwise be immediately taken as unacceptable. Zizek made this point about Stalinist Russia: people carried out terrible actions precisely because they were involved in an absolute ideology: once the absolute was removed their cover was taken and they had to take responsibility for what they had actually done as individuals.

The triple tragedy of these events in Northern Ireland appears to be that not just one, but three institutions with ‘hard’ ideologies colluded to prevent a man being brought to justice. If our more devolved ‘big society’ is about anything, it must be that the absolute is removed in proper ways, so that police are accountable, government actions are transparent, and religious leaders practice what they preach.

Just got back from a couple of weeks holiday where I took a proper break from posting. Space to think about other stuff really, and ‘Devon’ and ‘Wireless Network’ are not immediately at home in the same sentence yet.

This weekend I’ll be off to Greenbelt, where I’m doing two talks expanding on some of the themes in Other.

The first talk is called ‘One and Other‘ and is at 7:3opm on Friday in Talks 2 (Hebron)

From noisy neighbours to nervous political coalitions, fears about immigration, racism, fundamentalism and international terrorism – our fear of engaging ‘the other’ is at the heart of so many of our problems. What can Jesus’ commandment to love God and love our neighbour mean in an increasingly pluralist and fluid world of online friendship and offline anxiety?

The second, ‘Pirates of the Charism‘ (sorry – couldn’t resist the pun!) is on Saturday at 7pm in Talks 4 (Galilee)

Admitting that there are strangenesses in myself, in God and in other people, how can we practically work out better ways of becoming, as one theologian put it, ‘the kinds of selves who live in harmony with others’? Among others, pirates – with their ‘short and merry lives’ – may hold some clues to better engaging ‘the other.’

It’s in this second talk that I’m hoping to drill down further into the TAZ / Christian Piracy concept that lots of people have picked up on in the book and found contentious. So there’ll hopefully be good chance for debate on that. Be great to see people, so do come and say hello.

Apart from that, I’m working on the next mini-series of Apple evenings, which are going to be on Sept 15th, October 13th and November 17th. Follow appleTMP on Twitter for updates, or check the Apple blog.

Finally, some places I’ve turned up… Good to see Jonny’s new book (which I won’t call romantic tosh in public JOOKING) on Curating Worship, which has a long dialogue between him, me and Nick Hughes about Vaux and our take on curation. He’s launching it in London and offering free booze, so I’ll be there for that! I’ve also got a piece in Third Ways’ ‘Futures’ issue, and Becky Garrison’s book Jesus Died for This is out too, which has some stuff from me in it too. Oh, and if you didn’t catch me on William Crawley’s Sunday Sequence a couple of weeks back, it’s a great show!

Firstly, the series of posts I did on ‘A Plea for Christian Piracy’ can be found here. Start at Pirates [1] and work on…

Secondly, some a round up of some of the other posts (from Pete Rollins, Richard Sudworth etc.) that that generated can be found here… Plus a little thought on the crucifix and the skull and crossed bones here.

Finally, here’s a longer article I wrote – a version of which appeared in Third Way magazine – In Defence of Pirates, which I hope will be helpful. All of this is thinking I’ve done which is condensed into the section on piracy in ‘Other’, which I hope people will go read and respond to too… I’m convinced that the pirate/heretic/cultural transfer and TAZ idea is one that is rich for our times:

This, then, is the lesson that pirates hold for us as people of faith. Was not the incarnation the penetration of our culture, a rupture that we experienced as heresy, a challenge to our economics and ethics that we resisted and fought back? Was not Jesus arrested and tortured and strung up for all to see like those 17th Century lovers of liberty, chained to gillets by the Thames? Did he not also demand that ‘no Man has the Power of the Liberty of another; and while those who profess a more enlightened Knowledge of the Deity […] prov’d that their Religion was no more than a Grimace’?

Financially, spiritually, culturally, theologically… the time for some good piracy is upon us. Avast, ye lubbers…

I’m going to be speaking at Greenbelt at the end of August, and very much looking forward to engaging in the ideas in ‘Other’ with people over the coming months. Lots of good stuff yet to come!

It’s as if the human unconscious has its own microscope which has always been aware of these bizarre life-forms, which are so similar to the stuff of science fiction books that were written ages before any technology to see these tiny creatures existed.

Very interesting report today in the Telegraph that NASA have detected a large solar flare erupting from the sun – which is likely to cause some spectacular displays of the northern and southern lights.

These ‘coronal mass injections’ are actually a source of immense worry for disaster planners, as the largest eruption could result in every electrical device on earth having to be switched off to protect it from destruction. This has happened before: the ‘Carrington Event’ of 1859, in which the few electrical machines of the time burst into flames, and telegraph operators were sent flying across the room.

Hearing about this on the BBC science programme Material World inspired me to write a short story, which I’ve uploaded here for the first time. For those of you who enjoy short-form fiction, hope you enjoy it. The story concerns an astronaut turned monk, who is called out of his hermitage by a forward thinking Pope hoping to reinvigorate support for Catholicism and help a cash-strapped NASA by putting a man on a Voyager-style probe on a journey out of the solar system. As the solar storm hits, those in mission control know that the astronaut will not survive, but as he struggles with loneliness and dwindling faith, they wonder if it would even have been right to tell him of his fate…

Download and read the PDF here: Into Great Science Aug 10 And do it quick before your devices get fried