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Gathered here are thoughts on faith, technology, culture and anything else that interests me. I hope you enjoy your stay.

Feel free to add comments; I won't edit them, as long as you promise not to promote meds ;-)

Is Institutional Religion An Out-Moded Technology? Apple 7 on 15th Sept…

Apple, the series of events I’ve been organising with some others, is back for another three dates. The idea behind Apple is simple: to get theology to engage with technology and social process. We’ve covered diverse ground such as social networks, the Large Hadron Collider, grey ecology, Heidegger and gadgetry. With this new series – [...]

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Back from Greenbelt | Other

In conversation with… Kester Brewin from Greenbelt Festival on Vimeo. 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 [...]

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Original Pirate Material…

Being in that part of the UK for holiday, and hearing on the grapevine that a few people are interested in exploring the thinking I’ve been doing around Hakim Bey’s work on pirates and TAZ, I thought I’d round up a few things here… Firstly, the series of posts I did on ‘A Plea for [...]

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Hell Is (more and more) Other People [2]

As a teacher – and an INTJ on Myers-Briggs – I can quite understand Sartre when he writes in a play that ‘Hell is other people.’ (I wouldn’t go as far as Zizek and say that ‘I hate my students – they are boring and stupid’, partly because they’re always trawling around the web looking [...]

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Hell Is Other People [1]

In ‘No Exit’ – what is considered to be his best play – Sartre wrote the line ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres‘ which is commonly translated as hell is other people. I was reminded of this last night hearing AC Grayling introduce Zizek, who had written in the Guardian that the worst job he had ever [...]

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Has What Emerged Retreated? | Returning to Institutions [4]

Emerging/Retreating [1] | Emerging/Retreating [2] | Emerging/Retreating [3] In the comments on the previous post Acetate Monkey asked ‘How did Vaux wind up?’ Resisting the temptation to explain all the ways that Vaux wound people up, I thought I’d post the section of the book that deals a little with that… with another encouragement to [...]

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Has What Emerged Retreated? | Returning to Institutions [3]

Emerging/Retreating [1] | Emerging/Retreating [2] I’m glad Jonny has posted some of his thoughts and responses to these posts on his site, and Andrew Jones has some great thoughts too, backed up by a range of pieces he’s written around the issues here too. As I set out in a long comment on Jonny’s blog, [...]

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Has What Emerged Retreated? | Returning to Institutions [2]

Emerging/Retreating [1] I’m quite surprised at the traffic caused by the last post – been the most read thing I’ve posted for a while, and that seems to suggest that the theme has resonated, though not all in agreement. I had a good chat to Jonny on the phone yesterday, who said he initially thought [...]

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Has What Emerged Retreated? | Returning to the Institutions

I’ve been thinking over the previous post, and over the conversation I had with Barry Taylor on Saturday about the state of things, and a thought keeps returning to me: there seems to have been a retreat to the institutions recently. I want to be very careful here, partly because a) I have many friends [...]

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Christiania | The Violence of Heaven [ 4 ]

Violence of Heaven [ 1 ] |  Violence of Heaven [ 2 ] | Violence of Heaven [ 3 ] According to Revelation – the apocalypic birth narrative of our future utopia – “when heaven is established, it will be a bloody business.” I have been trying to argue that any attempt to establish utopia [...]

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