Just got back from Greenbelt yesterday, and rather shocked to have to go into work today after 7 or so weeks summer holiday. It was a fantastic festival, with an excellent mix of talks from all angles and eclectic music too. Good hang out a bit with Rob Bell, Roman Krznaric as well as old friends too.
Thanks to everyone who made encouraging noises about the two talks I gave. They can be downloaded from the Greenbelt site here:
God is Strange, We are Stranger | A Plea for Christian Piracy
Both are connected to the new book I am writing, which should be available Spring/Summer 2010. Hopefully be some firm news on publishers/publication dates shortly, but it’s pretty much all written. For those who heard me speak about the new Apple events that Vaux are producing in the next few months, check out the site for latest info: vaux.net/apple
See you all on 17th Sept at a central London venue…
Comments
6 responses to “Back from Greenbelt | Pirates and other Strangeness”
Talks purchased! Impressed w/ speedy availability !
Well, Peter’s solo talk had such shitty quality I gave up on it…but that’s ok he just says the same shit over and over 😉
Your science talk started slow but is picking up
Of course being there would have made any of them incredible, but then that’s because they put LSD in the water.
Hi Kester
I caught the tail end of “We are strange, God is stranger”, and out of the blue remembered I owe you some sincere thanks – hence this post.
Three years ago you gave a talk entitled ‘Dirty Theology’, and at that time I was struggling on the last stages of my PhD in creative writing – a volume of poetry + thesis on Elizabeth Bishop.
The poetry was ‘doing away’ (as they say in Scots) and I had most of the thesis written, BUT no tub-thumping climax for my argument that Bishop cherished dirt (as well as primitivism) in her writing. Yes, I had a gut feeling that it wasn’t all leading back to Freud/Klein and her quirky ersatz primitive-Baroque aesthetic… but no key to unlock that hunch.
So… picture me then exiting your talk, laughing, exclaiming (you can guess what expletive) – showing all signs of delirium at God’s amazing provision in serving me up my very own portion of PhD manna – at Greenbelt! A year on, and after a fair bit of rifling through Purity & Danger, The Complex Christ and Trickster makes this World, it was all done, and I graduated last summer.
So there you go, a belated thanks and hopefully an interesting post-script to that time of your writing/thinking life.
Thanks again for all that you and Beki have – and are – contributing to Greenbelt. I hope it’s a quirky-happy thought that God’s used you to bring so many diverse things – from clay menageries to marriages, babies, and PhD’s – to completion…
God bless
Marianne Rustad
Thanks so much for the encouragement Marianne, and glad that the talk produced some good fruit. Sounds like an interesting thesis… is it available?
Going to be interesting times post-Greenbelt for Beki and I. But sure to be there next year!
Keep me posted re: the book – assuming the title doesn’t contain the word Emerging/emergent/emergence (that movement is over as far as publishing branded biz goes) and the cover doesn’t look like a feminine hygiene product, I “think” we can try to get a bit of buzz going here especially in the a/theist market.
BTW, for those in my talk wondering what possible impact quantum talk could have, here’s an article from the BBC today about quantum computing, which uses the superposition principle to do mind-bending calculations. We’re going to need some new levels of security once these things get going – they could decrypt pretty much any code without breaking a sweat.