A Journal of Impossible Things

Poetry on the unprinted page, or, the trouble with ebooks

noreply@blogger.com (Caleb Woodbridge) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:32:00 +0000

Right now, I'm in the thick of an exciting work placement with the Welsh publishing house Seren. Over eight weeks, I'm working as a Digital Assistant, getting them set up in the brave new world of ebook publishing. As both a book and technology geek, it's a great job for me to tackle.

Seren have loads of great titles: last year, they published The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness, which was long-listed for the Man Booker prize, and shortlisted for the Costa first novel award. Particularly up my street is their current series New Stories from the Mabinogion, which retells Welsh myths and legends in a modern style and context. They also publish a wide variety of fiction, non-fiction and poetry from Wales. It's really exciting to have the opportunity to work with them on creating ebooks.

Poetry in ebook form is one of the most interesting tasks facing me. Publishers are used to having complete control over the layout of the printed page. Contemporary poets make use of various typographic tricks to fuse together word, form and meaning. On an ereader, however, all that becomes fluid. Ebooks can be read on devices of all different shapes and sizes, from dedicated e-ink readers such as the Kindle, up to large computer screens, or down to mobile phones. Words reflow to fit these screens - which is great for reading prose, but can play merry havoc with the readability and artistic integrity of poetry.

For example, one of Seren's upcoming poetry titles involves two long poems, one of which starts normally from the front, the other of which is printed upside down from the back, so you can turn the book over either way to start reading. There's no exact way of replicating that experience in ebook form.

The formatting options available on ereaders such as Kobo, Nook or Kindle are still pretty primitive. The current EPUB and especially the Kindle file format are very basic. They are much more limited than what can be done on a normal webpage. But new file formats - EPUB3 and Kindle Format 8 - are on the way. These will allow more sophisticated layouts, fonts and image handling. In the meantime, many publishers are developing apps for those times when a basic ebook layout just won't cut it.

Of course, 90% of poetry is simply a series of lines on a page, perhaps with a bit of indentation, so there's plenty of poetry that's relatively straightforward - perhaps a little fiddly to convert correctly, but perfectly doable given time and patience. But the other 10%, those poems which push the boundaries of form and textuality, present both a creative and technical challenge - but one that I've started to get to grips with!

Slytherin, Saint Paul and the dangers of ambition?

noreply@blogger.com (Caleb Woodbridge) — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 23:41:00 +0000

Over the summer, I signed up for early access to Pottermore, the new Harry Potter website, and a few weeks ago I got the email granting me beta access. One of the activities on the site is completing a quiz in order for the Sorting Hat to put you into one of the four houses of Hogwarts, the wizarding school, according to your character.

As you'll know if you're a Harry Potter fan like myself, the House of Gryffindor, Harry's house, is famed for its courage; Ravenclaw, for intelligence; Hufflepuff, for diligence, and Slytherin for ambition. Slytherin is also the house that has produced the majority of Dark wizards, such as the evil Lord Voldemort, and as such has the reputation of being the "evil" house.

Somewhat to my amusement, I was sorted into Slytherin, which seemed to me ironic since I reckon I'm a pretty good natured guy, a far cry from Lord Voldemort or the unpleasant Draco Malfoy and his racial-purity obsessed chums. But on further reflection, I thought that if you take ambition as the defining quality of a Slytherin, rather than "being evil", it was actually a pretty fair choice. I really would like to change the world, and yes, I'm aware there's a hint of megalomania in that statement!

As the Harry Potter books suggest, ambition can be dangerous. More importantly, the Bible has some particularly strong warnings about ambition. But is it all bad?

The apostle Paul wrote in Phillipians 2:3-8:

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others. Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death — even death on a cross!

The apostle James also warned in chapter 3 verse 4 of his epistle:

For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice.

Does this mean I should squash my ambitions? Are they nothing but trouble? Or does the phrase "selfish ambition" suggest that there might be such a thing as unselfish ambition? Paul also wrote in Romans 15:20:

It has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on someone else's foundation.

And he told his young protégé Timothy in 1 Timothy 3:1 that:

Here is a trustworthy saying: If anyone sets his heart on being an overseer, he desires a noble task.

So it seems that Biblically speaking not all ambition is necessarily wrong. It seems to me that ambition is good or bad depending on what it's aiming for. Ambition can be good if it is an ambition for the glory of God and the good of others, but it is easily corrupted into something self-seeking and self-centred.

Our motives are rarely if ever entirely pure. Mixed in with an honest desire to do good is usually a self-centred desire for status, reputation and so on. The worship of our own self-image is one of the subtlest forms of idolatry. It can lead not only to pride, but also to deep discontent and despair as we attempt to maintain a certain image of ourselves.

God's grace is the liberating antidote to this bitter cycle of pride and worry. Realising that we are accepted and loved by God purely as a free gift of grace in Christ sets us free from having to prove ourselves by our actions, whether that's to God, others or ourself.

Grace also sets us free from the constant paralysis of analysis that can come from the introspection of always examining our motives to see if they're pure. Even though our motives are often impure, in Christ, God accepts us and uses us for his purposes anyway. The Holy Spirit is at work in us to help us develop the genuine love for God and others that is the proper motive for our actions. So while we should be self-aware and should seek to put to death our selfish ambitions, that shouldn't make us do nothing, or prevent us from having any ambition ever.

A good litmus test is whether we'd be happy if someone else achieved the good we are ambitious for. If someone else could do the same thing as well or better, would we be happy in the achievement, or is personal recognition what's really important to us?

What do you think is a healthy attitude to ambition? How do we get the balance right between wanting to achieve great things, and not being proud and self-centred?

There's Probably No Dawkins

noreply@blogger.com (Caleb Woodbridge) — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 11:40:00 +0000

American philosopher, debater and Christian apologist William Lane Craig has been getting attention for Richard Dawkins' refusal to debate him. Craig's Oxford debate has been publicised with a bus campaign stating 'There's probably no Dawkins'.

It's a funny and clever riff on the atheist bus campaign, and good publicity for William Lane Craig's Reasonable Faith debate tour. Dawkins is in a bit of a lose-lose situation - Dawkins would be hard-pressed to match Craig in the debate, and such an event would be good publicity for Craig but less so for Dawkins; but by refusing, Dawkins looks weak and Craig still gets lots of publicity.

In response, Dawkins is trying his best to dismiss him as a legitimate intellectual figure, accusing Craig in The Guardian of justifying genocide in the Old Testament. This is a tricky subject, and as such is a good 'distraction' for Dawkins to use in diverting attention away from the debate about God's existence. I think it's quite telling - the New Atheism is as much an attack on the goodness of God as it is on his existence.

Of course, divinely-sanctioned war in the Old Testament is an important issue in its own right. For an introduction, check out these articles on Bethinking: Old Testament Mass Killings, Is God a Monster?.

But on the basis of an atheistic, naturalistic worldview, so what if the Israelites committed genocide? If we are nothing but molecules in motion, then there's no more moral import to the movements of some ape-descendants in the Middle East than there is to continental drift or the Northern Lights.

Of course, genocide is always wrong, and we know it's wrong, but that suggests that there's more to reality than Dawkins' atheism allows. Atheists are just as moral as anyone else, but this is inconsistent with their stated beliefs - you can be moral without God, but you cannot justify objective, universal morality from a purely naturalistic philosophy.

Dawkins is also begging the question by accusing Craig of endorsing genocide, because Craig's argument is to explain why the war described in Judges was not in fact genocide, but was a proportionate, targeted and morally justified war given the full circumstances and context.

As a reason not to debate Craig, it's a pretty weak one. Dawkins is basically saying he won't debate with Craig because Craig takes the Bible literally, even the parts that go against modern morals and values. This is an odd reversal: Dawkins devotes most of his attention in The God Delusion on attacking the more extreme versions of religion rather than its more "moderate" forms. But now he's saying he'll only debate "moderate" religious figures. A bit inconsistent, surely?

However, I think Craig and those promoting him might need to tone down the rhetoric a bit. There's a danger of going too far and appearing needy and attention-seeking. Potential debate opponents need to be reassured of a fair fight, rather than being invited to an intellectual ambush. In an interview on BBC Radio 4, an atheist complained about Craig's "slippery arguments". On the other hand, this guy seemed to be objecting that Craig uses lines of argument that sound convincing and are hard to refute without a lot of work. It seems that Craig should be ashamed of using such dirty tricks as having strong arguments for believing in God, and use unconvincing arguments that are easily refuted instead!

See the programme for William Lane Craig's Reasonable Faith tour to find out where he's appearing, or check out a recording of his lecture at Imperial College London from earlier this week.

The Joys of Rereading

noreply@blogger.com (Caleb Woodbridge) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 09:53:00 +0000

So many books, so little time! I'm enjoying having more time for reading for pleasure now I've finished my MA. It's sometimes possible to feel guilty about going back to reread books, when I've got so many unread books waiting for me.

But you never actually read the same book twice. You never have the same experience of a book twice, because you will have changed. At different times in your life, you bring different experiences and knowledge with you to a book - you'll pick up on different things, other elements will resonate with you, you'll spot connections you missed before.

In An Experiment in Criticism, C S Lewis proposed judging books by how their readers read and respond to them, rather than judging the taste of readers against some pre-determined "canon" of quality literature. So rather than good and bad books, or "literary" versus "genre" books, "classic" vs "popular", he distinguished between "literary" and "unliterary" ways of reading.

You can judge a book on the quality of its readers, Lewis suggests, and the way in which they read the book. If a book is "tossed aside like an old newspaper the moment it has been used, unliterary reading can be diagnosed with certainty". But, "where there is a passionate and constant love of a book and rereading, then however bad we think the book and however immature or uneducated we think the reader, it cannot".

A good book invites and rewards rereading. It will also have more on offer than just "how will the plot be resolved?" Plot is the skeleton on which the juicy meat of story hangs. In a good book, you can enjoy the characters, situation, descriptions, atmosphere and so on repeatedly even when you know how the story ends. And a good reader is one who delights in not just in books in general, but loves specific books and returns to them to drink again from their riches.

Life, Death, Steve Jobs and Success: The Richest Man in the Cemetery?

noreply@blogger.com (Caleb Woodbridge) — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 09:40:00 +0000

By any human measure, Steve Jobs' life was an incredible success. Co-founder of Apple, former owner of Pixar, a visionary who transformed computing, the music industry, mobile phones and much more.

And then he died, aged only 56.

Jobs was suffering from pancreatic cancer, and his death at such a relatively early age is deeply sad. And yet in Steve Jobs' Stamford University commencement address in 2005, he was able to say:

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

"Follow your heart". Jobs' success was due in a very large part to his sense of vision. He didn't want to make "me too" products, to follow existing trends and successes, to be a slave to market research. He said, "For something this complicated, it's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."

But if that's true of computers or iPods, then what about life? Will "following your heart" really make you happy? Perhaps when it comes to what really matters, we don't know what we want until we're shown what we need.

In Luke 12:13-21, Jesus told the story of a rich man:

The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. He thought to himself, 'What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.'

Then he said, 'This is what I'll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I'll say to myself, You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.'

But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?'

This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich towards God.

Jesus tells us that what really matters is being "rich towards God" rather than storing up things for himself. Unlike the man in the story, Jobs wasn't concerned simply with making money. He famously said:

Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me ... Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful... that's what matters to me.

But while we are probably quick to recognise the emptiness of chasing mere money, profit and riches, we perhaps fail to recognise that pursuing achievement and excellence can be just as meaningless.

Trying to "do something wonderful", leads to frustration, anxiety and worry as much as it does to satisfaction, even if you actually succeed. "You can't take it with you" doesn't just apply to your bank balance, but also to your CV, whether you've built a business empire, invented great devices or created incredible works of art, or anything else.

Jesus came to show us what we really need. If we simply "follow our hearts", we risk missing out on what will truly satisfy. He came to tell us that our deepest needs and desires can only be met by being rich towards God. Instead of worrying, even about the basics of life, what we will eat or what we will wear, he tells us to "Instead seek God's kingdom, and these things will be added to you" (Luke 12:31).

But what does it mean to "be rich towards God" and to "seek God's kingdom"? How do we do that? It means seeking and treasuring God as Father and King, finding our meaning and purpose in life in following him. God is revealed to us in Jesus. Jesus said "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father". Jesus died on the Cross for us, showing us God's self-giving love. It's only when we see Jesus that we see what we really need, what will really satisfy.

God's kingdom is all-encompassing, for all of life - because God is a loving and righteous, just and generous, we are called to live in the same way. Luke 12:33-34 tells us,

Sell your possessions and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

When we find our treasure in God, we have a meaning and purpose that demands our whole life, but will outlast death. Jesus isn't another app for the smartphone of life; he's a whole new operating system, who transforms our lives infinitely more radically than the smartest new gadget or device.

I'm not criticising or condemning Steve Jobs; I admire his achievements, and wouldn't presume to know where he stands before God. My prayers are with his family and friends.

But as the world marks the death of a man rich in vision and conviction, we would all do well to consider Jesus' question, "What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?"

Throes, and a couple of pages

noreply@blogger.com (Caleb Woodbridge) — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 10:58:00 +0000

I'm in the last throes of finishing my dissertation, which is due in next week - I might resume somewhat more regular blogging once it's handed in!

"Throe" is a great word, by the way. The OED defines it as:

1. A violent spasm or pang, such as convulses the body, limbs, or face. Also, a spasm of feeling; a paroxysm; agony of mind; anguish.
b. spec. The pain and struggle of childbirth; pl. labour-pangs.
c. The agony of death; the death-struggle, death-throe (Sc. deid-thraw).
2. transf. and fig. A violent convulsion or struggle preceding or accompanying the ‘bringing forth’ of something.

...which seems to just about sum up what I'm going through at the moment! In the meantime, I've added a few general pages, linked to in the sidebar: About Me, My Writing, and My Designs. They're a bit basic at the moment, but I'll be adding more information to them gradually.

Makes a change from Hobbits

noreply@blogger.com (Caleb Woodbridge) — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 07:54:00 +0000

I'm still very busy with my dissertation, but I've got an exciting break today: I'm off to London to the BFI preview screening of 'Let's Kill Hitler', the first episode of the autumn series of Doctor Who! I'll be reporting on it over on the Impossible Podcasts blog and Twitter account.

Thoughts on my MA

noreply@blogger.com (Caleb Woodbridge) — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 08:25:00 +0000

Well, it's been a while since I updated my blog, mainly because I've been keeping very busy with my English Literature masters. I handed in my second set of essays a few weeks ago, which were titled "Childhood, colonialism and Christianity in Swiss Family Robinson and The Coral Island" and "Faërie, art and magic in Sir Orfeo and Tolkien’s fiction".

At Easter, I heard that my application for PhD funding wasn't successful, so my plans to research religion in children's literature, 1950 to the present, are on hold for the moment, and I'm now looking for a job for after I finish the MA. I'd like to return to do a PhD at some point, but it will probably be good for me to get a full-time job and be back in the "normal" working world, and I'm hoping my MA will stand me in good stead in finding something writing or communications based that I'll find interesting and satisfying.

In May, I gave my first academic paper at the Myth, Legends and Folktale conference held at Cardiff University. It was titled King Arthur and Christendom, focusing on Malory, Tennyson and White's versions of the King Arthur story. It was based on one of my autumn MA essays, and looked at changing representations of the relationship between Arthur and the Grail, and how that revealed changing conceptions of the relationship between secular and sacred. Yesterday I heard that I've had a second paper accepted, this time for the Christian Literary Studies Group conference in Oxford in November - I'll be discussing Heroism in The Lord of the Rings and The Once and Future King. So I'm very excited - and slightly nervous! - about that.

I'm thoroughly enjoying studying English Literature at a postgraduate level. Managing my own time and staying focused can be hard work, but I enjoy the time researching in the library, reading books, and writing up. The pressure of essay deadlines isn't much fun, and I've got to be very disciplined over the summer to get the 16-20,000 word dissertation written, but it's good to develop the organisation and motivation to carry out this kind of research.

The second reason I've not updated my blog much is because most of my spare time has been going on reviving Impossible Podcasts to record commentaries the new series of Doctor Who, and getting it up and running with general science fiction and fantasy reviews and articles. It's been fun doing that with Peter, Swithun, James, Olivia and some other friends and guests. I'll be uploading some Tolkien episodes of the podcast over the next couple of weeks. If you enjoy science fiction or fantasy, check out our website, or find us on Twitter, Facebook or iTunes!

Census 2011: No religion please, we're British?

noreply@blogger.com (Caleb Woodbridge) — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 16:06:00 +0000

Originally printed in Gair Rhydd, 28th April 2011.

There are three kinds of lies, the saying goes: lies, damned lies and statistics. One statistic has proved particularly controversial: the 2001 census found that 72% of the population described themselves as “Christian”. With the 2011 census, the fight is on to get it changed.

“If you’re not religious, for God’s sake say so”, runs the British Humanist Association’s (BHA) campaign slogan to encourage non-believers to register their disbelief in the current census. As a Christian, I can see no possible objection to having an accurate picture of the nation’s beliefs. It seems pretty likely that religion is in continued decline in Britain. But the real controversy is over how these statistics are used politically.

The BHA argues that the census figures on religious affiliation were used to justify increasing the number of faith schools, special privileges for religious groups in equality law and other legislation, retaining Bishops in the House of Lords and much more. The campaign to get people to tick the non-religious box is also about decreasing religion’s influence in the public sphere.

It’s right to take the question of religion seriously. It makes an everlasting difference if we will face a choice of heaven or hell, or if we will be reborn in a cycle of reincarnation, or if this life is all we get, and so on. It’s in no-one’s interest for someone to think themself a member of a religion without really understanding and being committed to its teachings and practices.

It’s not just eternity, either: religion makes all the difference to everything from education to marriage, from war to abortion. Our beliefs should not be a matter of habit or cultural identity, but of personal, rational conviction. What we believe really matters, so tick what you really believe on the census.

But I think using religious statistics to make political arguments, whether by the non-religious or religious, misses the point. Political issues are usually questions of principle – statistics shouldn’t come into it. Rights and freedoms and responsibilities should apply to everyone equally.

If faith schools are acceptable, then statistics might decide which faiths are taught where, what the distribution should be of Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, secular and so on. But statistics can’t tell us whether or not religion ought to be taught at all in schools in the first place. Should education be religion-free, to allow children to make up their own minds? Or would a secular education simply mean secular indoctrination?

Or take the example of Owen and Eunice Johns, the Christian couple barred from fostering because they believe, in accordance with traditional orthodox Christianity, that homosexuality is a sin. Despite promising that they would show love and support to any child they fostered no matter their sexuality, their moral stance was deemed potentially harmful.

Whatever you think of the Johns’s beliefs, the issue can’t be decided simply by majority vote. If people have freedom of belief, then they have it even when it runs contrary to the opinion of the majority. A teenager disagreeing with their parents’ morality would be nothing new. Should an atheist like Richard Dawkins be barred from fostering, in case his belief that religion is immoral harms his child should they adopt a faith? The Johns are victims of an intolerant secularism intent on excluding faith, not on promoting freedom.

It’s also wrong to assume that all people of a particular religion will support a particular policy, and neither does being non-religious necessarily imply support of secularist politics. To treat religious affiliation like a vote for a political party is a logical confusion and an abuse of statistics.

Let’s stop the statistical one-upmanship right now. I don’t want any special privileges or exceptions for religious people, but for everyone, both religious and non-religious, to have the same freedom to live according to their beliefs and principles – even for Jedis!

Vengeance and grace in "True Grit"

noreply@blogger.com (Caleb Woodbridge) — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 21:09:00 +0000

I went to see the Cohen brothers' film True Grit earlier. It's based on a book by Charles Portis, but is apparently a remake of the 1969 film starring John Wayne. It tells the story of 14-year-old Mattie's efforts to gain vengeance against Tom Chaney, who killed her father, by enlisting the services of Rooster Cogburn, played here by Jeff Bridges.

Like Joel and Ethan Cohen's previous film, the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men, there are no easy answers to be found in Mattie's search for vengeance. But while I found the arbitrariness and lack of closure in No Country for Old Men to simply be unsatisfying, rather than interesting or profound (There Will Be Blood was robbed of that Oscar), True Grit is much more engaging. This is partly down to the wonderful dialogue: always sharp and funny, often echoing with Biblical resonances. But at a deeper level, the film is not just about vengeance, but also about grace.

At the start of the film, Mattie says:

"You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free with the exception of God’s grace."

But she shows little grace, pursuing Tom Chaney with single-minded determination. She doesn't want him to simply die or to face justice, but to do so in the knowledge that it is for killing her father. She has a sharp legal knowledge and clings to the language of law and of contracts in situations where it seems wildly out of place.

I don't want to give anything away, but while forgiveness is conspicuous by its absence, I think grace ultimately does play a part in Mattie's story. It's worth asking of the film, what is its view of grace? How might grace be obtained? Does grace only come from God? As a Christian, I might take a rather different view of the world than the one offered in the film, but True Grit offers an engaging story and an intriguing engagement with these ideas.

I've also just seen an article by Stanley Fish in The New York Times on this subject, Narrative and the Grace of God: The New 'True Grit', which discusses these themes in more detail (and gives more of the story away, so be warned!)

Why study Tolkien?

noreply@blogger.com (Caleb Woodbridge) — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 15:12:00 +0000

One of the modules I'm studying this semester is Tolkien's Medievalism. J R R Tolkien was not only a fantasy writer, but also a distinguished scholar of medieval literature. His essay Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics remains influential to this day. The rich depth of his writing comes from his love of language and of medieval storytelling, making him the modern writer that medieval scholars love to study.

He obviously did something right: The Lord of the Rings is the most popular novel of the 20th century, and also one of the most derided. J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy epic has sold over 150 million copies. The tale of Frodo the hobbit has won poll after poll across the world. But many critics howl in protest at its success, dismissing it as childish escapism.

I admit that it’s a story - no, a world - that you can lose yourself in. The hobbits, with their anachronistically English ways, are our companions on the journey into Middle Earth. It’s full of great characters, such as Frodo and Sam, Gollum and Gandalf. It’s packed with exciting events, from the flight from the Black Riders all the way through to the final confrontation above the Cracks of Doom.

But good storytelling isn’t childish. The people who worry most about “escape” are jailers. Great literature is more than just a good yarn, but not less. Far from being “mere escapism”, Tolkien used fantasy to deal with the big issues of the 20th century.

As Tom Shippey argues in Tolkien: Author of the Century, like George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, and William Golding, Tolkien turned to the fantastic to make sense of his experiences of modern warfare. Industrialization, global warfare, environmentalism and the nature of evil all loom large in the fabric of his novel.

Modernist writers responded to the horrors of the First World War and the barrenness of modern life with increasingly disjointed and formless writings. Writers like T. S. Eliot drew on ancient myth, but as broken fragments.

Tolkien, while sharing many of their concerns, did something very different. Drawing on his knowledge of Anglo-Saxon and Norse myth and legend, he wove a story of unique power and insight. When it mattered most, Tolkien reaffirmed the great values of human civilization: Good against evil. Unity over division. Self-sacrifice over power. And in doing so, he wrote a story that will speak not just to our time, but to all times.

I honestly believe that Lord of the Rings is going to be one of those rare stories that lasts, which like such works as The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost, will still be read and enjoyed hundreds of years from now.

If you're interested in Tolkien, and especially in academic study of his writings, then you'll probably share my enjoyment of The Tolkien Professor podcast, in which Professor Corey Olsen of Washington College discusses his writing in a lively and engaging way, with lectures, interviews, Q&As and readings.

There's a veritable industry of Tolkien scholarship. Some titles that are good introductions are the aforementioned Tolkien: Author of the Century by Tom Shippey, The Tolkien Fan's Medieval Reader by Turgon and The Keys to Middle Earth: Discovering Medieval Literature through the fiction of J R R Tolkien by Stuart Lee and Elizabeth Solopova. Looking at the medieval influences of Tolkien (and other writers such as C S Lewis) is an easy way to get into medieval literature, which is itself fascinating and wonderful.

Men Against Porn?

noreply@blogger.com (Caleb Woodbridge) — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 15:02:00 +0000

Opinion piece for Gair Rhydd, published 15th November 2010.

Believe it or not, I’ve never looked at porn. Far from being harmless “adult entertainment”, I believe porn degrades both women and men, and damages relationships and society.

Defenders of porn say that people know the difference between porn and reality. But the unreality of porn is one of the problems. Rather than engaging with the reality of another person, with their own thoughts, feelings and pleasures, porn is a sad retreat into fantasy. Worse, porn conditions us to treat others as simply as “living porn” - as objects to be used for our own sexual gratification.

Porn won’t turn you into an overnight misogynist. But we’re deluding ourselves if we don’t think it has any effect. Our culture is increasingly pornified. We don’t blink as almost-naked women cavort in adverts. Lad’s mags are a normal feature on the shelves of newsagents, offering competitions to win free boob jobs.

But what should we do about it? Try to ban porn? I don’t think that would work, and I don’t think it gets to the heart of the issue. Where there’s demand, there will always be supply. We need self-restraint, not censorship. Men are traditionally seen as the main consumers of porn, though it is becoming increasingly normal for women too. So having men speak out against porn is powerful and important.

This is where a new website, the AntiPornMenProject, comes in. Crucially, it’s a place for men to speak out against porn, arguing from feminist principles. It says, “Pornography is one of the most important social issues that we face in tackling both violence against women and wider gender inequality, as well as an important personal issue in the lives and relationships of many people”.

I wouldn’t call myself a feminist, but I agree wholeheartedly. But something puzzles me. The site goes on to say that it isn’t against porn for “any conservative or religious sentiments”, and to quickly clarify “we are anti-porn is because we are pro-sex”. I might be reading too much into it, but as a Christian, I found this rather odd. It implies that while feminists have “reasons” for being anti-porn, religious people have “sentiments”. They are also inevitably conservative, and probably anti-sex too.

But such stereotypes are mistaken. I don’t oppose porn because of some arbitrary “Thou Shalt Not”, or right-wing reactionism, but for the same reasons – porn is bad for women, society, sex and relationships. You can be both a feminist and a Christian, and many forms of the two share common ground.

Of course, not all strands of feminism, or flavours of Christianity, are compatible. Porn was a key battleground in the Feminist Sex Wars. The 1980s in particular saw bitter arguments between anti-pornography feminists and “sex-positive” feminists, who argue that porn can be empowering and liberating for women.

But it seems to me – in common with many feminists – that the sexual revolution, far from liberating and empowering women, has made many women far worse off than before. Pro-porn feminism, far from improving sex for women, has made it worse.

Christianity has had a chequered history when it comes to women. But if you go back to Jesus’ life and teachings, you’ll see that he smashed through the gender divide of his day. He was unafraid to spend time with women, and others who were excluded from society – the “sinners”, tax-collectors and prostitutes. St Paul wrote that in Christ, there is neither male nor female – we are all one.

There are differences, of course. Christians are so pro-sex, we think it’s almost sacred, and so should be enjoyed within the covenant of marriage. Some Christians, myself included, believe that the Bible teaches masculinity and femininity aren’t just a matter of biology or culture, but spiritual and moral realities. Men and women should be equal in worth, in rights and opportunities, but we should also recognise and celebrate their differences.

Porn isn’t just a feminist issue, or just a religious issue, but an issue for everyone: men and women, liberal and conservative, religious and non-religious. While not everyone can agree and we can’t agree on everything, we can still unite against porn.

Oh, the humanities!

noreply@blogger.com (Caleb Woodbridge) — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 14:53:00 +0000

Article written for Gair Rhydd, published 11th October 2010:

Cuts are everywhere, but the arts and humanities have their head against the block. With plans to cut its funding by as much as 25%, they are treated as an expensive luxury rather than a vital part of our national life. I've just returned to university to study for a master's degree in English Literature, so I've obviously got a horse in this race, but I find this attitude very short-sighted.

The arts in Britain do contribute massively to our economy, as does the study of humanities to a degree. The arts employ 2 million people, and contribute £16.6 billion to our exports – not bad value for 0.08% of the national budget. But that’s not the main reason we should protect them. If they are reduced simply to a price tag, we’ve already lost our souls.

“Impact” is the latest buzz-word in the Higher Education quangos that govern our universities. Doing high-quality research isn’t enough any more; universities have to prove it has “impact” on society if they want to good assessments and continued funding. This is fair to a point; if tax-payers are funding university research, they want to know what they’re getting out of it. The problem is a narrow focus on money and headlines as the criteria of success.

Rewarding academics for getting their ideas in the papers or on television won’t deliver good research, just sensationalism. Academic study by its very nature is specialised. You can’t expect it to make good 10-second soundbites. And while humanities subjects don't typically deliver a direct economic benefit in the way that, say, science or engineering do, there's much more to life than just economic competitiveness. The humanities are valuable precisely because they don’t typically have much direct economic value. They teach us there is more to life than the bottom line.

Understanding our culture, past and present, really matters. We need people who have a deep understanding of language, literature, history and so on. We need to support the creation of art – painting, music, theatre, literature and all its other myriad forms. We need voices that will both preserve and pass on, confirm and challenge, our values, culture and heritage.

No society can function for long without creative vision and a humane sense of value and purpose. While science, technology and engineering tell us “how” to do things, it takes the arts and humanities to tackle the questions of “what” and “why”. Neglect the questions of art, the wisdom of the humanities, and you are left with a technocratic society that may be efficient, but has no clear purpose.

The point is not to set the arts and humanities against the sciences. Both sets of disciplines are necessary for our well-being. But we need to resist the idea that science and technology are the “real thing” and philosophy and ethics, literature and theology, are airy abstractions. We need to fund not just those areas with “survival value”, but ones that give value to survival.

A good humanities degree not only teaches critical thinking skills and a deeper understanding of our cultural heritage, it teaches us how to be human. Art as its best enlarges our understanding of the world and of other people.

The arts and humanities may or may not help you get a job or fix the economy, but they certainly help you get a life.

Christianity & Postmodernism 8: Conclusion and Index

noreply@blogger.com (Caleb Woodbridge) — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 14:42:00 +0000

I've been rather busy with my MA course over the last couple of months, but here are at last is the index to all the posts in my series on Christianity and Postmodernism. I hope to return to a more regular blogging schedule now that my essays have been written!

Make no mistake, Postmodernism is a hollow and deceptive philosophy that depends on the basic principles of the world, rather than on Christ, as Colossians 2:8 would put it. But so is Modernism. Both of them grasp at least some aspects of truth. Both bring not just challenges, but opportunities to witness to what God has done in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Against them both, we need to demonstrate that faith and reason work together to produce knowledge and discover truth. The Christian faith is not less than reasonable, but it is more than rationalism: the Gospel speaks to you as a whole person, intellect, will, emotions and every other aspect of you. Jesus calls you to follow him with all that you are. Examine the evidence, but do so knowing that before we can discover truth, we all have to answer the question “who will I trust?”

I’ll finish with the words of Jesus in Matthew 22:37-38, which sums all this up:

"'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment."

Christianity & Postmodernism 7: Challenges and Opportunities

noreply@blogger.com (Caleb Woodbridge) — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 08:38:00 +0000

In some of my recent posts, I've been looking at the ideas of various postmodern thinkers - Lyotard, Foucault and Barthes - arguing that there's more common ground than you might at first suspect between the Christianity and postmodernism. I'm now going to consider the challenges and opportunities in general terms.

Postmodernism vs postmodernity
Of course, when it comes to the effect of postmodernism on culture, when it comes to our present condition of “postmodernity”, the subtleties of what particular postmodern philosophers, writers and critics make very little difference.

When you explain the Gospel to someone, and they object that it’s intolerant for you to claim it’s true for everyone, and it’s all a matter of interpretation, then trying to explain what Lyotard really meant by “suspicion of metanarratives” probably won’t get you very far!

The net cultural effect of postmodern philosophy is a culture deeply suspicious of any kind of truth claims, whether “legitimated by universal reason” or not. To present the Christian faith as truth to a postmodern world is a massive challenge. But understanding postmodernism in more depth can help us to find better ways of responding than simply repeating arguments for objective truth more loudly.

Let’s consider three particular areas of opportunity and challenge:

Opportunity 1: a new openness to spirituality Postmoderns tend to be much more open to the spiritual than moderns – Alister McGrath observed in Evangelicalism and the Future of Christianity that “the claustrophobic and restrictive strait-jacket placed on Western Christianity by rationalism has gone”. That’s only partly true – the so-called “New Atheism” tends to be stridently modernistic. But many people are dissatisfied with modernity’s inability to satisfy their need for spiritual meaning and purpose.

Opportunity 2: a hunger for community and authenticity
I asked earlier how we should witness to our faith if not by trying to “prove” Christianity by appeal to universal reason. To reach a postmodern generation, the Church doesn’t need to have an apologetic; it needs to be an apologetic. As Jesus said, “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” This is exactly what the Church ought to be, but I think we’ve got some work to do in this area.

In A Better Hope, Stanley Hauerwas made the provocative claim that “Postmodernism is the outworking of mistakes in Christian theology correlative to the attempt to make Christianity ‘true’ apart from faithful witness.” Postmodernism has the potential to be a catalyst to spur the Church into recovering its mission of being Christ to the world.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t try to demonstrate that Christianity is rational – of course we need to engage with people’s questions and doubts, and make the case for our beliefs – but this will be far more effective within the context of the faithful witness of a community of faith that lives out what it means to follow and worship Christ.

Opportunity 3: more emphasis on action and experience On the positive side, this is a welcome corrective to modernism’s narrow rationalism. There’s less factionalism and dogmatism, and postmoderns are much more likely to work across boundaries of different churches and denominations. Christ called his followers to be one as he and the Father are one. Christianity is for the whole person, body, will, emotions, not just for the intellect. So if postmodernism helps us to recover a more holistic approach to our faith and be more united as his people, then so much the better.

On the negative side, postmodernism brings the danger of neglecting the rational, and this apparent unity often comes out of a doctrinal apathy, rather than us being any better at dealing with disagreements. Are we following Ephesians 4:15 by “speaking the truth in love, growing up into Christ our head,” or are we just “not speaking anything contentious in apathy”?

Truth matters and doctrine matters. We must take the Bible seriously as God speaking to us authoritatively, rather than waving away disagreements as “just a matter of interpretation”.

Other avenues
Other areas I could discuss if I had time would be Christianity and narrative, and the challenge to recover the Bible as a story. We could also look at how deconstruction seeks to hear the voices of the oppressed and marginalised, and how that ethical concern gives us a bridge to discussing God’s compassion for such people. It’s a massive subject and I’ve barely scratched the surface.

In a few days, I'll post a concluding summary, with links to all the posts in the series.

My short story shortlisted!

noreply@blogger.com (Caleb Woodbridge) — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 15:27:00 +0000

Yesterday I received an email telling me that my short story, Mr Crickfarthing's Emotion Emporium, has been shortlisted for the Wicked Young Writers' Award 2010 in the 17-25 year old category. Hip hip, and indeed, hooray.

That's "Wicked" in reference to the musical Wicked, by the way, based on Gregory Maguire's novel, a prequel/"re-imagining" to The Wizard of Oz. Gregory Maguire is one of the judges, along with Michael Morpurgo, former children's laureate.

Being shortlisted means that my story will be published in the anthology of entries. I've also been invited to the Awards Ceremony in London in November at the Apollo Victoria Theatre, where the winners will be announced.

The competition closed back at the end of July, and not having heard anything for a couple of months, I'd pretty much forgotten about it, so it was a very pleasant surprise to receive the email telling me I'd been shortlisted! I'm looking forward to the trip to London.

Christianity & Postmodernism 6: The Death of the Author

noreply@blogger.com (Caleb Woodbridge) — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 15:37:00 +0000

Continuing my series on Christianity and Postmodernism:

Another famous idea associated with postmodernism is “The Death of the Author”, announced by Roland Barthes in his famous essay of that title, published in 1968.

Barthes attacks the idea that the meaning of a text is fixed by the author’s intentions. In particular, he takes issue with the idea of the author having God-like authority:

We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single "theological" meaning (the "message" of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations.

He argues that believing in the Author as the source of meaning limits the text:

To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing.

For us as Christians, this immediately raises implications for how we approach the Bible. If there are no fixed meaning to texts, just the many and varied interpretations of the readers, how can God speak to us authoritatively through the Bible?

But more than this, Barthes goes on to draw a connection from denying the author as the giver of fixed meaning to a text, to denying God as the giver of fixed meaning to the world, saying:

“by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a "secret:' that is, an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which we might call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.”

As Christians, can we just say “Barthes was wrong, there is actually a God, and so the author determines meaning after all?” I don’t think so. Barthes had a point, in that authors aren’t infallible in communicating their intentions; meaning is sometimes unclear and confused – the Author isn’t God.

But if we approach the idea of the Author from a Christian perspective, we’ll see that we don't have to choose between the Author-God and the death of the Author.

The Bible tells us both that we are made in the image of God, and that we are finite and Fallen. Because we are made in God’s image, we should expect to be able to communicate meaning through language, because God is truth and he is the Word.

But we also recognise that our ability to communicate is limited; we don’t always say what we mean or mean what we say; we don’t have absolute control through our intentions over the meaning of what we write. We are limited, we get it wrong, we miscommunicate.

This brings me on to a wider point: even postmodernism in its most nihilistic forms has something to tell us. In postmodernism’s suspicion of ultimate truth and meaning, we can hear an echo of the words of Ecclesiastes, where the teacher proclaims “Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless!” The Bible itself tells us that life “under the sun”, that is, without revelation from God, is vapour, a chasing after the wind. There is a place for the insights of postmodernism, because it describes the brokenness of a world under the shadow of the Fall.

Of course, as Christians, we cannot accept it as a total description of reality. We believe in the Son of God who has come from beyond the sun, and in the story of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, in the big story of Creation, Fall and Redemption, we have a source of hope and meaning. But as well as trying to bring hope to a postmodern world, we need to listen to the realities it describes.

Also, we can work to undo the damage of the Fall through Jesus’ redemptive power, through his Spirit at work in us. For example, when it comes to meaning and language, we can redeem them by using them truthfully and lovingly, rather than deceptively and as a power game.

To return to Barthes, the Author isn’t dead or divine, but human – finite and fallen but redeemable.

Links:

Full text of The Death of the Author essay.

First day

noreply@blogger.com (Caleb Woodbridge) — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 07:58:00 +0000

Six years ago, a young, innocent and fresh-faced boy found himself suddenly transplanted from the wilds of deepest, darkest Wales to the seething cosmopolitan mass that is Cardiff (well, that's how it seemed at the time, anyway). Once his parents drove away, he was alone in the city, not yet knowing anyone or anywhere, left to discover a new life as a student.

That was me, back then.

Fast forward to the present day... six years, a degree in English Literature and History, several jobs, two published short stories, some additional facial hair, and a lovely wife later, and I was once again walking in to Cardiff University to enrol for my studies. This is me, now.

When I came away to university in 2004, everything was new - new city, new university, new course, new friends, new flatmates, new church. Starting my masters in 2010 is a very different, I already have a wife, home, church and set of friends; I already know the city and the university.

So the transition from my life immediately before my MA in English Literature to studying for it won't be nearly so stark, but it may be all the more startling for intruding on and changing my life as it was before, rather than being a whole new existence.

And it will be a very different from undergraduate study. For one thing, I now understand that my reading lists aren't a theoretical ideal, shining far off and distant like a Platonic form, but something I'm supposed to actually get on with and read!

Some things never change, of course, such as the bizarre initiation rite by which you have to make your way down the street without being drowned in flyers and leaflets.

My favourite flyering-related incident yesterday was being accosted by a member of the Christian Union, who looked around 10-years-old. "Do you know about the Christian Union?" he asked. "Know it? Hah! I was in the CU before you were doing your GCSEs, sonny-my-lad!" Perhaps fortunately, I didn't think to say that at the time, but instead muttered something polite about having already looked at their website. But there's plenty of time for me to develop a well-cultivated and curmudgeonly disdain for the antics of undergraduates.

At enrolment, we discovered that there are around 30 students on the MA course this year, which is quite a high number. A large proportion of those - maybe two-thirds? - have come straight from the English Literature BA course. Some seemed slightly alarmed at the reduced class sizes - some modules run with only two or three students on them, and at the enlarged workload! But Professor Martin Coyle used his usual wit and humour to put us at our ease - we're masters students by the end of the course, we're not expected to suddenly jump up to a whole new level overnight, but grow into it over time.

Before enrolment, I went to the Chaplaincy drop-in café, and met Sophie who's doing the same course, and many of the same modules, as me. I've now found out that out of eight people studying The Myth of King Arthur in the 19th and 20th Centuries, half of us are Christians. I'd prayed that there would be another Christian on at least one of my modules, so God certainly answered that prayer in abundance!

I also dropped into the Gair Rhydd office, which has had a nice make-over since I was a student, to offer my writing services once more. It was a nice measure of how much I've grown in confidence since I was a fresher - I tried to go up to introduce myself in Freshers' Week in my first year, but dithered around outside and chickened out. Although I still get nervous in new situations and with new people, I'm much better at not letting it get to me and just chatting with people. And once I start talking, the usual problem is then getting me to shut up.

In the evening, I headed out to the Postgraduate Meet and Mingle in the Graduate Centre. We were given "human bingo" cards to help facilitate conversation, consisting of a grid with things like "Can ride a horse", "Is a fan of Star Wars", "Has the same birthday as you", and had to find people to match each of them.

It was a bit random, but I met some interesting people, including some from my course, and some Doctor Who fans, so I was able to have some meaningful conversation amid the endless stream of "What's your name? Where are you from? What are you studying?" Bev joined me there after her Welsh lesson and also enjoyed it. It was nice to be able to introduce people to my wife, because most people don't expect me to be married.

So it was a great day - met loads of people, including Danielle, Dyfrig, Sue, Alison, Mike, Beth, Heather, Pete, and many others. The rest of the week is a bit less hectic, but there's plenty to be getting on with, not least finishing redrafting my novel and doing the reading for the course.

Starting my masters degree

noreply@blogger.com (Caleb Woodbridge) — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 15:16:00 +0000

It's over three years since I graduated from Cardiff University in English Literature & History, and I'm about to go back for more. On Tuesday, I picked up my student card, and so I'm officially a postgraduate student. Tomorrow, I'll be enrolling with the School of English, Communication and Philosophy for a MA in English Literature, focusing on medievalism and children's literature.

I decided to return to academia for a number of reasons:

Simply because I'm interested in the subject and enjoy studying!
To enrich my own creative writing, particularly my novels.
It opens up the possibility of maybe doing a PhD at some point in the future.
It might help towards getting a more interesting, writing-related job, rather than just a series of fixed-term contracts doing admin.

Also, I feel I somewhat neglected my undergraduate studies for all the different activities on offer, and this is my chance to go back and make the most of the opportunity to study, in a way I probably didn't do the first time round!

I'll be involved with CriSP (the Christian Staff and Postgrads group), and I hope to write the occasional article for Gair Rhydd, but that will be plenty, rather than the half-a-dozen or so activities I tried to do as an undergraduate.

I'm sure it will be quite a different experience. I'm three years older (and hopefully wiser!). I've learned a lot from working, and I'm now a married man. And I'll be studying not because I have to, or because it's the done thing, or I don't know what else to do, but because I've chosen to be there.

I'm really excited to have the opportunity to study again, to engage my brain and read loads of books, to think deeply about literature and the questions it raises. I'm also very grateful to my wife Bev for being so supportive of me in it - she'll be the one paying the bills this year! It's a great privilege to be able to spend another year learning, studying and thinking, and I intend to make the most of it.

Sex and death - at the heart of religion, or of secularism?

noreply@blogger.com (Caleb Woodbridge) — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 09:27:00 +0000

The Pope's visit is imminent, and on cue, The Guardian has more than its usual quotient of articles bashing religion and waving the flag for secularism. Polly Toynbee has a particularly entertaining specimen, Sex and death lie at the poisoned heart of religion. Here's the opening paragraph:

A dispute with BBC TV's religious slot, Sunday Morning Live: would I join a debate on the pope? As president of the British Humanist Association, I was glad to – but there was a problem. Discussion was divided into a first debate on whether Catholicism was over-obsessed with sex, but I was to join a second: is the Catholic church a force for good? How could you answer that without saying that sex lies at the poisoned heart of all that is wrong with just about every major faith?

Now, as far as I'm concerned, the Pope is just some guy in a funny hat. I disagree strongly with the Catholic Church's teaching on a number of issues, and I have no wish to defend or justify its failings and abuses. However, it seems to me that Toynbee objects to Catholic teaching because it strikes at the idols of secularism.

Having done away with God, secularism has made sex and death its new gods. It is not that religion is over-obsessed with sex - rather, it exposes secularism's obsession with it. ecularism's demand for unrestrained sex and death is a sign not of a healthy civilization, but of a decadent and decaying culture of death. This is where the real disease and sickness lies.

Secularism makes sex an absolute good; any restraint on sex or sexual expression is wicked - a dangerous repression of our natural impulses. Christianity teaches that sex is good, but not an absolute good - it exists within a moral framework. It is properly practiced within a framework of love and life-long fidelity, embodied in the practice of marriage. Sex should not be simply the satisfaction of a physical urge, but an act of love that brings together husband and wife into unity not just of body, but as whole persons.

Similiarly, secularism makes individual self-determination an absolute good. Again, Christianity teaches that individual freedom is a good thing; Jesus came to set us free, but again, freedom within moral boundaries and a moral framework. The irony is that the removal of a moral framework around individual freedom actually makes individuals more vulnerable and less protected; a social contract that is based solely around freedom so long as it does not impinge on anyone else's choices cannot care for the vulnerable as effectively as a social contract that is committed to the common good with moral protections of life and well-being. Christianity seeks to protect life, to care for the hurting and vulnerable until the final breath.

I wouldn't necessarily draw the moral boundaries in the same place as the Roman Catholic Church, but secularism in its basic logic objects to the very fact of any restraint on individual freedom, except where it impinges on the freedom of others.

Toynbee conflates secularism and atheism, which is a bit of a leap. On the other hand, secularism is basically sociological atheism, so perhaps she has a point, even though secularism has its religious supporters - everyone has their inconsistencies.

The main inconsistency of someone like Toynbee is the sense of moral indignation with which she condemns religion. Like most secularists, Toynbee misses the point about "no morality without God". It's not that Christians claim to be more moral than anyone else - Jesus came for the sick, not the healthy, for sinners, not the righteous, and recognise that all humans have an innate moral sense. The problem is not that secularism has no morality; rather, secularism has no justification for its morality that wouldn't equally apply to any dominant cultural mileu.

For Christians, our innate moral sense is part of the image of God in us; it is rooted in the will and character of a good and benevolent transcendent God. But if it is simply a quirk of evolution - I've no argument with evolution as such, by the way, but if it is nothing more than that - why should we obey our innate moral sense over our similarily innate selfish tendencies? If you push it back to the very basic question of "why should we be moral?", what non-arbitrary answer does secularism have?

Christianity & Postmodernism 5: Nothing outside the text?

noreply@blogger.com (Caleb Woodbridge) — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 15:35:00 +0000

Continuing my series on Christianity and Postmodernism:

French philosopher Jacques Derrida, is famous, or infamous, for his technique of “Deconstruction”. He made the provocative claim in his book Of Grammatology that “There is nothing outside the text”.

By this, he didn’t mean that the things around us – people and trees and knives and forks – don’t actually exist, that there aren’t really any material objects, just ideas. Rather, he was criticising the idea that we can ever read something without interpretation. We usually only talk about “interpretation” when we encounter something we find hard to understand. I interpret the book of Revelation, but I just understand the newspaper.

Derrida is saying that everything is interpreted – not just words on a page, but all our experiences. There is no way of getting at the world in an entirely objective way, apart from our pre-existing knowledge, experiences, beliefs, culture and so on.

The worry for Christians is that one interpretation becomes just as good as any other. People say “That’s just your interpretation” to end a discussion, to imply that it’s just a subjective opinion and there’s no meaningful way of judging one interpretation as more true than another. If the Gospel is an interpretation, it is not objectively true in the modern sense of being self-evident or universally demonstrable.

But if we look at what the Bible says, it doesn’t portray the Gospel as objective in this sense. As Abraham says to the rich man in Jesus’ parable in Luke 16:

'If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.'

Or think of the reaction of the people to God speaking from heaven in John 12 – some said it was thunder, others an angel.

Again, the truth of the Gospel isn’t self-evident because we are sinners with darkened minds. People don’t need more evidence to become Christians, they need changed hearts. Knowledge of God is as a gift of his grace, as well as salvation – we don’t have to work it out by ourselves before we can be saved by grace. God graciously reveals himself to us by his Spirit – it’s his work, not something that’s universally demonstrable by us.

There’s no neutral position free from prior assumptions and faith commitments, as various Christian writers and apologists such as Francis Schaeffer and Cornelius Van Til recognised. Modernism pretends to be objective, but even that has to begin from a position of faith in autonomous human reason. Postmodernism rightly tries to reveal the underlying assumptions of supposedly neutral and objective positions, but goes too far if it says its impossible to make any kind of rational judgement between positions them.

My new smartphone

noreply@blogger.com (Caleb Woodbridge) — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 20:35:00 +0000

My mobile phone contract recently came to an end. I'd been paying £8.50 per month to Virgin Mobile for 100 minutes and 100 texts. I sometimes used up all my minutes, but almost never that many texts.

I really fancied getting some kind of smart phone, and since my mp3 player was literally being held together by an elastic band, if it could double as a new mp3 player, so much the better. The key features I wanted were:

Easy synchronisation with my email, calendar, tasks and so on.Ability to download and play podcasts directly on my phoneCheap or unmetered Internet access

Since I use Google's Gmail, Calendar, Tasks and so on, a phone with Google's Android operating system was an obvious choice, and I knew that Android has a great podcast app in the form of Google Listen. There was no way I could justify an expensive gadget like the iPhone, or the top of the range Android models only available on the £30 per month contracts, to myself (or more importantly, to my wife), but there are by now plenty of cheaper options on the market.

I quickly settled on T-Mobile as the most promising choice of network for my needs. If you choose a smartphone, "unlimited" Internet access is included, even on the cheapest tariffs. T-Mobile also offer a choice of a "Flexible Booster", such as unlimited texts, landline calls, or T-Mobile calls, which you can swap around monthly. Since most of my minutes are spent on the phone to my wife Bev, and she had just switched to T-Mobile, the "Unlimited T-Mobile Calls" booster would make a big difference to me, even if my basic allowance of minutes and texts remained unchanged.

Of course, I'd only been paying £8.50 a month - T-Mobile's cheapest tariff is £10 a month, and they don't offer any Android phones for free at that point. One option was to go up to £15 per month, get 300 minutes and texts, and a smartphone "free". Alternatively, I could pay money upfront to get a smartphone on a £10 tariff.

So in the end I opted for an Android phone on the £10 a month tariff - 100 minutes and 100 texts, plus unlimited Internet access, and unlimited calls to other T-Mobile phones, on a two-year contract.

I strongly considered getting the LG Intouch Max phone. My friend Phillip has this phone, and one of its most attractive features is its slide-out QWERTY keyboard. I'm not a big fan of touchscreens and have always found texting on a numeric keypad cumbersome, so that was quite a selling point.

But having played around with my wife's new touchscreen phone, I found that the newer capacitive screens are quite usable, and the T-Mobile Pulse at £40 less (£35 instead of £76) had very decent reviews and a better screen. While it came with the same fairly old version 1.5 of Android, I discovered it could be upgraded to Android 2.1 through an update released on T-Mobile Hungrary's website (slightly bizarrely, it's not on the UK site, though it works fine here). So I decided that while a physical keyboard would be nice, a cheaper phone with a bigger, better screen and more recent version of Android was a bigger draw.

My T-Mobile Pulse arrived on Friday. The first thing I did was to update the operating system following the useful instructions given on the Modaco Android forums, plus some other tweaks - I might discuss my customisations in more detail in another blog post.

Once that was done and I'd set up my email address and so on, I went a bit crazy with Android Market, quickly filling up the internal memory with various weird and wonderful free Apps! I've calmed down a bit now and cut back to those I think I'll actually use. Once I've had more time using them, I might write about which I find to actually be worthwhile.

I've had it a couple of weeks now and I'm very happy with it. The number and variety of apps is bewildering but there are some that are genuinely handy. Easy access on the go to the web is very handy, especially combined with GPS for maps and the like. I've even begun to get the hang of touchscreen.

Oh, and it also happens to make phone calls!

God's will is good grammar

noreply@blogger.com (Caleb Woodbridge) — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 19:11:00 +0000

A month or so ago, I had the pleasure of attending the Christian Postgraduate Conference in Dovedale, Derbyshire, at which Edith Reitsma from L'Abri Fellowship England and Alister McGrath, writer of many books including The Dawkins Delusion, were speaking. I'm starting my masters in September, but might as well get started early in thinking about how my faith and my studies will relate!

One of the many fascinating people I met on the conference was Anthony Smith, who is a PhD researcher in Astronomy. He also writes a blog, and just drew attention to a talk entitled "The Sound of Freedom" by Jeremy Begbie on freedom and faith from the Veritas Forum, drawing on the analogy of music. Another talk for my ever-expanding queue to listen to on my mp3 player, then!

Anthony's introduction to the talk is as follows:

We tend to think that if we allow God into our lives, in the way that the Christian message suggests that we should, then that will make less room for ourselves. That is, there is a certain amount of “space” in my life, and the more God enters that “space”, the more I get shoved out. So to become a Christian is to diminish my freedom.

But this isn’t the only way of looking at things. Drawing heavily on the analogy of music, Begbie presents a much more enriching and appealing perspective on how the presence of God in my life affects my own freedom.

This reminded me of another analogy of how rules bring freedom: God's will is like good grammar for our lives.

In language, it's only by having a shared set of grammatical rules that we can communicate to each other. Language free from grammar isn't really free, it's nonsense. But the rules of grammar give us a framework through which we have the freedom to express our thoughts; there are virtually no limits to what can be said through language.

Of course, grammar isn't rigid and unchanging. If you know the rules well, then you can break them in creative ways - for example, the statement that "Verbing weirds language". But such variations depend on knowing the conventions of grammar, and understanding how they are being departed from. To make sense of the above phrase, you actually need a very sophisticated understanding of grammar; it only works, in fact, because it is still obeys the rules of grammar at a deeper level. And language changes and develops over time, of course, but still relying on shared rules and conventions. In short, you need the structure of grammar to give freedom of speech.

The same principle, that form and freedom go together, has much wider applications. I think it's helpful to think of God's will for our lives less like a fixed text, and more like a grammar that governs our lives, but within which we have great freedom and creativity. This grammar for life is what the Bible calls "wisdom".

Often we think of God's will as something fixed and monolithic - there is only one right answer. That may be true in some situations, but I think that often we are free to choose between equally valid options. What matters in such cases in not so much what we choose, as how we choose it - do we do so prayerfully, bringing our choices to God, not necessarily to find the One Right Answer, but rather to learn from him the habits of love and humility, passion and commitment, that he wants to develop in us. God's will does not constrict our freedom and the expression of our humanity, but is their basis and fullness.

Or as the Psalmist put it far more poetically:

How sweet are your words to my taste,
sweeter than honey to my mouth!

Your word is a lamp to my feet
and a light for my path.

James: Wake Up and Smell the Coffee

noreply@blogger.com (Caleb Woodbridge) — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 06:17:00 +0000

Yesterday, I preached the first in a new evening series at Mack on the book of James titled "Wake Up and Smell the Coffee". James urges us to put our faith into action, and is like a shot of coffee to wake us up in our Christian lives. Below is the text of my sermon.

Introduction

When was the last time you received a letter from someone? Not just a bill or advert, but an actual letter from a friend, written to you personally?

In this electronic age, many of us are more likely to dash off an email or a text message, or to write on someone’s Facebook wall. It’s great that we can keep in touch so easily. But there’s something special about a letter you can touch and hold on to. Our emails and texts are transient scraps of thought sent today and deleted tomorrow.

But fortunately for us, James and other leaders of the early church, such as Peter and Paul, relied on good old pen and paper, or probably ink and papyrus. These weren’t just passing thoughts, the first century equivalent of “Train running late, C U soon”.

Instead, they were moved and inspired by God the Holy Spirit to write down wisdom, teaching, and encouragement. The church quickly recognised these letters as being inspired by God himself. Christians carefully copied them and handed them down through the centuries. Through these letters, God is speaking words of eternal truth to his people throughout history, right down to us today. These letters, or “epistles”, make up 21 out of the 27 books of the New Testament.

So who was James? Who was he writing to, and why? What does a letter written almost 2000 years ago have to say to us today?

Matthew 13:55 tells us that James was one of Jesus’ younger brothers. Although we often refer to the Virgin Mary, after she had miraculously given birth to Jesus, she and Joseph went on to have a normal family. In Acts we see that James was a leader in the early church, and history tells us he was executed in 62 AD.

The book is written to “the twelve tribes scattered among the nations” – the 12 tribes referring to Israel, so mainly to Jewish Christians. It often talks about the Law, the Jewish Torah. It is similar in style to Jewish wisdom literature like the book of Proverbs. It has lots of memorable advice on different topics, moving quickly from one subject to another – which is why we’ve decided to tackle a different theme each week, rather than going through it chapter by chapter.

Throughout his letter, James is calling us to action. “Count it all joy”, “Ask God”, “Don’t be deceived”, “Know this”, “Receive the Word” are just a few of the many commands he gives us. His aim to spur us into action, to give us a kick up the backside, a shot of coffee for our spiritual lives.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be looking in detail at the practical instruction James has for us in various areas of our lives. Good works aren’t an optional extra, but a vital part of living out our lives as Christians. I urge you to think practically each week about what specific steps you can take to live out your faith in God and love for God more fully. As we go through James, identify at least one thing each week to work on. Write it down. Pray each day about it. Tell some Christian friends about it, and get them to check up on how you’re doing.

We often put up our defences to avoid the full force of what the Bible is telling us:

Ignoring what God says to us
Pretending not to understand God
Thinking we can have faith without deeds
Dismissing God’s commands as impossible

But James steam-rollers through all of our defences, by reminding us of God's gifts to us. Let's see what he's got to say to us:

Defence 1: Ignoring what the Bible says

James tells us “anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like”.

A question: when you read the Bible, do you feel at peace? Be honest - don't just give a pat good Christian answer. Does the Bible make you feel uncomfortable? Do you ever get the sense that there something missing? You look around at your life as a Christian and the church here around you, on the one hand - and then you read the Bible, see the life of the early church, and you look at Jesus on the other hand. And there's a contrast. You read the New Testament, and being a follower of Christ seems to demand a whole other level of commitment and adventure.

If the Bible makes you feel uncomfortable, then there’s still hope for you. Part of you remembers what you saw in the mirror. The Bible isn’t supposed to be comfortable. When I look in the mirror first thing in the morning, my first thought isn’t “My, what a handsome chap”. It’s more like “Help! There’s a Yeti shuffling towards me! Oh, wait, that’s my reflection!” Looking into the mirror when I’m in an early morning state isn’t comfortable, but it does show me I need to shave, wash, have a cup of tea and put some clothes on.

If the Bible never makes you feel uncomfortable, be worried – you might already be too good at blocking out anything challenging, anything that would force you to act or to change. You may have already deafened yourself to what God is trying to say to you.

One way in which I think I'm in danger of deafening myself, and perhaps some others of you too, is in the way we talk about the preaching. If we actually get round at all to discussing the sermon, we so often spend our time complaining about the preacher’s style (or lack of it), the length of the sermon (too long or too short), minor points of disagreement – anything and everything except what we think God might have been saying to us through his word.

But there is always hope; God gives sight to the blind and opens the ears of deaf. Pray to him, go and “look intently into the perfect law that gives freedom”; “humbly accept the word planted in you.” Read the Bible until your skin crawls! Put it into action, and keep on putting it into action, and James promises you, you will be blessed by God's gift of his word.

Defence 2: “The Bible is too hard to understand”

It’s all very well to want to put the Bible into action, you might say, but how can I know what exactly the Bible says? There are so many interpretations, after all.

You’ve probably heard the saying “God says it; I believe it; that settles it.” We often pooh-pooh such a naive approach. We're wise not to assume that we'll always understand the Bible right first time. But if we do believe that God has said something, surely that should settle it - not as a stick to beat other people with, but for us to follow in our own beliefs and behaviour?

Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard claimed the following:

“The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand it, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world?”

If we think we can’t understand the Bible, James gives us a very simple solution in 1:5: “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him”

So as we look at the book of James, I want to challenge you – don’t overcomplicate things. Take the Bible at its word, simply pledge yourself to act on whatever God says to you. If you don't understand it, study it, read books and commentaries, talk to other Christians. But most of all, pray to God for his gift of wisdom.

Defence 3: “We're saved by faith, so I can sit back and relax”

But wait a moment – Paul tells us in Romans 3:24 that we are "justified freely by God's grace", and again in Ephesians 2:8-9 that we are saved "by grace", "through faith", "not by works", so that no-one can boast". Does this mean we can sit back and relax - how we live doesn't really matter?

But if you think like this and live like this, you show that you haven’t actually understood grace. Worse, it might be a sign that your faith itself is not faith at all, and you may not actually be a Christian in the first place!

James tells us that faith by itself, just believing in your head, if not accompanied by action is dead. He points us to the story of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis 22 to illustrate his point. God tested Abraham's faith by asking him to sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham was willing to do so, trusting that God would still keep his promise to make Abraham's descendants a great nation. God sent an angel and a ram to tell Abraham that he, God, would provide the sacrifice.

James goes on to say that “the scripture was fulfilled that says ‘Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness’ and he was called God’s friend. You see that a person is justified by what he does and not by faith alone.”

We sometimes struggle to understand the Bible because we lose our place in the story. For example, you might get the impression that the Jews in the Old Testament had to obey the Law in order to be saved – after all, haven’t you got all those rules, in Exodus, Deuteronomy and Leviticus?

But if you follow the story, you’ll see that God rescues Israel first, he brings them out of slavery in Egypt to be his people, and then gives them the Law. Grace and mercy were woven into the very fabric of the Old Testament law, just as they are woven into the perfect law that brings freedom for us now.

James might seem to suggest that Abraham somehow earned his God’s approval by his actions. But if we pay attention to Genesis, we’ll see that the point at which Abraham believed God, and was considered righteous, was way back in chapter 15, before Isaac was even born! Abraham believed God’s promises, and that’s what made him God’s friend, and then obeyed God in fulfilment of his faith.

So James isn’t telling people who aren’t Christians that if you do lots of good works, then you will be accepted by God because of them. The moment we have faith in Jesus, when we trust in his death and resurrection, God accepts us completely and entirely because of what Jesus did, not because of what we do.

Just as a side note, this is something that distinguishes us, as an evangelical church in the Protestant tradition, from our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters. The Catholic Church teaches that we are accepted by God on the basis of the faith and works that he produces in us over time. Some Catholics are believers, some are not – the same is true of any church or denomination; we should disagree lovingly and courteously.

But Catholic teaching on this point takes the emphasis away from Jesus onto us, which brings a greater danger of relying on ourselves and our own efforts, rather than having faith in what God has done. The doctrine of salvation by faith alone was the fundamental divide when Protestants broke off from the Catholic Church in the Reformation 500 years ago, and despite many efforts to find some compromise, remains a key point of disagreement today.

If faith is the beating heart that gives life, then our actions are the pulse that shows we are alive. It’s not the pulse in your neck or wrist that keeps your body going, but if you can’t find your pulse, it’s a clue something is badly wrong with your heart. Living faith always expresses itself in love. James is writing to tell us how we should be living as a result of what God has done for us.

When we realise what God has done for us then “I’ve got to” becomes “I get to”. Nothing we do can make God love us any more or any less, so we are free to do good works, not out of a sense of obligation, but simply out of love. Real faith in God doesn’t mean just believing in your head that God exists, but trusting him and loving him, because of the gift of God's grace.

Defence 4: “I'm never going to be perfect in this life anyway”

But we often think that the heights of love, generosity, faith and goodness commanded in God’s word are out of our reach. We hear stories of great heroes of the faith, such as George Muller, who depended on God to provide for the orphans he cared for, and saw God provide for him at the last minute time and time again. We think we can never match up. We recognise in theory that we should “be perfect as the Father is perfect”, but in practice we dismiss it as a lofty ideal that can safely be ignored.

But James tells us that Elijah was a man just like us. The heroes of the faith were all ordinary people, just like you and me. They had faith in an extraordinary God, and that same God is our God today. He answers prayers and changes lives, and will answer your prayers and change your life if you trust him.

Throughout the Bible, certain people are recognised as “righteous”. Genesis tells us that Noah was righteous, blameless in his generation. Throughout Psalms and Proverbs, the ways of the righteous and ways of the wicked are contrasted. In Luke’s Gospel, Zechariah and Elizabeth, the parents of John the Baptist, are described as “upright in the sight of God, observing all the Lord’s commands and regulations blamelessly”.

“Righteous” in these cases seems to refer to the people themselves, not just them being accepted as righteous because of Jesus. It doesn’t mean they are completely perfect – the Bible tells us about their mistakes – but on the whole, they are living holy lives of faith in God, and trust him for forgiveness and grace when they mess up. With God at work in us, it is within our grasp to genuinely become righteous people, people marked by faith and love.

In fact, it’s easier for us now than for the saints of the Old Testament! The big difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament isn’t that one is a covenant of law and the other is of grace – both contain law, and both are of grace.

Through Jesus, we have now received the promise of the New Covenant that God made in Jeremiah 31:33 when he said “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts”. God has given us a new inner power to live holy lives - he has come to live in our hearts by his Spirit. As James put it “He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created”.

If we were just left on our own, without God to help us, it would be unreasonable to command us to be holy. You might as well tell a hamster to fly; it isn’t going to happen, no matter how hard the hamster tries!

But we aren’t hamsters being told to fly - we are birds with injured wings. If we know Jesus, if we have placed our faith in him, then he has healed our broken wings. When James reminds us to “love your neighbour as yourself”, God isn’t asking the impossible, telling us to be something we are not, because he has given us the gift of new life, the gift of his Spirit.

God is telling us: little bird, your wings are healed – become what you are, and fly!

Christianity & Postmodernism 4: Incredulity towards metanarratives

noreply@blogger.com (Caleb Woodbridge) — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 08:30:00 +0000

In 1979, philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote The Postmodern Condition (introduction, first five chapters). He was the one who popularised the term “postmodern”. In his introduction, he said:

Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.

What is a metanarrative? The simple answer is that “metanarrative” means “Big Story”. Since Christianity tells a Big Story of Creation, Fall and Redemption, and since postmodernism is incredulous of big stories, you might think that this places Christianity and postmodernism on a collision course – and many Christian thinkers and writers would agree.

But James K A Smith argues in Who’s Afraid of

Postmodernism? that if we look a bit closer at what Lyotard wrote, and how he defined “metanarrative”, we’ll see that it’s not quite that simple.

Lyotard wrote:

Science has always been in conflict with narratives. Judged by the yardstick of science, the majority of them prove to be fables. But to the extent that science does not restrict itself to stating useful regularities and seeks the truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules of its own game. It then produces a discourse of legitimation with respect to its own status, a discourse called philosophy. I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth. For example, the rule of consensus between the sender and addressee of a statement with truth-value is deemed acceptable if it is cast in terms of a possible unanimity between rational minds: this is the

Enlightenment narrative, in which the hero of knowledge works toward a good ethico-political end -- universal peace. As can be seen from this example, if a metanarrative implying a philosophy of history is used to legitimate knowledge, questions are raised concerning the validity of the institutions governing the social bond: these must be legitimated as well. Thus justice is consigned to the grand narrative in the same way as truth.

This is fairly involved, but basically he defines modernity as extending “science” – objective reason - beyond simply stating scientific fact and making larger, universal truth claims. The Enlightenment narrative claimed to be true on the basis of a “possible unanimity between rational minds”, for example. A “metanarrative” isn’t simply a “Big Story”, but a narrative that claims legitimation by universally accessible reason, as Smith explains it in his book.

So is Christianity a metanarrative? The Bible certainly gives us a big, overarching story, but does it claim that it can be legitimated by universally accessible reason?

Some Christians say that modernists are just starting from the wrong foundation – the individual self. But if we just begin from the right foundation – God, who knows all things and stands objectively outside all human culture, context and subjectivity, and who reveals the truth to us – then viola! We have certain and objective knowledge. Because God exists, we can prove he exists by our own independent reason.

But that actually fails to reckon with what the Bible itself tells us about the human condition. On the one hand, the Bible talks in several places about creation declaring the glory of God. Romans 1:18-20 says that humanity is “without excuse” because “what can be known about God is plain to them”, and his “eternal power and divine nature” have been clearly perceived.

But Paul goes on to say that our minds have been darkened by sin, that we became futile in our thinking, and in 2 Corinthians 4 talks about the Gospel being veiled, and that the god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers. The Bible shows us that the Fall affects every area of life; all areas of human activity are damaged by sin, including our ability to know and to discover truth. If we ignore the “noetic effects of sin”, then we end up joining in with modernism’s misplaced confidence in autonomous reason.

So I’d say no, Christianity isn’t a metanarrative in Lyotard’s sense - we shouldn’t claim our faith is provable in this way. Some Christians treat our faith like a metanarrative by trying to prove Christianity in a very rationalistic way, but I think this is a mistake.

So how do we witness to our faith, if we can’t argue people into it by universal reason? I’ll come back to this in later posts when I discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by postmodernism.

This question of whether Christianity is a metanarrative has been discussed in quite a few places online - for example, Christianity is not a metanarrative on Wet Lenses, Lyotard’s Postmodern Critique of Metanarratives and the Proper Christian Response by Tom Sherwood on Confession of Inadequacy, and Is Christianity a Metanarrative? by David Nilsen on Evangelical Outpost. And there's plenty more out there too.