Postman: religious TV

...on television, religion, like everything else, is presented, quite simply and without apology, as an entertainment.  Everything that makes religion an historic, profound  and sacred human activity is stripped away;  there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all no sense of spiritual transcendence.  On these shows the preacher is tops.  God comes out as second banana.

p119

Postman: discontinuity and contradiction

[young students are] coming from a different universe of discourse altogether:  the "Now...this" world of television.  The fundamental assumption of that world is not coherence but discontinuity.  And in a world of discontinuities, contradiction is useless as a test of truth or merit, because contradiction does not exist.

p112

Translation speed 125 years faster

Wycliffe Bible Translators expects to have the Bible — or at least some of it — written in all of the world's 6,909 spoken languages by 2025. About 2,200 languages remain without a Bible, which represents about 350 million people — mostly in India, China, sub-Saharan Africa and Papua New Guinea. Portable computers and satellites get the credit for speeding things up by about 125 years. Previously, a Wycliffe missionary family or team could spend decades learning and transcribing one language in a remote corner of the Earth. 

(Denver Post)

Postman: the problem with entertainment

The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining. which is another issue altogether. 

...televison is different because it encompasses all forms of discourse.  No one goes to a movie to find out about government policy or the latest scientific advances...But everyone goes to a television set for all these things and more, which is why televisioon resonates so powerfully through the culture. Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself...

...For the message of television as metaphor is not only that all the world is a stage but that stage is located in Las Vegas...

p89, 94-95

Postman: technology metaphor

Each technology has an agenda of its own.  It is, as I have suggested, a metaphor waiting to unfold.

p87

Chambers: character

No man is born either naturally or supernaturally with character, he has to make character. Nor are we born with habits; we have to form habits on the basis of the new life God has put into us. We are not meant to be illuminated versions, but the common stuff of ordinary life exhibiting the marvel of the grace of God. Drudgery is the touchstone of character. The great hindrance in spiritual life is that we will look for big things to do. "Jesus took a towel…and began to wash the disciples' feet." 

Utmost 15th June

Chris Wright: the commission isn't a clock

The Great Commission is an expanding and self-replicating task, not a ticking clock for the end-times.

The Mission of God, p35

Ministry of the aged

"People at various stages of life give us a vision for our own life at that stage," says Friesen. After Friesen's own grandmother died, at age 99, he was particularly struck by the testimonies from older members.

"My grandmother's influence on me started when she was 89 and extended to 99," he says. "In the eyes of our culture, she's a useless person. But her most productive time in my life was her final ten years." This is something that everyone approaching or in retirement needs to hear, Friesen says. "You think nobody's paying attention" because of your age. "Think again. You can have a tremendous impact on people in your final decades. And you're going to have more of them than you think." A major job for the church, Friesen says, is to "give people a vision of the good life in the seasons of fall and winter."

Christianity Today.

#8 Drama

Well it had to happen sometime, much I am sure to Minty's depressed prediction, but this is a Yes album.

In my defence, it's not a 'normal' Yes album - it's not from the 'golden era' of side-long songs and completely incomprehensible Anderson lyrics.  In fact it had a ll gone a bit wrong by this time, with Anderson and Wakeman leaving, and Trevor Horn (soon to be Buggles) drafted in.  But neither is it the Yes-gone-pop of 90125 (though I like that one too).

It's somewhere between classic Yes and pop-yes.  For me, Machine Messiah is OK, but it's Does it Really Happen and especially Into the Lens which lift this to desert-island status, with Tempus Fugit finishing well.

Go on Minty, let yourself go........

Chambers: Homesick

You can never give another person that which you have found, but you can make him homesick for what you have.

10th June

Lewis: instinct to honour

Where men are forbidden to honour  a king they honour millionaires, athletes or film-stars instead;  even famous prostitutes or gangsters.  For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

Equality, quoted Ward p68

Postman: the proper use of TV

Many television sets are also large and sturdy enough to bear the wieght of a small library.  The top of an old fashioned RCA console can handle as many as thirty books, and I know one woman  who has securely placed her entire collection of Dickens, Flaubert and Turgenev on the top of a 21" Westinghouse.  Here is still another use of television - as bookcase.

p85

Postman: the really weird thing

There is no more disturbing consequence of the electronic and graphic revolution than this:  that the world as given to us through television seems natural, not bizarre.

For the loss of the sense of strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we have been adjusted is a measure of the extent to which we have been changed.

p81

Really?!

From CT:

At an average of 55 minutes, David Platt's Sunday morning sermons at the Church at Brook Hills in Birmingham, Alabama, are already far longer than those of most pastors. But to Platt, they seem awfully short. He has been struck in his travels by underground Asian house churches that study the Bible together, under the threat of persecution, for as long as 12 hours in one sitting. He has imported this practice into a biennial event that Brook Hills calls Secret Church. Starting at 6 p.m., Platt preaches for six hours on a single topic, such as a survey of the Old Testament. About 1,000 people, mostly college students and young singles, turned out for the first Secret Church. Since then, other Secret Church topics have included the Atonement and spiritual warfare. It is now so popular the church requires tickets.

Chambers: abandon

“Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body what ye shall put on.”
Matthew 6:25

Jesus sums up common-sense carefulness in a disciple as infidelity. If we have received the Spirit of God, He will press through and say - Now where does God come in in this relationship, in this mapped out holiday, in these new books? He always presses the point until we learn to make Him our first consideration. Whenever we put other things first, there is confusion.
"Take no thought . . ." don't take the pressure of forethought upon yourself. It is not only wrong to worry, it is infidelity, because worrying means that we do not think that God can look after the practical details of our lives, and it is never any thing else that worries us. Have you ever noticed what Jesus said would choke the word He puts in? The devil? No, the cares of this world. It is the little worries always. I will not trust where I cannot see, that is where infidelity begins. The only cure for infidelity is obedience to the Spirit.
The great word of Jesus to His disciples is abandon.

Utmost, May23rd

Chambers: safety

Paul is not talking of imaginary things, but of things that are desperately actual; and he says we are super-victors in the midst of them, not by our ingenuity, or by our courage, or by anything other than the fact that not one of them affects our relationship to God in Jesus Christ. Rightly or wrongly, we are where we are, exactly in the condition we are in. I am sorry for the Christian who has not something in his circumstances he wishes was not there.
"Shall tribulation…?" Tribulation is never a noble thing; but let tribulation be what it may - exhausting, galling, fatiguing, it is not able to separate us from the love of God. Never let cares or tribulations separate you from the fact that God loves you.
"Shall anguish…?" - can God's love hold when everything says that His love is a lie, and that there is no such thing as justice?
"Shall famine…?" - can we not only believe in the love of God but be more than conquerors, even while we are being starved?
Either Jesus Christ is a deceiver and Paul is deluded, or some extraordinary thing happens to a man who holds on to the love of God when the odds are all against God's character. Logic is silenced in the face of every one of these things. Only one thing can account for it - the love of God in Christ Jesus. "Out of the wreck I rise" every time.

#9.....

OK I have struggled here: the thing is, in the ongoing sedate mid-life crisis that Minty & I are sharing like two teenagers who have just bought a tape-to-tape deck, I have a problem.  My biggest musical influence, indeed the 'spiritual food' that held me up until I found real Bread and real Water, was the impractically long sound-paintings of Mike Oldfield.  And that's the problem:  given we listen to these albums in snatches on Spotify, an hour-long track is a push.

So I have cheated here - I'm giving two albums BUT only one of them counts: it's your choice.  Here's the one I wanted to choose but is probably impossible to listen to in a week because it is an hour-long track - which means Spotify can't interrupt with adverts, but neither can you listen to a bit, log out and come back later and carry on.

Amarok was Oldfield's penultimate album for Virgin, before he got his life back.  And he managed to persuade them to let him do his own thing, rather than what Virgin had been demanding for some time.  The first really long, real-instrument work for years.  The problem is he does seem to have wanted to fit it into an hour: and with all those years of pent-up ideas ready to flow, he shouldn't have edited down to an hour, but let the themes develop.  However, I love it.  it is very silly - but exuberant: a return to classic Oldfield, but sadly possibly the last time it would really happen.  After this the long slow sale of his instruments and the slide into electronica began.  By the way, some of the odd bits are clues:  there was a prize buried somewhere in Britain, and the album sleeve and the music contained the directions.  Sadly, Virgin never bothered to tell anyone...

In some ways, Amarok was a future echo of Ommadawn (the cover is a giveaway).  And here is the alternative if one hour long track is too much: Tubular Bells 3, which is TB reimagined.  So reimagined that many critics said it was only the name that had anything to do with the original.  Not so:  we anoraks will tell you it's all here - from the shout of Piltdown man, to the frantic bass-work from the end of TB1 reappearing in the closing sequence of this one.  And it's split into smaller tracks.  I wasn't looking forward to TB via Ibiza, but actually I think he did pretty well (even if Man in the rain is shamelessly Moonlight Shadow with different words).

Postman: Burning books

A book is an attempt to make thought permanent and to contribute to the great conversation of authors of the past.  Therefore, civilised people everywhere consider the burning of a book a vile form of anti-intellectualism.  But the telegraph demands that we burn its contents.  The value of telegraphy is undermined by applying the tests of permanence, continuity or coherence.  The telegraph is suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message.  Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation.

...telegraphic discourse permitted no time for historical perspectives and gave no priority to the qualitative. To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.

p71, 72.

Chambers: provision

...we talk as if our Heavenly Father had cut us off with a shilling! We think it a sign of real modesty to say at the end of a day - "Oh, well, I have just got through, but it has been a severe tussle." And all the Almighty God is ours in the Lord Jesus! And He will tax the last grain of sand and the remotest star to bless us if we will obey Him. What does it matter if external circumstances are hard? Why should they not be! If we give way to self-pity and indulge in the luxury of misery, we banish God's riches from our own lives and hinder others from entering into His provision. No sin is worse than the sin of self-pity, because it obliterates God and puts self-interest upon the throne. It opens our mouths to spit out murmurings and our lives become craving spiritual sponges, there is nothing lovely or generous about them. 

Utmost, May 16th

Keller: change is slow

Jonah stands as a warning that human hearts never change quickly or easily, even when a person is being directly mentored by God

Counterfeit Gods, p144