Amazon Kindle Preliminary review

amidst a postal strike, illustrating how Royal Mail and their staff are tragically putting their own bsiness down the toilet just now, UPS delivers an Amazon Kindle. As you can see, every Kindle delivered to the UK comes with a free promotional English lady novelist. You just add water or something. I got Charlotte Bronte. Buy 4 Kindles and you get the whole Cowan Bridge clergy daughters’ school, complete with willowy maidens, bread and water and your own Semaphore kit. Just add Crinoline.

Anyway, I haven’t quite worked out how to access all the promotional stuff, but I have been reading a substantial book with the Kindle, Hilary Mantel’s excellent Booker prize winning novel Wolf Hall. The hero is pictured, left, with his own leather-bound reading device.

Some preliminary observations about the kit:

• The screen is brilliant. There are five sizes of text, all very clear, and you can adjust the gaps between words as well as the size. I have been reading the smallest size perfectly comfortably. e-ink is very restful to read, and quite clear enough with a small reading light at night, for those who like to read their novels under the bedclothes overnight.
  
• Content Delivery: The 3G mobile signal, which is slightly questionable in these parts on mobiles, is strong and good on the Kindle. Hilary Mantel’s substantial opus downloaded in just under two minutes.I didn’t think it would make much difference, but the whole acquiring of information is pleasantly smooth and uncomplicated. Buying a book in the conventional way from the Kindle store is also remarkably painless. You just do what you always did on Amazon, and the book appears within a couple of minutes by magic on your Kindle.
  
• Controls, apart from the keyboard, are ergonomically sound and, although I am not proud of the fact, the left hand second control for thumbing through pages is immensely useful if you're reading in bed. Some operations take longer than others, but the general feel for most operations is smooth and non-kludgy. I wish there were a “history” shortcut back to the latest 100 pages read, like on the Sony Reader, though. Maybe there is...
  
  
• The Keyboard is a bit more of a pickle, though it may be that those with more developed Blackerry Thumb would find it more convenient. I am not convinced an iPhone like screen based keyboard wouldn’t have been faster to use. It does however do what it says. Perhaps all such entry devices take a few weeks before they feel natural to use, but I suspect I would be finding the keyboard more ergonomic if I were a spider than as a human being.
  
• Design of books themselves does seem rather easier than on my Sony Reader. I like the system for telling you instantly how far through a text you are (percentage, paragraph number and a bar that fills up), and the system is free of the rather annoying occasional random line breaks that I have hitherto experienced in e-Books.
  
• Content: We Brits are currently allowed US content licensed for the UK market — a goodly but not infinite selection. It's funny what you can and can’t get in a Kindle edition just now. As someone who likes an occasional read in French or German, I do wonder when some of the publishing industry’s copyright walls will be readjusted to allow proper paid access across national boundaries — all it would mean for them is increased trade. I can currently get physical books from amazon.fr or amazon.de, but not Kindle editions. Bah! Humbug!
  

Charlotte has now dissolved into the ether, to be replaced by a plan of the Villa Palladio. Not quite sure what that means.

I will, however, try and post a more detailed review comparing the Kindle experience to the Sony Reader one, sooner rather than later.

Ministry Development Review ahoy

A slightly busy and intense time, including a two night residential learning event at Whirlow Grange, Sheffield’s retreat and spirituality centre, exploring Ministry Development Review. National interim guidance consistent with the new Terms and Conditions of Service being implemented in 2010 has brought together the whole ragbag of schemes that have grown up around England in the past 20 years. This event brought together a dozen of us — bishops, archdeacons ministry development officers and a lay reviewer with commercial HR experience, from various dioceses around the country, from Manchester to Truro.

Events like this are rather like a sit-down meal — a lot depends on who you get on your table. Fortunately, this group represented a wide variety of people with different experiences in all kinds of circumstances, with a real commitment to learning together. Excellently led and enabled by Tim Ling, Paul Wright and Karen West, this course took a notional for-instance MDR and slowed it down, giving us space and time to try it for ourselves, then analyse the key issues and opportunities arising, playing with possibilities and backing up our experience alongside national guidelines and local practice.

As Ministry Development Review becomes mandatory across the Church, and different dioceses roll out new schemes, it’s going to be really important to work at making this tool a real enrichment and support to colleagues in their ministry. That will involve conscious work by all of us, as the reviewees and reviewers we all are.

I can understand some clergy fearing MDR as a bit of secular managerialism they could do without. The only way to win their confidence will be to offer people really helpful, spiritually focussed and honest reviews. This won’t happen automatically. The one thing I learned from this event, above all, was how much there is for us all to learn, especially if we have been in and around ministry review processes for years. For example, I came away realising how much I need to raise my game around defining goals that really are goals, not just worthy bits of work.

I very much hope excellent training like this will be made available everywhere to all clergy and lay people delivering MDR.

Doing this properly will, of course, cost — but it will also benefit everyone especially the people we serve in our day to day ministries, as well as each other and, of course, ourselves.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition

Are 400,000 Church of England laypeople, 2,000 clergy and 50 Bishops imminently going to go RC, just to capture the predicted numbers in various Fleet Street Organs? I very much doubt anything like that number are sufficiently into fear, surprise and and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, but we’ll see in a couple of years time.

Ben Hecht once suggested

trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.

Indeed. One interesting take has come, not from a journalist, but Oxford Church History professor Diarmaid MacCulloch in the Observer:

John Paul II and Benedict have created the most centralised regime that Catholicism has ever known – a far cry from its state in either the medieval period or the Counter-Reformation. It is with an anxious ear for those alternative voices, not much different from those of mainstream wishy-washy liberal Anglicans, that Pope Benedict seeks to encourage those who think like him beyond the walls, and to bring them inside the fortifications.

Much is left unsaid amid the present triumphalist crowings of those Catholics who see this as a victory over a feeble, tottering Anglicanism, since Anglicans are temperamentally disinclined to blow their own trumpets. The Church of England is not about to disintegrate, as anyone who knows its day-to-day life, rather than listening to what journalists say about it, will be aware. Most Anglo-Catholics and evangelicals are fed up with all the name-calling, intolerance and calls for revolt...

There is one killer fact about the pope's present move. "Traditionalist" Anglicanism is a shotgun marriage between incompatible groups: extreme Anglo-Catholics and extreme evangelicals...

Their alliance with the traditionalist Anglo-Catholics has been one of convenience, because both sides cannot stomach women in positions of clerical authority (for entirely opposite reasons) and hate the idea that homosexuals might be just part of the spectrum of boring normality in God's creation. (Anglo-Catholics are more muffled in their outrage on this one, given how many of them are gay themselves.) So the pope's move will split the traditionalists down the middle and reveal how fragile their alliance is. The best law in church history is the law of unintended consequences.

In one sense, this is a storm in a teacup, stirred by an elderly cleric in the Vatican with a private agenda and a track record of ill-thought-out policy moves. In another, it is a fascinating moment in a confrontation as much a struggle for the soul of the Church of Rome as of the Church of England. Once we have got past the screaming headlines, we should keep an eye open for the real story.

The Church of England has always functioned as more of a coral reef than a model trainset, mainly because that’s how Christianity was usually done in these islands before the sixteenth century, and the English were characteristically averse to clericalism and control. For Protestants unsatisfied by such pragmatism, there were New World colonies. The people with get-up-and-go got up and went, especially after the Civil War, leaving the rest of us a rather pragmatic, unassuming, and messy lump. Since the 1830’s, those sufficiently scared of the modern world to be attracted by New Model Ultramontanism usually ended up by becoming Roman Catholics. Thus all the Vatican politics behind the denunciation of Anglican orders in 1893 — a quaint marketing ploy for a different, positivist, age.

Anglo-Papalism, an idea that first appeared in the last quarter of the 19th Century, only takes in a small section of Anglo-Catholics in the C of E. They may be colourful people, but any historical assessment has to take into account everybody else. Something similar could be said of extreme Prods. The vast bulk of the Church of England has always been more multifaceted, its Protestants closer to Richard Hooker than Walter Travers — boring, but true.

It could be that a Coral Reef Church, with an open and creative base in the Creeds, the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer, might eventually turn out to be as sound a home for faith and holiness, as one predicated on Imperialism and control. Like Professor MacCulloch, I suspect this question will be answered over the next hundred years or so bottom-up, rather than top-down.

Let’s squish our fruit together!

In a world of division, this latest bit of public loonery from ImprovEverywhere has Broadway class, and a heartwarming Ecumenical theme:

Faith, Ministry, and Human Kindness

As someone who spent my thirties burying people in an urban parish with a crematorium in it, on one occasion 13 a week, I was really moved by Martin Samuel’s piece in the Daily Mail about his uncle Sid’s funeral.
It certainly took me back to what my job seemed to be all about in those days,

Sid was a whisky man and he liked it straight. He regarded water with suspicion, as if it were a particularly inadequate mixer.

During one spectacular coughing fit caused by his choice of solids to accompany the whisky - 40 cigarettes daily - he was offered a glass from the tap. 'No thanks, son,' he said between wheezes. 'I tried water once, tasted of nothing.'

And that is what some people think about the Church of England, too. That it tastes of nothing. They would prefer something stronger, with a bit of oomph, a little more fire and brimstone, a greater commitment to the cause. Yet no religion could have given Sid a better send-off than he had that day.

The vicar held a service for a man who never set foot inside a church unless he had to, yet did so with dignity and humour. He introduced faith for those that sought comfort from it, and displayed humanity and respect for those who were there just for Sid. And, in doing so, he converted a room of people, not to the beliefs of the Church of England, but to the idea of it.

The very modern, very civilised, concept of a faith that can be all things to all men with a common decency that may come from the teachings of God, or the teachings of Man on subjects as wide-ranging as conservation and contraception. A faith that embraces the Bible and Dean Martin, Charles Wesley and Sid.

Can any good thing come out of the Daily Mail? Apparently, yes. The fact that Martin’s experience goes on all over England any day of the week, goes a long way to explain where the real energy lies in the Church of England, and the very serious way the vast majority of my colleagues try, not always successfully, to take their responsibility, as an established Church, to be there for anyone.

Jesus preached a kingdom where the first were sometimes last and the last first. He said the real kingdom was hidden deep within, like a seed or yeast. Our job isn’t to manipulate, bully or coerce people, just pray for them, whoever they are, be there for them, and, based on trying to grow a Eucharistic community in every community, bear witness as best we can (being all of us sinners) to the way home to God. It may not sound like much, but it’s we’re there for...

[the] Church is not redundant, but more relevant than ever, precisely because it resists dogma, hectoring or the fanatical, because it does not move people to acts of violence or cruelty.

The Pope proposes to welcome Anglicans to the Roman Catholic Church, but the ones most eager to take him up on the offer will be those out of step with society, who vehemently oppose the ordination of women as priests, for example.

They see the Church of England as feeble and compromised, they hear Dean Martin where a church organ should be and think it has lost its place in society. They are wrong.

There is great modernity in the inclusiveness of the Anglican Church because it places human kindness to the fore. And that simple grace should never be mistaken for weakness...

I have to say, however, I contest any impression the papers have been giving that Fr Ed Tomlinson is some kind of twisted misanthropic oldie. Fr Ed and I come from different ends of the candle, and disagree fundamentally about women’s ordained ministry, but when I visited his parish earlier this year it was obvious that his work, about which he cares passionately and sincerely, is very outward focussed in a community which hasn’t had many advantages in the past. Catholic in every sense of the term, it encompassed prayer, hospitality, a commuity play, and the renewal of a school and playgroup, among other big pieces of outward focussed hard work.

I don’t know what his local paper’s on, or maybe they were just sexing up a story to sell it, but grateful as I am for the discussion the story stimulated, and much as I agree with Martin’s conclusion that the simple inclusive grace of the C of E (where it can manage it) is its greatest strength, not a weakness, I’m uncomfortable about any injustice about the priest whose blog it was orignally based on.

Britwell Rising

Last time I was in St George’s Britwell, it was a building site. Last night I was there for baptism and confirmation, and The Princess Royal will be round to open the new Church formally next week. The new baptismal pool was in use, and the building performed really well packed out with 250 people. This project shows what can be accomplished with a lot of prayer, help from friends and some inspirational leadership from John Chorlton, vicar, and others. John has logged the various stages of building on YouTube.

The challenge with this kind of building is to accommodate all the various things that go on in a busy urban Church flexibly, but without it feeling like an old-fashioned scout hut. This means a conscious choice not to cut corners, to include various designated areas among a lot of versatile space, to include first class social infrastructure (WC’s, kitchens, etc), and not to skimp on materials. This last point was especially relevant at St George’s, because it had a 1960’s Church which had to come down because it was build of various miracle substances of the 1960’s, including Sick Concrete and asbestos. That all seems a long time ago now, and it’s especially good to see a growing congregation usually nudging three figures of a Sunday where all was, certainly in the early years of this century, blood and guts.

Two immediate thoughts struck me, seeing it all up and running:

1. Lighting makes an enormous difference to a building. This one has all sorts of bells and whistles built in, including solar power generation off the roof, and the ability to light the areas you are using properly brings the whole place alive in use, along with high quality wired-in services.
   
   
2. We often say, in new housing areas, “of course we shouldn’t be thinking of new build because the Church is people not buildings.” Theologically this is fine — we don’t need to build, but the half truth looks slightly hollow when you see first class building in a context that had been branded a failing estate. It may seem noble and somehow incarnational not to invest in buildings, but they can be endeavours that catalyse faith, generate as well as spend energy, and bring people together. It is also incarnational to invest sacrificially in an area’s renewal. Failing to consider at least the possibility of such investment in a challenging urban parish runs the risk of colluding with the whole culture of failure, grot and crappada that stalks the streets anyway. Christianity is not a religion, as much as a process of social and personal transformation, and it is good to see a distinctive sign of this transformation, corporately and concretely, at work on the streets.
   

Small Earthquake in Rome?

Serving in a part of the Lord’s vineyard with a valued but proportionately tiny Anglo-Catholic strand (for the past four hundred years, anyway), I am surrounded by silence about the latest Vatican scheme for special Angican ordinariates. I have to admit I don’t know what an “ordinariate” is, but some of my Anglo-Catholic friends who claim they do are delighted, so I’m glad to share their joy.

Not being of a Chauvinistic/ Imperialistic bent about religion, I’ve always thought people should serve within the denomination in which they can best be discipled. All denominations are only delivery systems for the Kingdom, after all.

This new scheme has some rather odd resonances — if a clergy colleague came to see me to say they believed God was calling them to be a Baptist, if that’s discipled, I’d be delighted. If the Baptists then announced they had a special scheme for Anglicans where you could be a Baptist but also, as a former Anglican, you could carry on doing infant baptisms, my eyebrows would raise.

How jolly postmodern of them, I’d think, but wait a minute. Assimilating a lot of people who perhaps have struggled, and some might even say haven’t made a raging success of living within their own tradition, you’ll get two sorts of “convert”:

1. people who really should try out and perhaps are called by God to be part of the Roman tradition. Becoming Roman Catholics will enable them to be better disciples, so the whole Church of God, every denomination, is enriched — the wealth of one Christian expression is the resource of all: Hip, hip, hooray!
   
   
2. people who aren’t terribly good at living in any tradition on anything but their own terms. “The disciplines and relationships of Community are for the little people...”

This second sort of “convert,” often has what St Benedict called the Gyrovague personality. The symptom, says the Rule, is a compulsive habit of “murmuring.” Gyrovagues will carry on inexorably being as they are, because their aproach to authority is personality based and they can’t help it.

The latest special offer may not be good news for the Pope’s own people. There are, for example, genuine Roman Catholic clergy who have faithfully and heroicially struggled and somehow managed to live sacrificially within their Church’s discipline, because they sincerely believed it was necessary. Where does it leave them to know that Auntie in Rome is now doing a PostModern family promotion for married Anglicans, but they’re not invited? However delighted I might be, were this me, that Auntie is now being jolly and Post-Modern to the Anglicans, I’d hope she manages to find some way, after all these years, of being jolly and Post-Modern to me…

Anish Kapoor: Goo and Mirrors

Arty types will recognise from my blog header my respect for the work of Anish Kapoor. It was a great joy to spent a day off yesterday at his latest, largest and most absorbing exhbition at the Royal Academy. He’s still fascinated with space, bigtime, playing with mirrors and reflections. Vistors are greeted by a socking great pile of 76 mirrored bubbles in the courtyard outside which, like Cloud Gate, entertains all day.


Inside, there’s a good selection of dense colour works — strangely deep and absorbing even in poster paint primary colours. Somehow he manages to make the spindliest and sharpest geometry look as though it was simply powder that could blow away at any moment. As ever, he’s interesed in the plane as well as the shape, with a pregnant wall, hinting at things to come — a wall of pure sunshine orange that turns out to have depth when you get close to it (denser of not quite as monumental as the sun in Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project at the Tate the other year).

So far, Kapoor been before. The new dimension is goo. There’s dusty scatalogical goo, that being intestinally shaped coils and turns of concrete loaded on pallets like piles of guts or one of those snake scenes in an Indiana Jones movie. “Greyman Cries, Shaman Dies, Billowing Smoke, Beauty Evoked” is the finished resentable title. Many fellow visitors were drawn into the texture of various squigglies loaded on the pallets, longing to touch.

But the most spectacular way Kapoor claims his space, blasting it out or dominating everything, is with shimmering waxy scarlet goo. For those who like their goo monumental, Svayambh (Sanskrit for “self-generated”) is a 40 ton slow train that takes one and a half hours to scour its way through five galleries, splashing blood-red wax and vaseline on the high imperial gilded arches as it goes. Like the original juggernaut it slides noiselessly through the huge space, drawing children of all ages back again and again to check on its progress.

If you prefer indoor fireworks, there’s Shooting into the Corner. Every twenty minutes a ritual is enacted by which a shell shaped red wadge is fired at the wall of the next gallery, filling the smaller room gradually with goo. Even though it’s powered on compressed air, I would guess, and there’s no conventional explosive bang, the whole thing makes a predictably intense indoor game. Various people near me were holding their ears, and somebody near me jumped. The kids loved it.

The show manages to be a monumental, dynamic and playful workout for the imagination. I shall certainly be back before December.