Restricted Views still available...

...at a price. Rounding off an interesting media theme, kudos to the very wonderful Dan & Dan for their new and painfully accurate Daily Mail song. Paying careful attention to it will save you a lot of money you might otherwise have wasted on buying the paper.

h/t Phil Ritchie and The Media Blog. It’s available here as an mp3 for your iPod.

Revealed — the Facebook Disease!

Since its first diagnosis in 1530, fear has fuelled all kinds of theories about Syphilis. Italians and Germans called it the “French disease.” The French called it the “Italian disease.” The Dutch called it the “Spanish disease,” the Russians called it the “Polish disease,” the Turks called it the “Christian disease” and Tahitians the “British disease.”

Fleet Street can now reveal (h/t Ben Goldacre) that Syphilis is, in fact, the “Facebook Disease.” This hypothesis also accounts for the failure of our Tudor ancestors to be able to place it accurately. Stories in the Daily Telegraph, Mail, and Star all proclaim the great discovery. A public health scientist in Teeside warned of the rise of incidence in his region. This was stuck up against another survey suggesting use of social networking sites is high in the North East and, hey presto!

Those who find this suggestion risible may care to try another from this February, also in the Mail — that Facebook causes Cancer.

How does this tosh make the printed page, and why should anyone pay for it? Now there’s a real mystery. Others will remember from Monty Python that sheeps’ bladders may be employed to prevent earthquakes. This new learning amazes me...

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.

Is Twitter Twaddle?

In the balmy days of my post-Christmas break I have been flexing my muscles as a new media junkie with Twitter. Some say this is the next Big Thing — but it has recently been excoriated by the Daily Mail, no less, for enabling celebs like Jonathan Ross, John Cleese, Will Carling and Stephen Fry to publish trivia about their lives.

Mind you, British newspapers have been known, themselves, to post trivia about celebrities, along with Celebs’ profound reflections about religion, philosophy, art and science. What seems to have got the Mail’s goat is that the celebs are now posting their own trivia for themselves, rather than having it dug up against them by Mail hacks; who sound understandably ratty about the time they wasted on Twitter digging for juicy dirt, rewarded by mere banalities.

So what is Twitter? It’s a free Micro Blog/ stream of collective consciousness/ social networking tool. From laptop or phone you enter up to 140 characters (limited because that's the max for a text message on some services) answering the simple question “what are you doing?” (like Facebook “Status”). You follow people you want, and are followed by people who want to follow you. A stream of “tweets” is served up to your desktop from the people you are following, sometimes in a clever and engaging form by applications like Twitterific (and PC equivalents). Additional tools like Mr Tweet dig out an expanding pool of people to follow, relavant to your postings and proclivities. You can also search the whole database of tweets for opinions about anything. Thus Twitter becometh, potentially, a serious marketing tool.

So, for example, I learn through Twitter that Jonathan Ross has been off in Florida on his hols with his kids, felt jet lagged when he got back, enjoyed Planes Trains and Automobiles whilst there, and hot tips Benjamin Button (available in the UK Feb) for his BBC TV show about film. Some of these information gobbets are more trivial than others. How interesting you find them depends rather on how interested you are in Wossy. I’m no dyed in the wool fan, but I actually rather like the guy more, and feel closer to him, for having some personal if trivial information about him. If I were a true fan, I’d love it. Whereas the media often dehumanize Celebrities, Twitter rehumanizes them.

As well as purely trivial tweets, people post links to their blogs, marketing tips, and the like. BBC and other media outlets post news stories as they get ’em, with links to follow up. Aha. This gets to sound more interesting. People post mini thoughts, impressions and experiences that wouldn't make a full blog post, but were good to note along the way. And you can feel your tweets through to your Facebook Status (killing, er, two birds with one stone) as well. The bigger the number following you, the more you have a purpose built advertising network for your blog, or whatever. As I twittered away last week, I noticed a steady and increasing stream coming to the blog, never more than a dozen a day with my little circle of 79 followers. Actually that's a very good conversion rate, in marketing terms. If I actually knew who half these people were...

Ah, there’s the rub. Some I do and some I don’t. Does it matter? I hate to admit it, bt I am finding Twitter to be an interesting news feed, facebook input mechanism, and marketing tool for the blog. If my little brownie ring of 79 grew into Barack Obama’s 154,878 followers (inluding me), it might become a significant component in my online presence.

You have to get your mind round what Twitter is and isn't. It’s a stream of collective consciousness, not a Big Po-Faced Hello magazine. You dip in and out of this river and dabble your toes. One would be unwise to invest more than five minutes a day in twittering, or maximum ten. Most tweets are trivial because most human information is trivial. It could have its uses, and the more people use it, the more uses it will find, no doubt. I’m definitely committed to tweeting for a few minutes this month, to investigate what it is and isn’t good for, and will say when I know... Anyone interested in following the saga blow by blow may click here.

For twitter as an Eighteenth Century Coffee Shop experience, see here.

Who’s wrecking Britain, and how?

Quentin Letts of the Daily Mail includes Graham Kendrick in his list of 5o people who have wrecked Britain (h/t Dave Walker and David Keen). GK has wrecked Britain, apparently, by writing 400 popular Evangelical hymns. I can’t say I’m a particular afficionado of them, but somebody must find joy singing them. If people’s hearts are stirred to worship God this way, why be snooty and sarcastic about it? Unaccountably, QL’s piece also takes a mean sideswipe at Mrs Alexander’s All things Bright & Beautiful, which I would have thought was right up his street. Beating up old ladies in public is ugly, but it’s a free country, I suppose.

Somebody told me today that what’s really wrecking Britain for them is the angry cynicism, celebrity fixation, base xenophobia, mean spiritedness, superstition and crass materialism they find in the Daily Mail. I don’t often read the Mail, so I couldn’t possibly comment. But a marvellous contraption called the Vodex Mailmaker will help you explore for yourself how the Mail’s worldview saves (or wrecks) your Britain. In seconds I produced my own work of art.

Most of the work we do is by definition less than our very best. Every age’s hymns contain much that is ephemeral, and it’s only as they are sung over many years that the real long-term winners emerge. So it was pure joy to be in a large congregation in Winslow this morning, on the 50th anniversary of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ death, a day designated as the International Day of Vaughan Williams, singing For all the Saints to his wonderful and uplifting tune.

I think we can all agree that RVW’s contribution to Britain’s worshipping life was sublime and enduring. How come some of our greatest hymn tunes were penned by an agnostic? Music is self-expression, but done with humility, the best music transcends its composers and artists. Great music is great music, and stirs the soul, full stop. God uses it as much as works by pious composers. Oh, and our packed congregation in Winslow also sang a Graham Kendrick hymn (Make Way with its curious evocation of Rule Britannia in the first line).
Nobody walked out, and I'm sure the Lord enjoyed the joke.

Church of Navel-Gazers?

I am not a natural Daily Mail reader, and I struggle with some of its historic points of view, from its enthusiastic endorsement for Hitler back in the 1930’s to its more recent tendency to whining Xenophobia. The fact is, however, that it is one of the few newspapers to build its circulation in the past twenty years. It has done this, it is said, by having a sure finger on the pulse of middle England.

Seeking the gift the giftie gie us, to see ourselves as others see us, I noticed a different persective on this week’s General Synod by Stephen Glover. Does this voice of Middle England deserve more serious consideration than comes naturally to Church political insiders?

Most people do not know the Church of England very well, and few of us regularly worship in its pews. But it is, for all that, our national Church, and most of us write 'C of E' when asked our religion. Millions of us are still married in its often glorious churches, and millions of us will have the words of its prayer book - transcendent ones, if they come from the 1662 version - spoken over our coffins when we are dead. So, however remote we may appear from the Church of England, it remains part of many of our lives, if less so than for most of our forefathers.

Strange and unfamiliar it may sometimes seem, but it is not some private sect whose deliberations are purely its own concern. And yet that is exactly what it has appeared to be these past few weeks, months and, I fear, years, as it has torn itself apart over issues that do not seem central to this nation's needs and concerns...

Our national Church is preoccupied - no, obsessed - with two issues: whether its priests should be allowed to be practising homosexuals, and whether women should be allowed to become bishops. I don't say such matters should be of no importance to members of the Church. But to concentrate on them so long to the virtual exclusion of more important things - well, that seems a form almost of madness, and certainly evidence of grotesque introspection.

One does not have to be apocalyptic to believe that we live, as David Cameron says, in 'a broken society' in which Christian values, as they would have been recognised by our fathers and grandfathers, and as they have been preached by the Church for nearly 2,000 years, are scarcely observed, or even understood, by many people.

Nearly half of marriages, which institution the Church has celebrated as the rock on which society is built, end in divorce. A growing number of people no longer bother to get married at all. The family, whose most perfect inspiration was the Holy Family, is no longer a paradigm for many people, and the Church of England only intermittently and half-heartedly promotes it. The Church is silent on many pressing social problems which seem to portend the slow disintegration of society, and often arise from the family breakdown about which it is comparatively relaxed. While it has been agonising about homosexual priests, ever younger children have been stabbed to death on our streets, and the level of mindless violence seems inexorably to grow. Yet our national Church has little to say about the brutalisation of our country...

The debate on the consecration of women bishops has been bewildering to many people, including some Anglicans. The Church of England decided 15 years ago, rightly I think, that there is no theological objection to the ordination of women as priests. Now half those accepted for ordination are female, and there are women canons, archdeacons and even a dean. Why not bishops?

One can understand that Anglo-Catholics should feel qualms about women bishops, as they did about women priests, and it seems reasonable that they should have their own male 'super bishops', as was proposed at the Synod yesterday. But the country looks on in amazement as Anglo-Catholics threaten to resign en masse, and to rip apart a Church that is, frankly, already tottering. Their arguments seem arcane, particularly in view of the earlier acceptance of women priests, and almost insanely inwardlooking.

Similar objections should be made to the Church of England's obsession with homosexual priests. Here, the factions are different, with the Anglo-Catholics being for the most part relaxed about homosexuality, while many Evangelicals, comfortable with the idea of women bishops, are distinctly queasy about homosexual priests. Many Third World Anglicans, especially in Africa, share their reservations.

But why in God's name does it matter so much? Both sides should be castigated for upping the ante. There are people such as the publicity-seeking American gay bishop, Gene Robinson, for whom homosexuality appears to be the most important issue in the world, and there are fundamentalists on the other side, the degree of whose intolerance seems almost un-Christian.

Everyone knows there have always been gay priests, and no one minded very much as long as they didn't demand instant and complete equality with heterosexuals within the Church. With good sense on both sides, there could have been a quiet evolution, which has been the Anglican way in past centuries, or at any rate since 1660 and the restoration of the monarchy and the Church of England.

As it is, with grandstanding crusaders opposed by intolerant fundamentalists, there has been an unedifying struggle about something not very important, while the rest of the country looks on in amazement at an increasingly monomaniacal national Church. Think what both Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals in the Church of England did for society in the 19th and early 20th century - building churches and opening missions in working-class areas, ministering to the poor, encouraging education, and inculcating Christian values.

And now, when our own century throws up its different but perhaps no less appalling social problems, our national Church, far from trying to fill this frightening moral vacuum, is too busy talking to itself.

I have certainly met good ordinary people, many of them lifelong core members of the Church of England, traditionally minded rather than traditionalist politicians, who think exactly along Stephen’s lines. They often feel that nobody in Synod speaks for them, and the whole focus of the present debate excludes their point of view. Discuss?

Incendiary former pope?

Still skirting the Twilight zone, the Daily Mail, The Beano for the Bilious, reports that former Pope J-P2 has shown up on a Polish bonfire. Well, well. Fancy that. After 400 years of Protestant Little Englanders, history’s Daily Mail readers, burning the pope in effigy on bonfire night, it’s jolly ecumenical of him to appear like this. But studying the evidence carefully and comparing the images, I sense, disturbingly, that he may be giving them all the finger...