Playing catchup

Blogging’s been sparse around here lately, so here’s a big catchup post of various things that have caught my eye recently.

There’s a new blog over at Dekhomai, centring around the “spirituality” banner but from a Christian perspective. Should shape up into something interesting. They’ve just been at the London “Mind, Body, Spirit” fair and it sounds like they made an impression. From them, a link to WorldPrayers – a website that supplies prayers from various faith traditions around the world. It’s good to see through someone else’s eyes sometimes.

Alastair has posted a picture of the Abomination that causes desolation. On a more serious note, he’s made some good points about how we can, almost by accident, recentre our thinking around issues that should be tangential to our faith. Once we do this, we become more liable to make certain kinds of mistake. For example:

The recentering of the faith around the doctrine of (individual) justification that occurred in many areas following the Reformation made Protestant churches especially vulnerable to certain errors that churches centred on a more catholic (with a small ‘c’) reading of the Nicene Creed would not be. This recentering led to weaknesses that could later be exploited by such movements as liberalism, modernism, secularism, individualism and sectarianism.

Sven, by contrast, has been concerned with issues of inspiration and assurance, making his usual cogent contributions to both spheres. I’m interested to see where he goes with both of these strands.

I can see the arguments for both the Calvinist and Arminian position, yet both have one major flaw in common in that neither of them offer complete assurance in the present. A Calvinist never completely knows if he or she is truly one of the elect, and an Arminian can never be completely confident in his or her “saving” decision or subsequent obedience. This flaw is, I think, really only a symptom of a bigger problem with both systems which is namely that their Christology is inadequate

On a more political note, Tony at Storyteller’s World pointed out a campaign that’s got wider reporting as well – Amnesty International’s Irrepressible. This is an effort to show the amount of silent censorship that is going on online, censoring of dissent or criticism, and to raise its profile by making available a simple script that will disseminate material that governments have tried to suppress. Here’s one of the ways it can look:

And finally (!), The Register has been reporting on Envirofone, a recycling organisation that pays you (or a charity of your choice) for your old mobile, reconditions it and sends it off to places where mobile phones are needed as the only viable method of communication. They’ve spent £285 000 already this year on obtaining phones, so they’re doing pretty well. If you’ve got a phone that you’re replacing, why not send the old one to Envirofone?

pax et bonum

Article posted at 7:44pm on 30 May 2006
Category: Faith, Links