Eugene Peterson is well known in the Christian world as a prolific author, but more importantly as a sensitive, orthodox, socially-aware Evangelical Presbyterian American, now Professor Emeritus of Spiritual Theology at Regent College, Vancouver. The Jesus Way. A Conversation in Following Jesus now completes his trilogy on Spiritual Theology , which began with Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. A Conversation in Spiritual Theology , followed by Eat This Book. The Art of Spiritual Reading. All are very accessible, readable and nourishing books.
More interesting is the fact that this final volume - The Jesus Way - contains studies on key Old Testament figures such as Abraham, Moses, David, Elijah, (I & II) Isaiah. No false splits, then, between Old and New Testament here! Rather, a discerning of continuities. The final three chapters have the interesting titles of The Way(s) of Herod, Caiaphas and Josephus. Hm!
Most interesting of all, almost, is the final recommendation in his Appendix on Some Writers on Discerning the Way: Czeslaw Milosz, A Treatise on Poetry. A 1980 Nobel Prize winner, but hardly known in England (?), I need to read him. Peterson writes: 'The bottomless pit of evil in which he began and the subsequent exilic conditions of his maturity galvanized his art in discerning God's truth and beauty in the particularity of his life and times.' He concludes his recommendation with the lines that 'One clear stanza can take more weight/ Than a whole wagon of elaborate prose'.
Elsewhere, Seamus Heaney speaks of how Milosz has gone from 'emigre writer to world visionary'. He writes: 'Milosz's poetry, even in translation, fulfils the ancient expectation that poetry will delight as well as instruct. It has a magnificent balance...Milosz dwells in the middle, at times tragically, at times deliciously, for he will renege neither on his glimpses of heaven upon earth nor on his knowledge that the world is a vale of tears.'
An Amazon review of his The Captive Mind (Penguin Modern Classics) says: 'At the risk of overstatement, this is one the handful of books from the twentieth century that genuinely deserves the title "great". It is about the use of coercive power by clear minds in the cause of absurd lies...It serves...as an analysis of... the processes which force, cajole and woo thinking men and women to believe self-eivident lies...This book is a wonder." I need to read it. Recent reports on the terrorist tactics of Ms Harriet Harman in the abortion debate in Parliament indicate that lobbying and threats easily achieve what no rational or irrational argument can.
Eat These Books!
Wednesday, 28 May 2008
Wednesday, 7 May 2008
Mangrove swamps
In the wake of the Burmese cyclone, the BBC web-site has published a report with a sickeningly familiar tone
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7385315.stm).
The ASEAN (Association of South-East Nations) Secretary-General, Surin Pitsuwan, suggests that it was the destruction of the mangrove swamps of the vast Irrawaddy delta for the sake of sprawling coastal developments which enabled the cyclone to have such destructive power. This is desperately sad, but no surprise: it was exactly the widespread process in many areas of South-East Asia that enabled the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 to wreak such havoc, and which conversely reduced fatalities where mangrove swamps were still to be found in profusion.
Debbie and I saw these enormous mangrove swamps in southern Nigeria in the 1970s, and they occur all around the world. They are fascinating natural 'bio-guards' for coastal settlements, in that their complex intertwining root-systems have been shown to dissipate wave energy (see the BBC article). The article also reports that 3.6 million hectares of mangrove forest have disappeared since the 1980s. They seem(ed) to be useless and unproductive; now we know how important the 'useless' was, and how much 'use' they are. (But the local people always knew.)
Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. It is clear that many such events are nothing to do with spectacular 'acts of God'; rather, the globalisation of the mad modernist myth of progress (and foreign holidays to countries ruled by dictators) has enabled people everywhere to treat creation as dispensable, to be re-ordered according to our own whims. Disaster follows. cf. floods in England: plant (build) on flood-plains, reap the floods.
What adds two further sour notes is that predictions were given but not broadcast in Burma (do. prior to the Boxing Day tsunami). Secondly, the Burmese government has acquired vast financial resources from mining over the past 20 years, which it has largely spent on building a new capital inland (far away from the sea), funding the army, genocidally destroying the Christian population in the East Karen and Kachin tribes; cf. Sudan)
(See http://dynamic.csw.org.uk/country.asp?s=id&urn=Burma; www.cswusa.com/countries/burma.htm),
and most recently committing atrocities against thousands of Burmese monks.
For further reading, see James Maudsley, The Heart Must Break (2002: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Heart-Must-Break-Burma-Democracy/dp/0099426943)
Benedict Rogers, A Land without Evil (2004: http://www.amazon.co.uk/A-Land-Without-Evil/dp/082546059X)
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7385315.stm).
The ASEAN (Association of South-East Nations) Secretary-General, Surin Pitsuwan, suggests that it was the destruction of the mangrove swamps of the vast Irrawaddy delta for the sake of sprawling coastal developments which enabled the cyclone to have such destructive power. This is desperately sad, but no surprise: it was exactly the widespread process in many areas of South-East Asia that enabled the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 to wreak such havoc, and which conversely reduced fatalities where mangrove swamps were still to be found in profusion.
Debbie and I saw these enormous mangrove swamps in southern Nigeria in the 1970s, and they occur all around the world. They are fascinating natural 'bio-guards' for coastal settlements, in that their complex intertwining root-systems have been shown to dissipate wave energy (see the BBC article). The article also reports that 3.6 million hectares of mangrove forest have disappeared since the 1980s. They seem(ed) to be useless and unproductive; now we know how important the 'useless' was, and how much 'use' they are. (But the local people always knew.)
Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. It is clear that many such events are nothing to do with spectacular 'acts of God'; rather, the globalisation of the mad modernist myth of progress (and foreign holidays to countries ruled by dictators) has enabled people everywhere to treat creation as dispensable, to be re-ordered according to our own whims. Disaster follows. cf. floods in England: plant (build) on flood-plains, reap the floods.
What adds two further sour notes is that predictions were given but not broadcast in Burma (do. prior to the Boxing Day tsunami). Secondly, the Burmese government has acquired vast financial resources from mining over the past 20 years, which it has largely spent on building a new capital inland (far away from the sea), funding the army, genocidally destroying the Christian population in the East Karen and Kachin tribes; cf. Sudan)
(See http://dynamic.csw.org.uk/country.asp?s=id&urn=Burma; www.cswusa.com/countries/burma.htm),
and most recently committing atrocities against thousands of Burmese monks.
For further reading, see James Maudsley, The Heart Must Break (2002: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Heart-Must-Break-Burma-Democracy/dp/0099426943)
Benedict Rogers, A Land without Evil (2004: http://www.amazon.co.uk/A-Land-Without-Evil/dp/082546059X)
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