a QWERTY church?

Here's an interesting anecdote I wasn't aware of:

Many of the rules that apply in businesses were set years ago and have endured by force of habit. A good example is the QWERTY keyboard, which is in use on all desktop computers. The original QWERTY layout of keys on the typewriter keyboard was designed in the 1870s to slow down the speed of typing because fast operators were causing typewriter keys to jam together. By putting the most commonly used letters e, a, i, o away from the index fingers of the hands, speed was reduced and jams were avoided. Those mechanical jams are long gone but we are stuck with a rule for a keyboard layout that is outdated and inappropriate. How many of the rules in your organisation are QWERTY standards – set up for circumstances that no longer apply today?

(You can read the whole article here)

Interesting as that is, it set me thinking: are there aspects of our church life & practice that are, effectively, QWERTY-standard?

And if there are, what then? Changing keyboard isn't possible - not now, not this late in the game. But changing church? Wadda ya think?

the great books (viii) - to kill a mockingbird

Continuing the sequence of major prize-winning literature that this list is turning into - an Orange, & two Bookers to date - we now reach the Pulitzer-accorded To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee's most famous piece of writing.

It's a coming-of-age novel but that can never do justice to this fine, fine work. The story of Scout, her father Attitcus and the fabled Boo Radley is wonderfully observed and bravely raised a flag for the injustices of the deep south.

The least-churchy of the main characters, Atticus nevertheless displays the most consistently Christian behaviour. Perhaps unwittingly, Lee takes us on a side-journey into the waters of Romans 2, Luke 10 and James 2....not the hearers but the doers.

It took me a long time to get around to reading this but I'm so glad I did.

wild horses

Susan Boyle on top form. Honest.

the great books (vii) - disgrace

Here we are again. And this time with a book I never epxected to read but found utterly enthralling, albeit not in any joyous way: J M Coetzee's Disgrace.

Rather than try to capture its central storyline and authorial intent myself (read: cannot do so), here is something lifted from Amazon which makes a fine job of doing so (although I'm not necessarily saying she gets it fully right...). All I will add is that the quality of Coetzee's writing is truly outstanding.

So, over to you, Rachel....

Disgrace takes as its complex central character 52-year-old English professor David Lurie whose preoccupation with Romantic poetry - and romancing his students - threatens to turn him into a "a moral dinosaur". Called to account by the University for a passionate but brief affair with a student who is ambivalent about his embraces, David refuses to apologise, drawing on poetry before what he regards as political correctness in his claim that his "case rests on the rights of desire." Seeking refuge with his quietly progressive daughter Lucie on her isolated small holding, David finds that the violent dilemmas of the new South Africa are inescapable when the tentative emotional truce between errant father and daughter is ripped apart by a traumatic event that forces Lucie to an appalling disgrace. Pitching the moral code of political correctness against the values of Romantic poetry in its evocation of personal relationships, this novel is skillful - almost cunning - in its exploration of David's refusal to be accountable and his daughter's determination to make her entire life a process of accountability. Their personal dilemmas cast increasingly foreshortened shadows against the rising concerns of the emancipated community, and become a subtle metaphor for the historical unaccountability of one culture to another.

The ecstatic critical reception with which Disgrace has been received has insisted that its excellence lies in its ability to encompass the universality of the human condition. Nothing could be farther from the truth, or do the novel - and its author - a greater disservice. The real brilliance of this stylish book lies in its ability to capture and render accountable - without preaching - the specific universality of the condition of whiteness and white consciousness. Disgrace is foremost a confrontation with history that few writers would have the resources to sustain. Coetzee's vision is unforgiving--but not bleak. Against the self-piteous complaints of all declining cultures and communities who bemoan the loss of privileges that were never theirs to take, Coetzee's vision of an unredeemed white consciousness holds out - to those who reach towards an understanding of their position in history by starting again, with nothing - the possibility of "a moderate bliss." --Rachel Holmes

honourable mention

to the album, Flying Cowboys by Rickie Lee Jones (yes, she of the Chuck-E fame).

You can check it out on spotify here.

The track, Don't Let The Sun See You Crying, is wonderfully beautiful.