Saturday, March 16, 2013

Just another local bishop! And a whinge. Or two.

A nice point is made by +Christopher Hill here.

My whinge: I have just taken delivery of a new computer which has Windows 8. Is this operating system the worst idea Microsoft has ever had?

Otherwise today is Saturday. The mighty Bulls play the possibly-once-were-mighty-Crusaders tonight (rugby) and I have an invite to a corporate box. How good is that! (Later: it was a corporate occasion, but not in a corporate box. The Crusaders were back to their mighty best, blowing the Bulls off the park, 41-19, six tries to one!)

While rounding up on a Saturday, there is an interesting story unfolding in Virginia. Short version: Anglican departure from Episcopal church, friendship between departing vicarBaucum and his former bishop Johnston, both speak at a reconciliation conference arranged by ++Justin at Coventry about their friendship, Johnston invites John Dominic (there was no resurrection because Jesus was eaten by dogs) Crossan to speak to his colleagues, end of friendship.

The Living Church has a responsible report here. Embedded there is a fascinating example of 'lack of logic' which (in my view) verges on 'self-deceit': +Johnston protests that Crossan's beliefs run contrary to his own yet, "Nonetheless, I will not be a censor of ideas, a roadblock to inquiry that is grounded in a search for ‘God with us.’" Er, Bishop, to not be a censor is not equivalent to I must invite John Dominic Crossan to speak to my clergy. "Censor" here would be, "forbidding my clergy to read Crossan's works". I sense that at the heart of the turmoil in TEC which we who are far away observe and misunderstand in respect of 'But why do parishioners and clergy feel they need to leave such a church?' is the sheer frustration of this kind of lack of logic and sleight of hand thinking.

(I like John Dominic Crossan whom I have heard in person and whose substantive works on historical Jesus and historical beginnings of Christianity I have read. He is a charming Irishman. Completely wrong about Jesus. And about the beginnings of Christianity. Ergo, no point in inviting him to disseminate his errors and heresies to clergy. Wrong, by the way and briefly, because his version of Jesus' life is "nothing to see here" which begs the question how and why the gospel of nothing spread and the movement of a nobody eaten by dogs continued after Holy Saturday!)


9 comments:

Tregonsee said...

The guy who managed it at MS has left "to pursue other interests."

Seriously, if you can put up with it for a few days, it kind of grows on you. You can fairly quickly make it look like WIN7 on your desktop. As I learn more about it, I find myself switching to the Modern/Metro Interface more often.

Bryden Black said...

Poor Peter! W8 now to contend with - my sympathy. W7 format is nice though, and a real improvement on Vista, which was a real DOG! (with apologies to all canines ...)

Bryden Black said...

More germane to the real substance of this thread: http://www.anglicansunited.com/

Very interesting re his attitude to the Ordinariate.

C. Wingate said...

I got stuck with W 8 on a new laptop, and running it all the time in desktop mode, it seems decent enough. The one thing I find annoying is the way sweeping the mouse over the wrong spot can hide your desktop; it's particularly an issue with a touchpad because the gesture for undoing this is almost the same as doing it in the first place, so you can end up undoing it several times in a row until you find the right spot. At least it boots up quickly.

Peter Carrell said...

Yes, CW, very annoying 'random' disappearance of what one is working on!

Father Ron Smith said...

I find that sometimes, when my prepared text 'disappears', there is a good reason for it. Can anyone else here admit to that?

Michael said...

Beating the Bulls is not that much chop....

Peter Carrell said...

It is a lot of chop when you have lost two games in a row, including to a team the Bulls have beaten!

Stephen Donald said...

Good to see we agree on something Bryden :-) - I've just gone from several years of Vista to Windows 7, and my, what a difference! I have heard W8 is not nice to use except on touch-screen devices...

Sounds to be like there are some strange notions of 'friendship' going on here? I understand friendship as having no agenda beyond itself, and to laud this relationship as a 'public friendship' rather than 'ongoing dialogue between disagreeing parties' is disingenious.

I often quote the Maori word for enemy when talking about disagreements between 'friends' - hoariri literally means 'angry friend' and therefore contains within it the possibility for reconciliation or restoration of relationship.