Make Wealth History is one today. I never noticed the anniversary of any other blog, but I’ve put so much into this one it feels worth celebrating. My reflections on our first year here.
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Easter reflections from SGM Lifewords
Sneak preview of an Easter project I’m working on for SGM Lifewords.
All will be revealed in a few weeks, but you’ll want to sign up or you’ll miss out.
Lay down your cloak
Quick plug for my latest project at work. At Lifewords we’ve been working on our latest Easter resource, and this year it’s an eight part online journey through Holy Week, with an animation for each day. The designers are doing a great job with it, and I’d recommend signing up, which you can do here. We’ll send you an email with a link to the first day’s content on monday of Holy Week.
There’s a bunch of other things you might find useful on the main Easter site, including audio and video downloads, ideas, prayers, and you can leave comments and suggestions on the blog.
christmas resources from lifewords
Thought I’d better give a little plug to some work stuff. Every summer I end up spending a fair chunk of time working on Christmas materials, which is always a little bit strange. The lifewords christmas site for 08 is here, and it’s looking good.
The basic idea is to supply free christmas resources for churches, so we’ve got powerpoints, audio downloads, posters, invites, a rather nifty advent devotional thing, and bunch of other stuff.
We’ve also got the little story booklet, A Little Story About Something Big, written by yours truly and illustrated by very talented Japanese artist Chinatsu Sunaga.
Celsias
I’ve just starting contributing posts to Celsias, and my first two articles are online. Go and have a look:
The forest cannot be bought – how the land rights of indigenous tribes are key to forest conservation.
Ecosocialism – a more green red, and a more red green.
Singing in church
I was talking about singing in church the other day with my brothers, and I was reminded of these cartoons, courtesy of ASBO Jesus. (Because if Jesus were alive today, he’d probably get one, in case you’re wondering).
abandoned places
Everybody likes a good ruin, but the ones we usually value tend to be old, ancient civilisations, runied abbeys. But the 20th century has given us more abandoned places than any other, the cycles of innovation, industry and obsolesence leaving us with ruins in and around our cities, empty and crumbling, foreboding and locked away. I find such places fascinating.
So does Tim Edensor, my old university lecturer, who wrote a book on the subject.
His eloquent and thought provoking take on industrial ruins is online too, in writing and in photography, here and here.
“As spaces by the side of the road, ruins can be explored for effects that talk back to the quest to create an impossibly seamless urban fabric, to the uses to which history and heritage are put, to the extensive over-commodification of places and things, to middle-class aesthetics, and to broader tendencies to fix meanings in the service of power.”
