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Here is a really fascinating/enjoyable interview with three monks from Brooklyn (Brother Shawn, Brother Martin, and Father Sylvester) on an Irish late night television show. They moved from Brooklyn to a poor estate in Ireland and are now living there among the people.
I don't know how long it will stay up on the main page but for now you just need to scroll down a bit. The segment is called The Monks of Moyross. It runs around 15 minutes.
If anyone is interested in praying the daily office during Holy Week, much in the manner I described in my sermon from a couple of weeks ago, then we can help you do this.
In the sermon on discipling the day through the discipline of fixed-hour prayer, I described how beginning at 6:00 a.m. bells were rung throughout the Roman empire to signal the opening of the market. It was subsequently rung every three hours as the day passed and concluded at 6:00 p.m. when the markets closed. Jews and Christians alike incorporated the ringing of those bells as a call to prayer throughout the day.
We generally lack similar kinds of prompts through our days that help us to be "called" to prayer. This week we are experimenting with just such a prompt: text messages or email reminders. Since many people sit in front of screens or are out and about with only their phones, using technology to prompt us to pray in many ways is analogous to the ringing bells of the Roman markets.
If you would like to receive either a text message or an email three times a day (at 9:00 a.m., noon, and 3:00 p.m.) with a psalm to pray, then follow these simple instructions:
No, this is not "Walk Through the Bible" 2.0. This is an amazing work of mapping the Bible in view of social networking. Chris Harrison is the creator of this amazing visual data set that cross-references the Bible for aesthetic, not just academic purposes. He also goes on to the narrative of the Bible mapping names and how they are interconnected. It reminds me of the "friendwheel" application on Facebook. He describes the scope of what he seeks to do in this way:
"I wanted to better capture the story, most notably the people and places, and the interactions between them. I did this by building a list of biblical names (2619 in total) and parsing a digital copy of the King James Bible. Each time two names occurred in the same verse, a connection was created between them. This produced essentially a social network of people and places. Because such relationships had no ordering or structure (unlike the cross references), I used a spatial clustering algorithm I developed for one of my other projects. This process causes related entities and highly connected groups to coalesce. I themed the output like an old piece of parchment."
There is a lot of amazing information to be observed. Check it out.
Okay, I admit it...I am a geek - and this is the post that is going to totally expose me.
I really like good speculative fiction. There. I said it.
"Huh?," you say.
Speculative fiction is a snob's way of saying science fiction. For most people science fiction as a genre evokes images of bad robots from 1950s B-movies or legions of geeked-out Star Trek/Star Wars fans living in their parents' basements in some kind of alternate fanboy universe. For sure those images and people exist. And I am not better or all that different really. Or, perhaps I am - not in kind but in degree. I like hard science fiction. I like science fiction that engages the science of quantum realities, that explores the limits of what it means to be a human, a species, a society, etc. I like science fiction that is about big ideas that conventional literary forms, grounded as they are in the world as it is, cannot begin to engage. I like to engage my imagination with the world as it might be. Science fiction allows one to position a narrative in a possible future, even if it is only a minute further into that future, and posit, "What if?"
This is why I like the term "speculative" as a modifier for fiction. It speculates about another world, either a little beyond our own or so far removed as to be nearly unrecognizable. Often such a world forces its protagonists to wrestle with significant moral/ethical issues that might not be as accessible or as interesting in a standard format. Writers like Orson Scott Card (in his early writing especially) and William Gibson (who continues to amaze) create worlds of possibility and invite you to engage there deeply. If you are interested in engaging speculative fiction on a more philosophical level, you might read the articles connected to the following links.
Clive Thompson on Why Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing
William Gibson Explains Why Science Fiction is About the Present
But back to the ultimate purpose of this post...You know where 99% of the bad rap science/speculative fiction originates from? Poor film adaptions of what is usually incredible source material.
Last Christmas season Will Smith starred in a movie that got a lot of advertising attention, moderate critical reception, and a decent box office: I Am Legend. Go ahead, hit the link, watch the trailer, then come back. I'll wait...This movie is based off a "legend"-ary work of what I would consider fantastic speculative fiction that dates to the 1950s. Written by Richard Matheson in 1954, this book tells the story of the last surviving human, Robert Neville. It's not that everyone else is dead; it's that everyone else has been transformed into some variation of a vampire. Sounds cheesy, I know. Except that Matheson wraps the vampire convention in a plausible life-science scenario of genetic mutation and species evolution. It's a big idea kind of book. And it builds and it builds and it builds and you have no idea where it is going until wham! You are on the last page and there is the big reveal and it is over and there you sit - astounded by what Matheson has pulled off. Something you never see coming. Just like the ending of The Sixth Sense.
Back to the film. Imagine if the movie studio heads determined in the end that audiences weren't smart enough to understand what M. Night Shamalayan was doing in The Sixth Sense and told him to erase the part about Bruce Willis's character being dead - scratch that part. Let him solve the murder mystery conventionally and become a fond uncle to Haley Joe Osment's character. I can hear them: "Let's let him watch the young man mature, reunited and living happily with his wife, far into the future. Much brighter that way. Audiences like bright." Except that didn't happen to The Sixth Sense and that is essentially what happened to I Am Legend. Some studio head at Warner Bros. decided that people were incapable of handling a big idea movie and instead settled for science fiction movie conventional ending #435. I was fuming when I left the theatre. They took an amazing plot and eviscerated it. And that happens all the time.
Now - why the aneurysm today? I found a blogpost about I Am Legend. It is about to be released on DVD. And guess what? They filmed an ending much closer to Matheson's original. The fact that they understood and filmed something in the spirit of the original and then butchered it? Unconscionable. But through the wonderful opportunities that DVDs and director's cuts create, we speculative fiction geeks have the opportunity to see a more faithful (but still not perfect) rendition of Matheson's classic.
I don't want to blow the ending for anyone whose curiosity is stoked, but if you go to FirstShowing.net, you can read that blogger's take on this, with a little more detail on the plot itself and what makes the ending so good - and see the five-minute long alternate ending!
Okay. That is all.
I Am Geek.
Yesterday I gave a sermon titled, "Learning the Rhythms of Prayer." It was the fourth in our Lenten series exploring the seven spiritual practices that migrated from Judaism to Christianity. Here's a brief refresher on what we have covered thus far:
The final three also revolve around discipling time and expand around the week, the year, and the life. Conceptually it has been really fun to explore these rhythms and practices. It has also been great to examine them in the context of a community that is always hungry to engage opportunities for added depth.
The discipline of fixed-hour prayer is a challenging practice for most people to begin to engage because for many of us it is such an alien orientation to a spiritual practice that has largely been individual, spontaneous, and self-directed. Like I mentioned in the message yesterday this has been a slow process of learning for me that begin when I first visited Conception Abbey seven years ago. In the hopes of helping others access this rich stream of prayer I am posting some resources that I think are helpful for those who want to journey here, too.
Books:
"The Divine Hours: Prayers for Springtime"
This is a four volume set that follows the liturgical year (it doesn't sell as a set). It has a marvelous introduction that if you read you will find much of the material I used yesterday to set up the cultural history of fixed-hour prayer. My wife, Mimi, uses and loves this resource.
"The Divine Hours, Pocket Edition"
This prayer book is also by Phyllis. It is simply a condensed version of the longer four volume group. This is the prayer book that I am currently using to shape my prayer life.
"Celtic Daily Prayer: Prayers and Readings From the Northumbria Community"
I have reference this prayer book resource several times in the context of the Jacob's Well worship gathering. We often use the prayers and readings when we do more liturgical worship experiences. Likewise, when I shared the first-footing prayer called "The Open Door," this is where it came from. Additionally I mentioned that the Northumbria community has a wonderful online prayer resource. If you sit in front of a computer all day and would like to access a way to prayer the office that is simple, beautiful, and accessible, then check out this link: Northumbria Community online.
"The Glenstal Book of Prayer: A Benedictine Prayer Book"
This is the final book I'll reference. It is another small and simple resource for prayer. I like it a lot. I have a friend who is a Presbyterian pastor who travels to Glenstal Abbey once a year on pilgrimage and study leave and loves the community there. He carries this around with him. I actually found this a number of years ago in the bookstore at the National Pastors/Emergent Convention in Nashville.
Web Resources:
Northumbria Community (again)
Magazine Articles Referenced Yesterday (from Christianity Today):
"Learning the Ancient Rhythms of Prayer," by Paul Boers.
"The New Monasticism," by Rob Moll.
"Ancient-Future People," by Mark Galli.
Finally, here is the Pepsi Blue commercial we included yesterday. Enjoy.
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