Jon Rogers

I’m glad to say that no-one in the seminar balked or said ‘nothing at all’! Creativity is key in expressing our own ideas in new ways and must not be left only to the worship leaders in Church. In Bloom’s Taxonomy, Creativing is the highest level thinking skill and includes synthesis, which is something that theologians might be more comfortable admitting to. Creativity is all about seeing links where others might miss them, re-presenting things in different ways.

But creativity must be employed with limits. In graphic design we might call the limits a ‘brief’ – not there to stifle creativity but to ensure that it leads to an end that is appropriate. There are ways of combining text and images to create things that would not be helpful to communicate effectively. The boundaries will be different according to the situation of the design – what you are making and who it’s for.

In drama or music, it makes more sense to talk about ‘improvisation’. A Jazz musician can’t just play anything, they are improvising ‘around a theme’.

“It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.”- Dizzie Gillespie

The talented soloist must play notes that harmonise with the rest of the band – dissonance is important but is resolved. A good jazz musician learns the scales and arpeggios until they can play in any key without thinking, until it becomes part of them.

Theological improvisation is the same. We drench ourselves in the dramatic narrative of the scriptures and in relationship with God until improvising ‘in the key of Jesus’ is the most natural thing we can do. We improvise always with an ear on what the band behind us are playing, what the church is saying through history and today. Each bar sounds different. Each note must be thought through but not intellectualised. Each note must be felt. Every one contributes to an ongoing harmony of such ecstasy that even the angels long to sing alone.

In the weeks since Nathaniel was born, Jane and I keep seeing buggies everywhere we go. I’m sure they weren’t there a couple of months ago, but now we see them round ever corner! We’ve even got to the point of walking along and just saying ‘buggy’ (no points involved, sadly).

It’s amazing how simply thinking more about something makes it pop out of the background noise more clearly. Another example in the last week has been two ideas that resonated with me from my reading of Kevin Vanhoozer – ‘translating’ and ‘improvisation’. As I’m sitting in a tutor’s office at college, the first book I glance at on his shelf is ‘Improvisation: the Drama of Christian Ethics‘ (I’ve not read it, so don’t take that as a recommendation!) I get home, click on a couple of tweets and start reading a sample chapter from Krish Kandiah of his new book, Route 66. It’s all about reading and understanding the Bible and it seems very helpful. In the preview chapter he talks about translation as not just how we move from ancient texts to modern vernacular, but further as how we put it into place in our own lives. As soon as these ideas take root in your brain you start seeing them everywhere! (And I suppose I should get on and write about those two as well…)

Sometimes seeing what God’s doing is exactly the same – when we’re engaged in it and it’s on our minds, it’s easy to spot all these different things and see God behind them. When we’re thinking about other things, it’s those other things that dominate what we see. We talk about scientific observation being theory laden – on a day-by-day basis this means that we see what we look for. So I see buggies everywhere, but I know what I’d rather be seeing!

I probably don’t have the time or place in my course to investigate this question properly, but it’s a really interesting one. What happens when the Emperor becomes a Christian?

First of all, some of the assumptions that I’m making.

1. Jesus primarily teaches groups, not individuals (the exception that proves the rule – John 3)
2. These groups are mainly made up of the lower socio-economic groups – labourers, peasants etc. The ‘super rich’ (e.g. the Saducees) are rarely spoken to directly but sometimes taught about
3. Jesus’ message was not simply about how to get to a remote heaven after death, but establishing the Kingdom of God from that moment onwards
4. Jesus was not trying to set up a competing Empire
5. Jesus was not teaching the lowest classes of Galillee and Judea how to run the world or the/an empire – and nor was Paul
6. A mature approach to the question will not blindly apply the sayings of Jesus literally in a totally different context.

My thinking at the moment is that Jesus teaches the poor and oppressed how to seek justice in the context they find themselves in, and when we seek to translate into a different context we must try to understand the kind of justice that Jesus wants to see rather than blindly take (for example) the Sermon on the Mount as a legal pronouncement for all people of all times to obey. It is that process of translating that will be contentious and difficult, but this is the job of all theologians of every era.

Being a Christian Emperor will be different to being a Christian farmer in rural Palestine. Many have criticised Constantine as a pivotal point that Christianity ‘lost it’s way’, but I haven’t yet read those same people articulating how an ‘Emperor’ should be a Christian. We may live in a ‘Western Empire’ that has no real Emperor, but many of those who have leading positions in politics and business (claim to) have a Christian faith. What it means for a world leader or a CEO of a multinational to follow Jesus will necessarily be different to what it means for a single mum on a council estate.

To read: Leithart, Defending Constantine, reviewed at http://www.reclaimingthemission.com/yoders-jeremian-dispersed-missional-ecclesiology-what-yoder-got-right-according-to-leithart/, the blog post that got me thinking.

When I’m preparing for seminars at LST I end up running down all kinds of rabbit holes. I’m also trying to reconcile the historic and often conservative teachings of scripture that I’ve been brought up in with the expanding view of God that I am embracing. My narrow view of the gospel has too be blown apart to accomodate the things I hear Jesus teach and the things I feel God doing. That process might start with some of the key words of the ‘evangelical gospel’ – ‘repent’ and ‘believe’.

‘Repent’ is often heard as a precursor to faith, as a prerequisit to meeting God. It’s framed as ‘admitting I’m wrong, that I’m utterly helpless, that I need God’. While I don’t question any of those ideas – in fact every one of them is important and useful to understanding Christianity – I’m less convinced that they summarise the entire meaning of the word. The greek word in the New Testament is ‘metanoia‘. Yoder explains it as ‘a new mentality’^[1] as he’s trying to explain the Jubilee program of Jesus. N.T. Wright often tells the story of how he found ‘metanoesein kai pistos emoi’ (repent and be faithful to me) in Josephus^[2]. It comes as Josephus is negotiating with a Jewish rebel (called Jesus) in Galillee (some 30+ years after Jesus of Nazareth’s death), trying to persuade them not to keep fighting against Rome. He explains to them why it’s impossible to win, what the results will be, how the rebel will be forgiven if he changes his allegiance. He asks them to change their viewpoint to match his, to trust that he sees things correctly – to repent and believe.

So two things strike me about this understanding. ‘Repent and believe’ is not just about admitting guilt or ‘utter depravity’. It may include that, but it goes far beyond, to accepting God’s view of the world, transforming my perspective to match what I percieve him to say about it. Because of this, metanoia (I hesitate to use the word repent, it has too much baggage) is something we continually need to do. Second, trusting God is not a one-time event or a switch of sides as it might have been for Josephus or the Galillean rebel. It becomes an on-going process of shifting my view of the world to match God’s, trusting that not only will he redeem me, he can redeem every situation.

1. ^[1]Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, 32↩
2. ^[2]Josephus, The Life of Flavius Josephus, 22↩

Rest might seem the most ridiculous thing for someone with a two-week-old baby to write about, but Krish Kandiah‘s conversation on facebook and blog post on rest got me thinking. This is an expansion of my comment on his post, perhaps a little more thought through (although with the sleep deprivation…)

Firstly, I have to confess that rest and ‘sabbath’ is something I’ve wrestled with since my childhood in a home that ‘kept Sunday special’. I can recognise now that for a lot of people who are involved in church ministry, especially those for whom it is not their ‘job’, Sunday is not ‘a day of rest’, however ‘holy to the LORD’ it might be. Sunday can be a day of work just as much as Monday  to Friday, just a different kind of work. True Sabbath it exemplified by the meal that Jews will share on a Friday evening. The evening is written off for sharing, conversation, spending time with family and worshipping God. Planning and delivering a sermon, Sunday School class, leading worship – these things are good and blessed by God but they are not rest.

When I am busy, it gives me a feeling of control. I am planning, reading, thinking, building, cooking, repairing, responding. I am making things better, I am fixing things, averting crisis. At times I can see this control is an illusion, but often I believe the lie that I am in control, that I can do anything I need to.

When I rest, I have to give up the protection of busyness and the illusion of control and stop. If something isn’t done by me it might never get done – when I rest I have to trust that that’s OK. I am not a god; the world will not stop if I do.

The fourth commandment of the Ten is not a call to meaningless religious services but (like the previous three commands) a reminder that in all we do we must recognise that YHWH is God. (The commandments go on to show what it means to recognise that we are (wo)men – there’s no ‘merely’ in there, it is a dignified and righteous thing to live acting wholly in the knowledge of our humanity, recognising God’s being and transcendence.) It is physically possible to work all the time. It is possible that you might get more done that way. But knowing God (not in an academic sense of studying but rather relationally, intimately) requires us to rest. We must rest, not because he needs us to sing to him once a week, but rather that we need to remind ourselves that the world is bigger than us, that God is bigger.

A few more thoughts. For five years I was a secondary school teacher. Teaching is an all consuming job; there are always more lessons to plan, more coursework to mark, new ideas to explore. It’s easy to spend every evening working and then more at the weekend. I chose to make at least one day each week a day where school work was banned. It wasn’t necessarily Sunday (though which day to take a Sabbath is another story…) but it helped me retain some element of balance, even when in ‘special measures’ and planning ridiculous numbers of lessons. In fact, if Sunday is a day of “the Lord’s work”, you need a different ‘day of rest’. The weekly frequency is important to me, too. Working solidly for a month followed by a long weekend is not OK – holy-days are in addition to Sabbaths in scripture, that model is given for a reason.

I’m sure there are many more things that can be said about rest – I’d love to hear some more angles on this.

It’s useless to rise early and go to bed late,
and work your worried fingers to the bone.
Don’t you know he (the LORD) enjoys
giving rest to those he loves?
Psalm 127:2, The Message

I replaced the screen on Jane’s netbook today after a little accident. Sometimes the screws from a little task like this get chucked in a bowl or left lying on the desk, but today I realised a much better way of keeping track of them all.

I cut a strip of wide masking tape and folded it over so the ends stuck onto my desk. Every screw I took out was stuck on the tape, grouped by when (and where) they were taken from on the laptop screen. I disassembled left to right, and assembling right to left was dead easy! The low tack of the masking tape leaves no residue on the parts and they’re not stuck down too much.

(sorry about the fuzzy photo, all I had to hand was my phone! I hope you get the idea anyway.)

Is love logical or illogical? In my usual, slightly perverse manner I replied ‘Yes’.

Love that’s not logical has not been thought through. Love needs to be wrestled with, it engages the whole person. A love that is not logical might be irrational, not thought through, not deep, just a whim, passing. It may be no more than infatuation, a crush, lust. It’s not really real love.

Love that’s just logical is little more than a scheme. It’s planned, clinical, cold. Love that’s just logical might be an infatuation, just a fixation on the idea of loving. It has to engaged the whole person. Love that’s just logical is all in your head – it’s not love at all.

Love is il/logical.

Perhaps you’re surprised that love is a paradox. Like so many things the more you look at it the less simple it becomes. Would it be love if it it could be reduced to a formula? Could you let love be written off as mere emotion if you’ve truly experienced it?

Well, maybe not completely proper typography, there’s still a way to go to have full control over our type, but webfonts are a really good start.

When this version of my site was designed I knew I wanted to use the Delicious font for the header and post titles. For the header I could have pre-rendered the whole thing as an image file, but that’s not an option for post titles. Two other options were sIFR and cufon. sIFR was out very quickly as it doesn’t come well with the linux versions of flash – BBC Good Food uses it and the titles are unreadable on linux, just appearing as a white box.

Cufon was better – it uses javascript to re-render each letter individually and automatically. It gives a small flash of un-formatted text but a fairly good rendering of the font. It was a great solution in early 2009, but the world has moved on (thankfully!) Over the past couple of years, using the @fontface to embed fonts has gone from theoretical to an actually working solution – JonRogers.co.uk no longer uses cufon, the fonts you see are downloaded from the site.

Making it easy enough to implement on New Year’s Day morning is the Font Squirrel @fontface generator. First thing to check is that you have the correct license for the font you’re using –Delicious says that with a link back it’s fine. You then upload the font files (.otf files in this case) and it works the magic, giving you a download that includes the css file to link to and all the different versions of the font file you’ll need for different browsers (from iOS to the big blue e). Link, change a couple of lines in my own stylesheet to name the fonts correctly and we’re done!

I know this is something that’s developed over 2010 and lots of people in the business have already written about it, but it’s nice to catch up and be able to actually use proper real fonts on my website!

It seems like everyone in the world is talking about the X Factor results show (at least on my Facebook feed!) BBC News are talking about the millions that Simon Cowell is earning from being paid to make a show that gains him revenue from advertisers so desperate to attach their brands to the new act that he’s going to launch, selling millions of CDs and downloads. You literally couldn’t pay enough money to a TV station to get them to promote a debut single to the extent that Cowell and co have every year – and he gets paid for the pleasure of it! “Mat Osman of Britpop band Suede: ‘It just seems to be the greatest con of all time.'”

The article goes on to say that the X Factor is not as varied as the old Top of the Pops shows of ancient history (although better than American Idol, for example). The difference in my mind is down to the story of X Factor. It’s all about overcoming adversity and harsh criticism; emerging from humble roots, a complete nobody achieving their wildest dream; comebacks, comedy and celebrity. In fact, it’s like Simon Cowell has re-created Christmas in his own, ultra-commercialised image!

Even those of us who don’t buy into the year’s biggest karaoke competition are helping buoy the story – whether it’s Biffy, Rage or Cage, it’s all about who can win the epic struggle for the Christmas number one. Even though most of us over the age if 14 don’t care who’s number one for 51 weeks of the year, suddenly we’ll sign up to Facebook campaigns and even buy four-and-a-half minutes of silence just to prove that our story is superior to Cowell’s.

What does the X Factor prove? That people really do love live music on TV? That the British television-watching public are so gullible that they won’t notice a three-month advert for SyCo’s next single interspersed with even more adverts? That you can make (a lot of) money out of people’s choices if you let them choose things they don’t need but care about, while selling them things they don’t realise they need and probably can’t afford? That we’re so desperate for a story to believe in that we’ll sit down and faithfully listen every Sunday evening (oh, not just that, Saturday too!) to the message?

The Elementary theme I have on Ubuntu is beautiful. I now have the right scrollbars on Chromium and I wondered when I’d get OpenOffice fixed. A little google-fu and the inbuilt translator of Chromium dug up a post on Argentinan site Soft-Libre.

The solution is really simple, but messes up the theme. DanRabbit is correct in saying that the problem is with OpenOffice, not with his theme, but by tweaking the theme it’s easy to fix. In keeping with the minimalist design ethic, DanRabbit has removed the buttons on the scroll bar. That’s what breaks OpenOffice – it just doesn’t know how to draw the scroll bars without the “steppers”.

To edit the theme you need to open the gtkrc file. If you have installed from a repository, press alt-F and paste in the command
gksudo gedit /usr/share/themes/elementary/gtk-2.0/gtkrc
If you installed it by hand, find the right file – it’s likely to be in a folder something like
~/.themes/elementary/gtk-2.0/
Open the file in gedit (or your preferred text editor!)
You’re looking for two lines that say
GtkScrollbar ::has-backward-stepper = 0
GtkScrollbar ::has-forward-stepper = 0

Change the 0’s to 1’s, save and close gedit.

Either log out and back in again, reboot or re-apply the theme – I did it by opening the Appearance dialogue, choosing a different theme, then setting it back to Elementary.

From now on, all of your applications will have the little buttons on the scrollbars, but it will work properly in OpenOffice – hoorah! An easy fix – the only question is why DanRabbit regards the purity of his design over the functionality of having such a key application as OpenOffice work properly.

Update

Earlycj5 pinged this post to show how you can keep the stock elementary look on most programs but still have OpenOffice work almost properly (apparently this should also work with Symphony and LibreOffice, but I’ve not tried it).
After changing the values following the instructions above, go up about half a dozen lines and add
GtkRange ::stepper-size = 0
Re-apply your theme as I said above and things should be almost normal. However, the scroll bar now overlaps the steppers (arrow icons at the top and bottom of the scroll bar) which means in OpenOffice you get this funny look – as you can see nautilus underneath looks fine. Unfortunately I don’t know the answer to Earlycj5’s question of how to make the arrows white so they don’t show up in OpenOffice – a little google-ing makes me think this is another limitation of the Murrine theme engine.