The recent Comic Relief reminded me of the Doctor Who special they ran written by Steven Moffat featuring Rowan Atkinson as the Doctor. Shared for your amusement!
Review: King of Sartar: Revised and Annotated Edition 4/5 stars
King of Sartar: Revised and Annotated Edition by Greg Stafford
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I picked up a hardback copy at Dragonmeet 2016, naturally getting Jeff to sign it (hopefully one day I’ll get to add Greg’s autograph too!) having recently fallen in love with Glorantha through both reading around the setting and the fantastic games run there by our GM. For those that don’t know Glorantha it is a mythical world created by Greg Stafford and the setting for a number of roleplaying games over the years.
King of Sartar is a fascinating experiment. It isn’t a novel, rather it is a collection of writings from Glorantha – I say from rather than about, as the writings are presented as source materials about the place by its own people, a bit like the source materials that historians in the ‘real world’ might sift through. There are inconsistencies, gaps, and questions left unanswered. In places its deliberately dry, in others it sparkles. As a piece of creative writing, it’s a remarkable work. As a book to simply read through for fun, it hits a different spot than a standard work of literature, its more of an experience than a story. It’s full of the myths and histories of the peoples of Glorantha from creation to the ‘present day’. Unlike many fantasy works, the conflicts aren’t presented as black and white, good and evil, instead we hear from the viewpoints of different factions, making a much more nuanced and satisfying picture, although of course the tendency is still to regard the Lunars as the enemy with the general bias towards the Orlanthi people.
Personally I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and will certainly return to it for the background it gives to this imaginary world. Hopefully, it will also inform future gaming there too.
Review: Norse Mythology
Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
As a child I fell in love with the Norse myths through Roger Lancelyn Garden’s retellings. Many years Neil Gaiman, one of my favourite authors has released his own retellings. Obviously I was going to read it! I thoroughly enjoyed revisiting them after many years, and what better guide than Neil Gaiman. His love for these myths is clear and the gods come alive in his hands, especially Thor. Was fortunate enough to hear him at the book launch at the Festival Hall in London, and hearing him read Thor’s Wedding was a delight and helped hear this book in his voice as I read it, capturing the humour as I went. I still have questions about the myths that remain unanswered, but Gaiman’s task was not to add to the tales but simply retell them for a new generation following in the footsteps of the great Roger Lancelyn Green whose telling I and he grew up in.
Review: Judas: The Biography of an Idea
Judas: The Biography of an Idea by Peter Stanford
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A fascinating read, sifting through the Biblical references to try and gain a picture of Judas and then tracing through popular thought through the ages to see how this enigmatic figure had been seen in the public imagination. Whilst I have a more evangelical view of scripture than Stanford and so differ a little in my treatment of the Biblical texts, I was drawn into this work; for me too, Judas has long been a figure of intrigue. Stanford’s biography bright to my attention the sorry history of anti-Semitism that although I was aware of it, I hadn’t quite grasped it’s extent and the connection to portrayals of the disciple, Judas. Evil betrayer, innocent part in God’s plan, Satan’s agent or revolutionary whose plans backfire? Stanford’s picture is more nuanced than these simple clichés, and tinged in the epilogue with a surprising touch of grace.
3 Years Late
Just finished listening to Big Finish’s ‘Tom Baker at 80’, an interview conducted by Nick ‘voice of the daleks’ Briggs. Moving from being comic, to revealing as it explores his past and poinant as Baker talks about his experiences of old age. A thoroughly engaging listen (how could it be otherwise with his majestic voice!)
Check out Tom Baker at 80 from Big Finish. https://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/tom-baker-at-80-1060
Dressing Up (Church Newsletter)
Here’s an article I wrote for our church newsletter, reblogged from the church website
Once a week I open up the laptop, turn on Word and sit and stare at a blank document waiting for an idea to pop into my head to write the newsletter about. After a minute or two of nothing happening I will open up my web browser and check out a variety of sites for inspiration, the BBC News site being one of them. This is how I discovered the story of the Peruvian artist and photographer, Christian Fuchs.
Christian Fuchs lives in an apartment overlooking the Pacific. According to Jane Chamber, the write of the article, his walls are covered with portraits of his ancestors. Or so it seems at first sight. Look again and you’ll realise after a bit that they’re not, not quite. They are in fact images of him meticulously recreating old photos and portraits. Fuchs says it started as a child. He was…
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Doctor Who – Phantoms of the Deep
Tom Baker, Romana, K9, submarines, intelligent giant squids and ghosts. What’s not to like!
https://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/phantoms-of-the-deep-690
Big Finish – Doctor Who audiobooks
Over the last few years I’ve developed a love of the fantastic Big Finish audio books, especially their Doctor Who stories. A favourite range has been their Eighth Doctor stories featuring Paul McGann which are absolutely brilliant – despite his short screen time he’s now one of my favorites. I’ve also recently got hold of a couple of Fourth Doctor series. It’s terrific hearing Tim Baker again, just as it was seeing him in the 50th special. I’ve just finished the two parter featuring the Lawn, The Sands of Time (. ) and War Against the Laan.
Have You Been Read Like a Book?
According to Oxford University’s online dictionaries, the phrase to ‘read someone like a book’ means to be able to ‘understand someone’s thoughts and motives clearly or easily’. This saying took on an interesting twist for me today when I stumbled across the Human Library™ on the internet today. In this unusual library, you withdraw not the latest novels or timeless classics, but a person who will share their life story with you.
So where did this unusual twist on a library come from? It started in Denmark after the stabbing of a youth in 1993. Friends of this teenager, who fortunately survived, started a group called ‘Stop the Violence’. Asked to provide an activity for the Roskilde Festival, they brought together 75 human books, who could be taken out so that ‘readers’ could find out about the person behind the stereotypes and ask awkward questions – and hear possibly honest and challenging responses. Apparently before the first book was withdrawn, the hall was full of conversation between the books themselves as they listened to each other’s stories, the policeman sitting down with the graffiti writer, the politician with the youth activist and the football fan with the feminist. Since this first event, the Human Library has taken off with similar presentations taking place in more than 70 countries around the world. You can even go to their website and get a taste of some of the books you might get to read, the soldier with post-traumatic-stress-disorder, the convert to Islam, the brain-damaged, young single mother, the unemployed, the body mod extreme and the refugee amongst others.
Personally, I think this is a wonderful idea. We’re all too quick to judge others simply by the tags we put on them, failing to think beyond these simple labels to the complex human being beneath them with their mix of emotions, pressures and insights. Perhaps it’s important to remember that to others we are tags as well. Don’t forget, to some we are ‘Christians’. Colossians 1:19-20 describes God’s mission as reconciling the world to himself through Christ. I can’t help but feel that this Library could be part of that process, enabling people to come together and begin to appreciate other’s stories and the people behind them. Got me wondering how we can help others hear our story, but perhaps more importantly, how can we begin to hear the stories of those around us.
Are You Sitting Uncomfortably?…
I remember as a child entering into a competition held by Radio Four in which people were invited to enter mini-sagas, 50 word stories. Fifty words doesn’t sound like many does it, anyone can come up with fifty words (to give you a sense of scale, the newsletter front page article is usually 4-500 words). It might be easy enough to come up with fifty words, but coming up with a gripping yarn in only fifty words is a totally different matter – I see that Radio Two has taken pity on current children and asks for five hundred word stories instead!
Here’s a challenge for you – can you encapsulate in some way your experiences of God in fifty words? Answers in an email, a couple of texts or a scrap of paper please! You could write about your story of coming to faith, your ongoing questions about him, or a particular experience. It could be a straight account, or a story or even a poem. I’d love to turn next week’s front page into a collection of them.
Of course, the master of the really-short-story was Jesus with his parables. Can you name anyone else who has come up with such enduring, captivating and surprising tales as his? Many of these are fifty words as well, or even less. It’s amazing that even now, some two thousand years after they were first told, that they still have the power to shock and transform, or to make us face up to who we really are. I’ve spent much of the last few years thinking about them and reading about them partly because of various bits of course work and sermons I’ve had the joy of preaching, but mainly because I find that I can’t get away from them, there’s something about them that teases and keeps calling me back to them. What did Jesus mean by that? If he told them today, how would he change them? What is Jesus saying to me through them now? And how about to us, his church?
There is a downside to their popularity. Sometimes we can become deaf to them, we’ve heard it all before. Or we come up with ways to make them comfortable to listen to or to explain away the awkward bits and make them suitable for church consumption. Symon Hill has come up with a great way to listen to them afresh and cut through the traditions we’ve built up around them in his book The Upside-Down Bible. Rather than turn to scholars and commentaries to get answers to these questions, he took a novel approach. If the parable was about crops or sheep or soil, he’d go and tell the story to a group of farmers and see what their reactions were. A story about workers and their treatment? He asked a group of trade unionists for their views. The Good Samaritan? He asked some Jews for their thoughts. He also made a point of asking non-Christians, those who hadn’t really thought about or heard the stories before. Sometimes their answers were what he expected. Often they were not, and jolted him into seeing them in new ways. Got me wondering who to talk to next time I get stuck in sermon prep, or for that matter, who might be interested in hearing these stories if we got them outside the church and into our communities…
