Torridon

Magic.

Summer Barn

After the Catch

On the Road

Loch 'a Mhuillin

Wild Wood

Lost Property

Down on the Farm

The Old Croft House

Rockscrape

Glint

All Blues

In Torridon, even the crash barriers seem look beautiful....!

In Torridon, even the crash barriers seem look beautiful....!

Torridon Otter

It's there, if you look hard enough!

Three Lochs, Eight Peaks

Click on photo to enlarge

John Shuttleworth: Out of Our Sheds, Live in Stirling

John Shuttleworth lived up to his billing as "South Yorkshire's Most Versatile Singer-Songwriter" at Stirling University on March 29th, when he brought his "Out of our Sheds" show to the Macrobert Theatre. With his trademark deadpan wit, entertaining songs, keyboard wizardry and endlessly joyous repartee, he left his audience delighted, and bewildered. Turning his with equal skill to grunge, rock, pop, ballads, and even a bit of country and western, John Shuttleworth thrilled his audience with such classics as "Two Margarines", "Pigeons in Flight", and "Can't Go Back (To Savoury Now)". John is well-known as a radio-personality, and musical entertainer with a full diary of live dates. The week before the Stirling date he told us that his agent Ken Worthington ("TV's Mr Clarinet Man"), had got him a gig in a hospice where he encouraged the residents to join in the songs and do the actions too - "which really seemed to take their minds of their problems". Less well known is that Shuttleworth is also an actor, and his acting masterclass midway through the show was a showcase for his prodigious talent.

The on-stage antics of Mr Shuttleworth were absolutely hilarious. Almost as funny was watching the reactions of the people with us. While some of the group were in hysterics, and a few others wore wry amused grins throughout the show - one member of our party sat in wide-eyed, open-mouthed incomprehension for its entire duration. This in itself was pricelessly amusing.

This was a fabulous night, of very funny comedy, through the quite brilliantly observed and performed persona of John Shuttleworth. Graham Fellows is a genius - I haven't laughed so much for ages.

Sand, Applecross Peninsula

Alligin Gloaming

Click on image to enlarge and see properly!

Book Notes: The UDA: Inside the Heart of Loyalist Terror by Henry Mcdonald and Jim Cusack

McDonald and Cusack's book about the Ulster Defence Association (subtitled, "Inside the Heart of Loyalist Terror"), traces the history of the  organisation from 1968 - 2004, from its foundation right through to the modern peace-process era.

These are four hundred of the most turbulent, bloody, depressing and unrelentingly hopeless pages I have ever read. McDonald and Cusack begin their story in the late 1960s as Protestant hegemony was being challenged, and the Troubles erupting.  While on one side of the divide, the Provisional IRA were preparing to renew their war with The British and Loyalists, the movement towards armed para-militarism was lead both by a small tight knit terror group called the UVF, and broad masses of street gangs caught up in the territorial wars that raged around Belfast. It was from these gang resistance movements that the UDA was formed. Violent, brutal and given to grotesque acts of barbarism to enemies both within and without its ranks, the UDA gained a significant hold on sections of working class loyalist Belfast.

According to the authors the high-water mark of the groups' influence was around the time of the Ulster Workers Council strikes of the early 70s, which brought down the Stormont regime, and with it power-sharing, and a role for Dublin in the rule of N. Ireland under the Sunningdale agreement. During this era, violent mass action against the perceived sell-out of Ulster by the British brought the UDA into the centre of Ulster's fraught politics.

However, it is the author's contention that everything was downhill from this point for the UDA. The organisation fundamentally failed to coherently develop a convincing 'political-wing' to mirror the electoral successes which Sinn Fein were able to enjoy after the hunger strike era. The Ulster Democratic Party consistently failed to gain any control over the disparate and warring factional groups within the UDA in order to ever achieve much politically. In addition to that, Loyalist voters lost any sense that the UDA were 'defenders of their community' much after 1974, and had no inclination whatsoever to vote for the representatives of violence, drug-dealing, thuggery, and organised crime which blighted their neighbourhoods. For this is what the organisation had in fact become.

Militarily, the authors assessment of UDA violence is also grim. Every chapter of this book is filled with descriptions of appalling and sickening violence. Some books (notably anything about the IRA from a nationalistic/republican stance) add detailed justifications for, and excuses for 'armed struggle'. McDonald and Cusack do not, but they do record a litany of horrors. Some of the worst of these were the 'tit-for-tat' killings conducted by the UDAs wing known as the UFF. Their strategy was to execute random Catholics in response to IRA/INLA killings of Loyalists. Their belief was that this terror would drive a wedge between the Catholic population and the IRA/Sinn Fein - while the truth was that their actions turned countless nationalists into republicans. The authors view is that this strategy was both morally and strategically disastrous.

The chapters on 'collusion' were not what I had expected. What I was anticipating was reading about the UDA being used to hit IRA targets who the Special Branch of the RUC were unable to get court-worthy evidence against. There was some of this. What there was a lot more of was details of the extent to which the security forces compromised and crippled the organisation, riddled it with moles and controlled it via the release of information and effective prosecution and imprisonment of key operatives. In addition to that, there were some incredible stories of UDA collusion with Republican terror groups, usually involving the betrayal of a rival in the constant battles to control the movement.

The book ends with two major stories. The first is of the official leaders of the UDA becoming involved in the peace process, and formally ending their 'war'. This is interesting reading, and a good counterbalance to the headline grabbing story of the IRA, London, Dublin, Washington and the path towards democracy. There were of course, a series of Loyalists terror groups who made similarly stuttering moves away from killing, but without the lure of the prospect of anyone ever voting them into office in return. The second is of the horrendous internal warfare that raged between the various Loyalist groups at this time, central to which is the menacing figure of Johnny Adair, who sought to control the movement by sparking a war between the UDA and the UVF, by siding with the LVF against their former comrades in the UVF.

The authors paint a miserable picture of a nasty, chaotic, violent, and bloodthirsty series of Loyalist terror gangs who carved out a role for themselves in the evils of The Troubles, fighting for Ulster - but sustaining their own glamorous lifestyles, and causing incalculable damage to their enemies and their natural friends. It is an extraordinary tale, one full of tragedies and contradictions. This remains one of the darkest books I have ever read - but yet is an essential part of the story of Northern Ireland's troubles, and search for peace. 

The book was published in 2004, and the UDA/UFF did not verifiably put its weapons beyond use until 2010.

Montage #5

A short series of 5 images which are stitched panoramas taken around Torridon/Applecross area. They all require to be clicked to enlarge them - in order to appreciate them.

Montage #4

Montage #3

Montage #2

Montage #1

Click to enlarge...

Gazing out to sea..

Big Sky

Another side of Alligin

Little Cairn, Big View. A' Bhainlir

A'Bhainlir, Torridon, Wester Ross.

Alligin Sundown

Looks even better (and bigger) when you click on the image..

The Marriage Course: Perth Spring 2013

We are going to be running The Marriage Course again in Perth this Spring. Our plan is to run on Monday nights from 7:30-10pm. The aim of the 7-session course is help any married couple (whatever their stage of life, or whether they are struggling or really happy together) to improve their relationship and enjoy it to the full.

An evening on The Marriage Course begins with a meal, then we watch a DVD together about an aspect of marriage. Then there are times for each couple to privately discuss their responses to the DVD, using some discussion materials in the course manual. These times are the most important part of the course, as so couples privacy during them is strictly protected, and there are absolutely no cringe-inducing group discussions whatsoever.

The course has a gentle Christian-flavour to it, but is by no means exclusively for Christians. On our course we have had several people attend who do not have Christian faith, but who told us that they both enjoyed and benefited from the course a lot.

Participants on previous courses have told us (sometimes years later) that working through this material together has made a huge difference in their lives for the better. Many married couples have a vague sense that 'we ought to be investing in our marriage' but don't know how to do it, or where to start. The Marriage Course provides a helpful structure and a safe environment for this, and so can be a great way of working together on building a stable and fulfilling relationship.

If you are interested in doing The Marriage Course, please e-mail office@perthbaptistchurch.org.uk, or speak to me personally if you know me! We ask for a donation of £25/head "or what you can afford" towards the costs of the seven meals and the course manual.

http://www.relationshipcentral.org/marriage-course

A Good Death

A Good Death from PRN Films on Vimeo.

A Good Death is a film about end-of-life care by my friend Robin Taylor

A sermon wordle

Ice ice, baby

East Lomond

Gazing Southwards from Birnam Hill, East Lomond in Fife lurks like giant pimple in the far distance, way beyond Perth.

From Birnam Hill

Rich winter colours...

Book Notes: A Secret History of the IRA by Ed Moloney

For many years Ed Moloney was the Northern Ireland correspondent for The Irish Times, and in the course of his many years covering 'The Troubles' gained unparallelled access to sources within the IRA. This book is the compiling together of his lifetime of research, detailing for what is claimed to be the first time, a detailed and accurate record of the internal history of that organisation. Many people have written before about the public faces, military strategies and terrorist outrages perpetrated by the IRA - but Moloney adds to this enormous insightful detail about the political machinations, power struggles, shifts and empires within Irish Republicanism, much of which I suspect would not have been safe for him to reveal prior to the Provisionals cease fires and retreat from armed struggle.

The story he tells is shocking, alarming, intriguing, fast -paced and completely engrossing. If even half of what he writes is true, it is one of the most strange, surprising and unusual political stories of modern times.

When I was a child, the letters 'IRA' on the news meant death, pictures of bombed buildings, grieving families, funerals, and bloodshed. Their sinister balaclava'd faces firing rounds over coffins at vast paramilitary funerals added a ghoulish element of 'cartoon-evil' to their inexplicable actions both in distant Northern Ireland and where I grew up near London. Of course, I knew nothing about them, their ideology, grievances, history, structure, organisation or reasons for violence - to me like most British people they were either purely evil or merely psychopathic. Either way, the political claims of Sinn Fein were completely drowned out by the sounds of gun-fire, bomb-blasts and decades of weeping. It is therefore fascinating to read about the thought-processes and reasoning of the people behind this terror, how 'armed struggle' began in Ireland, why it gained mythological status in Republicanism and why in successive waves it has been abandoned by people like Michael Collins, then Eamon De Valera, elements of the OIRA and finally the Provos.

Much of this book focusses on the Adams, and then Adams-McGuinness leadership of Republicanism. The story of Adams rise to the top of the movement reads like Stalin's manoevering to seize power in Russia after the death of Lenin - repeatedly isolating opponents only to subsequently adopt their platform. This goes in some way to explaining the odd ideological shifts within the movement. In the early stages of the book Adams is an opponent of engagement with politics, an advocate of only armed struggle. Later he appears as a proponent of the 'armalite and the ballot box strategy', while latterly he is seen endorsing purely political ends. Needless to say, at each stage of these shifts enemies were removed, and the whole narrative is encased in horrible violence. Moloney goes as far as hinting that key enemies of Adams were betrayed to the British forces by moles within the IRA some of whom were killed as a result at critical moments for Adams' leadership.

It's all here in Moloney's book, the Provisional's split from the OIRA and their seizing the initiative, the escalation of the 'war' in the early 1970s, the effect of the internment on the IRA, and the attitudes and policies of successive Belfast, Dublin and London governments. The stagnation of armed struggle, the hunger strikes, and the Republican's entry into elections, the passage of highly secret negotiations between all parties - notably Adam's route via Fr Alec Reid to the SDLP and governments, and the faulting path in the direction of peace. The publicity for the book majored on the fact that it reveals 'for the first time' the internal workings of the IRA Army Council and Adams role within it', that meant both leading it in actions of murder, terror and 'war', as well as in leading it away from that and into mainstream politics.

Adams' manipulation of the peace process and his interactions with the IRA are detailed in perhaps the most startling element of the story Maloney tells. His version of events suggests that Adams and McGuinness lied to the IRA about the possibility of a cease-fire, before leading the movement to a point when it was inevitable. The extraordinary lengths Adams went to in order to isolate opponents who opposed the political direction of the movement (notably the Micky McKevitt faction who subsequently formed dissident terror groups) are all documented here. Using the threat of losing control of the movement to these people, Adams is also pictured as winning concession after concession from the 'Good Friday' negotiators, which he continued to do long after these people had been removed from the equation.

Another amazing thread through this story is the IRA's external relations with hostile foreign governments (a history that goes back to their murky overtures to the Third Reich) such as Eastern Bloc governments during the Cold War and Gadaffi's Libya who would supply the Provos most sophisticated weaponry and large sums of money during the last decades of the conflict. This is interlinked with details of the incredible extent to which the IRA was infiltrated by moles giving away both military and political information to London and Dublin - of countless foiled operations, deaths and arrests. Some of these informers are known and named, in other cases Moloney documents the nature of the information and what was done with it - but either does not know or cannot name the informant. The most significant of these is the betrayal of the Eksund, a boat filled with a vast military arsenal from Libya with which the IRA hoped to bring the conflict to a bloody, violent and abrupt Republican victory which they names the 'Tet Offensive' after the VietCong's final push.

Maloney's work is incredibly detailed and insightful - yet its reads very easily. Interestingly, despite now living in America Maloney is still very guarded about many of his sources. The work is massively footnoted, and thoroughly referenced, but if you take a moment to follow the most revealing and alarming footnotes the will not reveal much more than, "119: interview with IRA source, November 1999" for example.

The book concludes at the completion of the peace process and the power sharing Stormont Government in the 'Chuckle Brothers' era of Paisley and McGuiness. Moloney charts the way in which Adams was able to use the skills he had honed in manipulating Republicanism to his desired ends to do the same to the wider political landscape. This process was mirrored on the Unionist side and so Sinn Fein displaced the SDLP in the same way that the DUP eclipsed the UUP - and the book ends tersely when he describes the handing of power over to the new executive:

"[Blair] and Bertie Ahern had brought final peace to one of Europe's most troubled regions, but at the cost of handing it over to the least deserving, most adamantine elements of that society." (p592)

This is a quite brilliant read, which anyone interested in the history of Ireland should take time to consider.

All Blues, No Rhythm

Birnam Hill, Dunkeld, Perthshire

Obney Hill 3

Colas Oil Train at Perth

A visitor crosses the Tay at Perth, Northbound towards Aberdeen.

Obney Hill 2

One of the oddities of taking photos when climbing hills is that the hill being climbed rarely appears well in the photos of the day - while adjacent hills loom large. Really I should catalogue all the photos and then post a picture of the day's walk, taken from a view of that hill rather than from it!

This view of Obney Hill was taken today from the Birnam Hill a couple of miles to the East. It forms a nice contrast to the previous post.

Obney Hill

There is a long line of hills which run east-west just north of the Perthshire village of Bankfoot. Visible for miles around, this chain of rolling summits divides Glen Almond to the South with Strathbraan on its Northern side. For travellers heading North on the A9, these hills visible to the left of that great main road offer a first tantalising glimpse of what the Highlands have to offer. The most famous of these hills is the furthest East of them, is Birnam Hill, forever enshrined in Shakespearean legend, which towers over the picturesque village of Dunkeld. Next to Birnam Hill is a lovely hill which is in comparison with its famous friend, largely overlooked but which gave us a wonderful little walk yesterday. I refer to Obney Hill, rendered on some maps as "The Obney Hills", and the summit in the photo above it shown by the OS as a 'fort' site.

Only a 2 or 3 hour jaunt, but an excellent tramp through some deep snow and some really wonderful views.

Book Notes: Unchained America by Dave Gorman

Although this book was a jolly enough little read, I came away feeling a little underwhelmed by it. The English comedian Dave Gorman is a humorous fellow, and his radio shows like Genius on BBC R4 is always worth a laugh or two. On Genius, members of the public submit their less-than-serious ideas for adjudication by Gorman and a guest celeb. I once submitted an idea to the programme, and ten months later the BBC invited me to come to the programme. I had to decline however, as by that stage I had completely forgotten what my idea was, and had to write back declining their invite with the frank admission that I may be many things, but obviously not a Genius.

Somehow though this book failed to live up to my expectations.

Perhaps my expectation were too high. For a start I like the author (even when I disagree with him), and quirky humorous travel writing is a genre I enjoy. I also thought the idea behind the book sounded interesting - which was to try and drive across the USA using only independent business for food, fuel and accommodation. Having driven extensively in the States a couple of years ago and experienced some wonderfully unique family hotels, stores and business and endured the drab uniformity of the chain-stores, chain-hotels too - I thought this concept for a book was a good one. In addition to that, Gorman's actual route took him along many of the same roads we drove, and through the same towns and landscapes. What then was there not to like?

In truth, I didn't actually dislike very much of it, it was, as I said an amusing piece of writing with which to fill odd moments. It kept me reading, turning the pages and on a couple of occasions chuckling. Perhaps I thought the adventure described would be more madcap, or that Gorman would deliver more incisive social comment or more laughs. Instead, Unchained America gave me several moments of entertained knowing recognition, much wry smiling and a general sense of amusement; and the feeling that I had perhaps expected just a bit too much of the book. No doubt my over-expectation wasn't helped by the blurb writers whose cover spiel contributed to this process. The book ultimately seems to fade out, rather than end with a grand conclusion.

Entertaining but not quite what I had hoped. 

What love looks like

The subject of this morning's sermon was "Love". The following picture contrasts the way in which our culture sees love, and how Jesus Christ views it. In many contemporary "love" songs, the love in question is the selfish pursuit of a set of pleasing emotions. However in Jesus' estimation, "greater love has no man than this, than he lays down his life for his friends...". In his life, his teaching and crucially his death, he shows us what real giving love is; while the transformative effect of his gospel on us makes us more loving so we can imitate him.

Food, family, friends, hunger, thirst, sex - and the quote I return to time and time again...

I will never forget the first time I read the following quote, almost two decades ago. I was so struck by it, that I wrote it down and have re-read it many times since. I have subsequently read it to friends, family and whole churches, and not many months ago I read it to a group on a church men's weekend. If you know me, you may have heard me read it somewhere - such has been its influence on my thinking.

It reads:

The effect of sin is to make mankind a slave of the things that were meant to serve him. This is one of the terrible, tragic things about it. According to our Lord, earthly, worldly, things tend to become our god. We serve them; we love them. Our heart is captivated by them; we are at their service. What are they? They are the very things that God in his kindness has given mankind in order that they might be of service to him, an in order that he might enjoy life while he is in this world. All these things which can be so dangerous to our souls because of sin, were given to us by God, and we were meant to enjoy them – food and clothing, family and friends and all such things. These are all but a manifestation of the kindness and graciousness of God. He has given them to us that we might have a happy and enjoyable life in this world; but because of sin, we have become their slaves. We are mastered by appetites. God has given us our appetites; hunger, thirst and sex are God-created. But the moment a man is dominated by them, or is mastered by them, he is a slave to them. What a tragedy; he bows down and worships at the shrine of the things that were meant to be at his service! Things that were meant to minister to him have become his master. What an awful, terrible thing sin is.   

These words were spoken around half a century ago by D Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and they continue to exert a profound influence on my thinking even now.

The first thing that arrested my attention were the positives. One of my errors as a young Christian was to imagine that 'discipleship' (that is, following Jesus), must necessarily be unpleasant. If I was basically sinful (I reasoned), then doing good must by default be irksome and tiring. I had not reckoned with the balance of the  New Testament where Paul (for example) rails to Timothy against the false ascetics whose austerity seemed to forbid pleasure. So this quote woke me up, abruptly! The desires I knew for food, friendship, thirst, and sex were not expressions of wickedness in and of themselves; but were actually part of the design. I had adopted a compartmentalised approach in which I sometimes followed God, and at others times enjoyed pleasure; but assumed a tension between the two. Lloyd-Jones demolished this false dichotomy along with all the needless guilt that accompanied it. God, he says, intended us to have a happy and enjoyable life in this world. Monasticism is not the end of sanctification. 

The thing which then grabbed me were the negatives. While insisting that our basic drives are God-given, Lloyd-Jones explained why so much human misery stems from harm caused by the pursuit of these drives for sex, comfort and happiness. In his wise estimation, humanity was created with a nobility which meant that we stood above our drives, and were able to handle them for good; but because of the fall of humanity into sinfulness we have found ourselves beneath them, and subservient to them. In other words, things given freely  to enhance our happiness are, in our alienation, things which we find we must pursue in order to carve out a life of meaning. So legitimate hunger becomes greed, which becomes first obesity and then heart disease. Sex is starved of its love-making and marriage-enhancing power and becomes animal lust, and even within marriage can become an act that demands and hurts, not one which gives and cares. Likewise the natural desire for shelter and clothing and comfort (not wrong!), can degenerate into the squalid idolatry of the love of money, and of the tyranny of incessant accumulation.

These negatives and positives combined, defined an agenda which I have attempted (with varying degrees of success) to pursue. The Christian calling is then neither to deny the basic legitimate drives and needs which come from creation not fall, nor to pursue them at all costs, as if they were the source of happiness and contentment themselves. We are called neither to the monastery nor the brothel. We are not to retreat from the real world as if we were less-than-fully human; neither are we to recklessly pursue the desires we have, for this too is less-than-fully-human. The former denies the pleasures God has for us in the world, the second makes us servants of those addictive desires.

Lloyd-Jones' quote showed me the way in which humanity was created with a sense of dignity, bearing God's image and appointed to 'rule' the earth for Him. It is loaded with the assumption that sin belittles us, makes us smaller, poorer, and more pathetic. We often assume that sin just makes us 'dirty', this is true but Lloyd-Jones goes further and demonstrates that it also humiliates us.

The Christian life must be characterised then, by the legitimate use of these pleasures and joys; but also the exertion of self-discipline and control over them. If I am mastered by the love of money, I must learn instead to love God and to de-throne money. If I am mastered by lust, I am under its power, and it will distort me and prevent me from being a lover and make me merely a user. "What an awful terrible thing sin is" he says. If I extend my need for comfort and shelter into a money-making, consumable-purchasing quest for happiness; money has become my god and I care nothing for the poor of the earth. To say that these outcomes are below the intended created dignity of humanity, is to understate the case a hundredfold.

What hope is there for people people like me (and probably you), who find ourselves under sin's mastery? When we know that our agenda for today is driven by the love of money, reputation, lust, or greed and we understand the folly of it, where can we turn? 

The Bible insists that because God is love , the best way to describe how He deals with us is "gracious". The essence of this is that he does not demand that we master these appetites and reconstruct our own dignity in order to gain His approval; quite the opposite in fact. In the Lloyd-Jones quote he describes sin as being like slavery, like being 'mastered'. This means that we are in fact, quite unable to tame our animal lusts, or insatiable desires by ourselves even when we see the harm they are doing to those around us. As such we are not able to elevate ourselves to a position where we can completely restore our lost dignity or demand his approval. Instead God, through His Son Jesus Christ, offers us something truly astonishing. He offers us complete forgiveness for all that is past; and gives us back our lost dignity by sharing with us the inexhaustable dignity of Jesus. In so doing, the human soul is offered the staggering prospect of being satisfied and complete and whole; in knowing, worshipping and feasting on God himself. Such a person will find him or herself increasingly liberated from the agenda of sin, and re-established as master of their own desires. It is when this happens that family, friends, hunger, thirst, sex can be used as parts of our other-centred service in this world, and contribution to human happiness.

In the ancient world a slave could be released or more accurately "redeemed" if a ransom price could be agreed. The Bible insists that the death of Jesus Christ on the cross was exactly the required price to liberate us from the slavery that Lloyd-Jones describes above, and which so profoundly describes me. So here is my agenda for the day: I will not deny my place in the world and retreat into an other-worldly asceticism which is sheer ingratitude to God. Rather, when I eat my tea tonight I will say grace, thank God for it, and enjoy every last mouthful!  But neither must today consist in the quest for the satisfaction of my appetites at the expense of others. Rather I must pray, be satisfied in God and so liberated to serve others. And this will begin with my family. Where I succeed I will thank God, and where I fail I will be driven back to His graciousness to start again tomorrow.

Book Notes: If God, Then What? by Andrew Wilson

"If God, Then What?" is a book quite unlike any I have ever read, it is remarkable and really rather good. For a start it has received rave reviews from across the spectrum from Ruth Gledhill in The Times to a few die-hard conservative evangelicals like Wayne Grudem! 

I have read several books which have argued for the reasonableness of Christian belief, proposing an intellectually coherent view of life and faith, countering objections and the like. Some focus on science (like John Lennox' works), other helpfully expose the weaknesses of rival ways of viewing the world (like Tim Keller), other like McDowell present wide-ranging introductory stuff in a straightforwardly didactic style. 

Andrew Wilson takes a completely different approach. He begins by charting his personal path from an unthinking fundamentalism into a questioning and probing faith. While he used to be a "them versus us" confrontationalist who hid from other people with contrary views, he now loves questions, challenges, thinking and people who help him to do all this. Unusually however, the more he has read, and thought and questioned, the more he has become convinced that Christianity presents a credible and coherent view of the world.

The most unusual thing about this book is its style. It is not designed for academic publication, it is not a physics thesis on origins for example. It is witty, quirky, odd and deliberately conversational in style -indeed the book's subtitle is "wondering aloud about truth, origins and redemption", in a few places it is really rather funny. However that is not to say that this is apologetics dumbed-down, in fact far from it, for Wilson has done his homework and is grappling helpfully with some very big and important concepts and delving into the main points raised by writers as diverse as Dawkins, Hume, CS Lewis and Alvin Plantinga! 

In a disarmingly friendly style he invites his readers to imagine with him the possibility, the probability in fact of the existence of God. he ranges across the sciences, philosophy, literature and human experience and from this unfolds the reasonableness of the Christian understanding of the world. 

This is an ideal book for anyone who genuinely wants to know what Christians think, why we think it and how on earth we can justify our beliefs in such odd-sounding things as the resurrection of Christ from the dead. It is not a hard-nosed lecture, but a gently written invitation to begin to think and maybe begin to imagine the world in a completely different way. It really is a page-turner, which I couldn't put down. I hope it is very widely read - especially by people for whom Christian faith is a strange, unknown or baffling concept.

Book Notes: The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness by Timothy Keller

This is the shortest of all Keller's books by some margin, yet it packs a punch in its 45 closely argued pages. It is thought-provoking and in its central message a helpful little book which deserves to be re-read several times. It is not perhaps that the thoughts in this book are entirely original but I cannot think of finding them as eloquently or concisely expressed as they are here.

Keller begins by suggesting that the modern Western presumption with elevating self-esteem, is not the whole answer to matter of improving human behaviour. In fact, in some cases great harm is caused by those whose self-belief is uncontaminated by the humility towards others which naturally embraces empathy.

In Keller's estimation, many of the difficulties of the human condition are caused by problems of the human ego. The ego he sees as being empty, painful, busy and fragile. Empty, because at the centre of our lives is an emptiness, a hollowness which is made acute by the fact that the human ego is inflated. Painful, because the distended ego is dysfunctional. Have you ever noticed that as you walk around you do not notice your toe unless there is something wrong with it? asks Keller as he points out that our constant concern with our own ego is a sign of a flaw. The ego is busy, he argues, because it drives us to constant activity seeking verification for itself, the accumulation of a CV with which to re-assure itself of its own value (despite the fact that in so doing it drains the inherent value from all the activities it embraces, making them of mere instrumental consequence to the greater good of the ego itself). Finally it is "busy" says Keller. He produces a fascinating quote from Madonna who admits being driven by a deep fear of mediocrity.

What then does Keller propose as a Christian antidote to these problems of the human ego? Readers familiar with Tim Keller's writing will be unsurprised to learn that his proposed solution is the gospel of Christ, seen as the unmerited grace of God being freely given to undeserving humans. Keller shows (using Paul's New Testament example) that this properly understood, believed, accepted and experienced leads to a remarkable freedom. This is freedom not just from what other people think about our value, but also a freedom from what we think about ourselves. Keller argues that a person who has received the love of God in Christ will not be 'puffed up' but will be filled up. 

The way in which the Christian life is worked out in these terms before God means that we can be on one hand certain that we are sinful, flawed and have made many errors, but on the other hand deeply loved and accepted by the one person whose opinion matters: GOD. This should make us neither self-hating nor self-loving, but characterised by what the author calls "gospel-humility". This he sees in the following terms (p32), Gospel humility is not thinking more of myself, or thinking less of myself, by thinking of myself less. Here is the goal that Keller puts before us, of what the gospel of Christ will do to us if we allow its sweet influence to have its way in our souls; not to be become egotists concerned with our levels of self-esteem, but rather to be so secure in the love of God that we declare our self obsession over.

The foundation on which all of this rests is of course the old Biblical idea of salvation by faith. That is to say that we do not enter into a right relationship to God on the basis of our good deeds or adequate performance; but rather that when we entrust ourselves to Jesus Christ he removes our guilt and unites us to himself. As Keller puts it, we have the verdict (loved, accepted, forgiven), prior to our performance. This, when understood is true liberation - as the person who has got this is truly liberated to love God and others.

This is a great little read, full of ideas, and shot through with a full-blooded New Testament spirituality which is satisfying and profound. 

There is a brilliant irony in all of this. I first became aware of this title because Amazon recommended the book to me on the basis of my previous purchases which is fair enough! However, the wording of their advert could not have been more bizarrely inept. "TREAT YOURSELF - to the freedom of self-forgetfulness" screamed the large font size! 

Book Notes: The Good The Bad and The Multiplex by mark Kermode

As readers of this blog know well, I am quite partial to the odd curmudgeonly rant. The film critic Mark Kermode's "The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex" is a particularly enjoyable example of the genre, and a read which entertained me hugely over Christmas.

The book consists of six chapter-rants which are well researched, and acerbically delivered. He begins with the charge that the modern multiplex experience fails to offer the enjoyment which old-style cinemas delivered to their audiences. He rails against ghastly over-priced trash food, awful customer service, noisy ignorant audiences,  shoddy projection, and staff who neither know or care about film. Good criticisms well made.

Next Kermode turns his fire on the phenomenon of the "blockbuster" movie hit, the mutli-million dollar spend-a-lot movies with A-list stars and mega-budget CGI effects. The question he asks is why are they so awful. While these films once they have been recycled through cinema, DVD, download, and TV-repeats, always end up making a profit for years to come; the question Kermode wants to ask this: Given the certainty of a financial return why do studios and writers content themselves with the likes of the lamentable Waterworld, the tedious Titanic, or the banal Dances with Smurfs (sic) er, sorry Avatar; when they could actually make great and poignant films?

3D cinema, according to "The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex" is basically a useless fad that the film companies won't abandon, but will return to repeatedly. The thesis of chapter three is that despite widespread audience dissatisfaction, the film industry needs a gimmick with which to distinguish cinema from the burgeoning 'home cinema' market. This is enhanced by the fact that the complexities of 3D projection make it a useful tool in the studios ongoing war against piracy of their product. This is then re-enforced by the fact that the investment in 3D projection requires a return and so cannot be abandoned as many audiences would like!

"What are film critics for?" Kermode asks. Well he might, because as he laments in his next chapter despite the fact that the reviewers queued up in droves to pan the awful Sex and the City 2 as an utterly unwatchable  ghastly and completely weird film, people still went to see it (I didn't!). Market dominance by fewer and fewer companies, and the power of advertising (coupled with the disastrously low expectations and demands of audiences) makes critical reflection on films seem pointless! Kermode is in full despair mode in this chapter, but the more cross he gets, the more entertaining and sharp he is.

The end part of the book looks at the dominance of Hollywood in various different ways. The myth of the "British Film Industry" is exposed and revealed as but part of an international film industry. However, in the final rant Kermode turns his attention to the subject of foreign film and subtitling. This was probably the most interesting and informative chapter of the book in that this is an area I know little about.While I enjoyed the other chapters and always appreciate someone delivering opinions with which I largely agree with a huge dose of sarcasm and derision, this chapter took me into new areas. Kermode examines the way in which Hollywood has a track record of taking foreign-language films and ruining them with American versions, to overcome the Anglo-American audience reluctance to read subtitles. In his analysis when the films are ripped from their context the stories often make no sense. I was intrigued by his discussion of the Keanu Reeves/Sandra Bullock romance, "The Lake House". I had seen it and loathed it and reviewed it here. What I didn't know was that it was originally a Far Eastern movie which made a lot more sense set in its original language and cultural context. A remarkable and surprising discovery.

The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex is a fast-paced and highly entertaining read. No-one, I suspect would  agree with all the vociferously expressed opinions within it; but anyone who watches films today should give it a read. It certainly should make the reader less happy to passively accept much of the badly presented shoddy fare with which we are so routinely presented.

Clan Line

Merchant Navy Class, Clan Line makes a fine spectacle, accelerating away from Egham.

Book Notes: Blood Done Sign My Name by Timothy B. Tyson

Timothy Tyson has spent much of a lifetime seeking to understand the  key event of his childhood, and the fruit of that search is contained within this extraordinary book. Tyson was only ten in 1970 when one of his friends father and uncle were responsible for a grizzly racial murder, a latter-day lynching in which a young black man was beaten and shot for (allegedly) making a sexual remark to a white woman. The young Tyson watched his father a white Methodist pastor in the integrationist Martin Luther King Jr 'civil-rights' tradition, become alienated first by the advent of 'black power' on one hand and then being driven from his church and called a "N_____ lover" for his outspoken integrationism on the other. When an all-white jury acquitted the murderers in what has widely been cited as a gross miscarriage of justice, Tyson watched the flames of black revolt tear through the industrial heart of Oxford NC, as black power became an active resistance movement.

As Tyson reaches back into the history of his town, he rather beautifully interweaves the story of his family (a long line of civil-rights Methodists), his own story, the immediate story of the murder of Henry Marrow, the town's story and the wider narrative of the African-American struggle for equality in the Jim-Crow South, which was (shockingly) a thriving system in Oxford, six years after President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.

Central to Tyson's explorations is dismantling what he sees a key civil rights myth; namely that The Civil Rights Movement presented a morally decent and upright assault on the conscience of white America, a challenge to which they rose and duly abolished segregation and all its associated inhumanities. Tyson sets out to demonstrate that in Oxford, North Carolina - the local authorities had completely resisted implementing any of the equality legislation by 1970, preferring to shut facilities than face the thought of the mixing of the 'races'. Tyson explores the peculiarly psycho-sexual nature of much of this separatism, which sought to 'protect' (ie control) white female sexual contact with Black Men, while the obvious history of slavery is of white exploitation of black women's sexuality. Such a theme is naturally brought to the forefront when Henry Marrow's alleged crime for which he was 'lynched' was to make a sexual remark about a white woman.

The dilemma Tyson explores through the eyes of his Father is that while the Civil Rights Movement did indeed present a non-violent and idealistic appeal to the conscience of America; the conscience of North Carolina at least was utterly impervious to both that appeal and to Federal legislation. Tyson sees that his father could completely endorse the aims and methodology of civil rights, but could also see that integration hadn't happened with any due speed whatsoever, and lynchings were still excused in courts in 1970. When the Black Power movement armed themselves and bombed and firebombed Oxford's white community and its businesses, he could neither embrace their aims or methods. However, he could not deny that they finally managed to make the authorities listen to them and make serious changes to the racial power structures which had subjugated African Americans since the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 in which Reconstruction-democracy was violently overthrown. Tyson documents the Black community's efforts to re-take the initiative and seize back their rights, through traditional protests and arches coupled with violence and the threat of violence.

Blood Done Sign My Name, is a beautifully written book which brings together these divergent strands of autobiographical self-reflection, local history, social and political history and family history into a compelling and insightful window into the world of racial (not to say ecclesiastical) politics of North Carolina. Apparently the attempt to turn this book into a film was not very successful, and the book is a far better bet than the somewhat cliched and plodding drama that it spawned. Like so many books on this area of history, it constantly provokes the reader not to copy the mistakes of the oppressors, who were so driven by fear and hate of those unlike them that they diminished themselves by their inability to understand or value their common humanity. So too, is it inspiring to read of the heroic actions of people who fearlessly stood for what (as Christians) they defined as "righteousness". It is good to read of those both black and white for whom Jim Crow was not only an affront to the dignity of Black people, but that as all people are made in the image of God, it was likewise an affront to God Himself, and so they were empowered to proclaim righteousness even when they were run out of town.

This book has lingered on my shelves for a long time. If I had realised it was going to be this good - I would have read it a long time ago!

Book Notes: The Lighthouse Stevensons by Bella Bathurst

For centuries shipping in Scottish waters was endangered by the country's perilous seas, dangerous coasts, savage storms, severe currents and partially submerged reefs, within shipping lanes. It did not require much professional analysis to work out where the most dangerous areas were, for communities grew rich by harvesting the fruits of the seas annual plunder from the their beaches, in the same spots year upon year.

Bella Bathurst's charming little book "The Lighthouse Stevensons" is a biography of the Stevenson family and their Edinburgh engineering firm, whose names will forever be associated with the construction of lighthouses around the Scottish coast. This very Victorian story (which begins before Victoria and ends after her reign) is a compellingly told story of bravery, ingenuity, determination, enterprise and skill. The unfolding generations of Stevensons who placed warning lights on far-flung peninsula's like Ardnamurchan, and who built great lighthouses out at sea in such places as Bell Rock, Skerryvore and Muckle Flugga; were all wildly different characters - but each of whom played a key role in saving lives with their engineering exploits. The most famous of the family was, of course, Robert Louis, who to the horror of the older members of the dynasty deserted engineering for the unworthy pursuit of literature!

This book is neither heavyweight social history, nor exhaustive biography; neither is it bogged down with footnotes or references. Rather it is a fast-paced easy-read which quite delightfully opens up a slice of history which is both important and fascinating. I was intrigued by Bathurst's account of the fatalistic sailors and islanders who thought that lighthouses were built in defiance of God, whose prerogative it was alone who determine the fate of those at sea! Fascinating too was the opposition the lighthouse-builders received from those who's wealth was dependent on the macabre trade of wrecking or foraging for the treasures of wrecks.  Equally intriguing are the stories of the way in which the difficulties of constructing great towers at sea, in dreadful conditions were overcome, as well as the ways in which the lighting systems evolved. The politics and finances of lighthouse-building, were equally engrossing. Bathurst traces the ambitions, the families, the characters, faith and achievements of this remarkable dynasty through to the present day.

From various remote places I have watched Scotland's lighthouses keeping their nightly vigil over the dark seas and been vaguely intrigued by them. Bella Bathurst's little book is the highly entertaining story of how they came to be there. Sometimes reading history is hard work, but this book is not intended to be that sort of history, it is more of a celebration of a thoroughly unique and intriguing chapter in Scots history.

Boots

I'm amused by the way that girls seem to look at this photo and say, "your two footprints in the snow, aww how romantic!" While what guys find most noteworthy about this image is that "her feet are a lot smaller than yours".

Seasonal Shot