Sunday 28 November 2010

Awesome Advent from Sufjan Stevens


A stunning version of my fave Advent hymn, love both the apparently haphazard and over the top production! This piece is on an amazing five CD collection Songs for Christmas. The enigmatic Sufjan also produced an incredible CD by another Greenbelt Festival favourite band who played there in 2009, The Welcome Wagon.

Welcome to Advent 2010!

PB

Tuesday 16 November 2010

The shuffling first fifteen meme...

 
1) Turn on your MP3 player or music player on your computer.
2) Go to SHUFFLE songs mode.
3) Write down the first 15 songs that come up–song title and artist–NO editing/cheating, please.
  1. The boy with no name – Travis
  2. Are we alright? - Show of Hands
  3. Bring 'em all in - Mike Scott
  4. He never said - Martyn Joseph
  5. Blood red sky - Seth Lakeman
  6. Why does my heart feel so bad? - Moby
  7. Superhuman touch - Athlete
  8. I grieve - Peter Gabriel
  9. Black swan song - Athlete
  10. Also Sprach Zarathustra - 2001 Space Odyssey
  11. Chasing cars - Snow Patrol
  12. You (Live 2008) - After The Fire
  13. Somebody told me - The Killers
  14. '40' - U2
  15. Walking into battle with the Lord - Chumbawamba
I supposed I am slightly puzzled this list is relatively contemporary yet my overall library is substantially more varied Intriguing that over 50% are bands that have played at the Greenbelt Festival over the years...

Thanks for the tag Phil, if you haven't been tagged yet, go for it anyway (that's you, that is!).

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Sunday 7 November 2010

Creative Covenant Conclusions...


Richard Twiss (above) of Wiconi International was one of the speakers at the recent Emergent Village Theological Conversation which evoked an incredible blog post from Julie Clawson. This paragraph jumped out at, giving me a gentle sense of joy with its resonance to my concerns for the church, particularly all the turmoil over the Anglican Covenant:
The speakers had led us to see how the Bible is used as a colonizing text and how the rituals and trapping of the Western church have colonized the minds of indigenous peoples. Their dream is to find ways to do distinctly indigenous theology and develop spiritual practices that are native to who they are. They pleaded with us to stop seeing Western theology, philosophy, academia, and liturgy as the norm that all others must aspire to or at least subjugate their spiritual language to. And above all to not just allow native peoples space to pursue those paths, but to join in with them valuing their voices just as much as we value Western voices.
Let's face it, The Anglican Covenant is simply an ecclesiastical straight-jacket, therefore I support and endorse the #nocovenant campaign.

It will be interesting to see what 'action' comes out of the Emergent Village Theological Conversation... At Greenbelt 2100 Richard Rohr said 'The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better'.

P