mountain masala

free lawrence lessig audio book

lawrence lessig's book "free culture", is available as an audio download here. Lessig is Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society.

The dowload is 100mb...

open source religious resources

Mary Hess is one of the instigators of OSSR, the Open Source Religious Resource site - "a new project that seeks to create a webspace for sharing and developing religious resources -- everything from curriculum materials, to worship elements, to music, and so on."

Mary is a religious educator with a strong interest in new media and communication. Clearly part of the project is to explore how and why the WWW might function as an 'open source' collaborative resourcing environment. For more on that, visit the project's blog.

worship unplugged

i have a running joke with cheryl about getting onto jonny baker's blog - the "cover of the Rolling Stone" for alt worship. she manages it all the time. i'm going to see if it works this time for me......

'worship unplugged' is a welcome contribution to the almost non-existent publishing arena of "Australian alt=worship resources". OK, the Prodigal Project was 1/3 Aussie. but since then it's all been in blogland. Rob Hanks has compiled a smorgasbord of ideas and resources, but more than that, he's journalled the thinking and processes that he and others have used to introduce people to thinking differently about worship.

Rob heads up the Youth Unit for the Uniting Church in NSW, and he has a solid history in both local and regional youth ministry. On the one hand, the book is full of creative worship ideas, 153 to be exact, plus a alphabetised list of great (mainly 'secular') songs for use in worship (listening not singalong). And of course, creative ideas are a mix of "wow", "oh yeah, I tried that" and "that would never work in my church/group/town/universe". as an idea bank for most people it is excellent - inspirational and practical.

but the important thing is that rob and the many people who have been part of his teams offer 'alternative' ways of viewing worship, drawing on the ideas of many and making them accessible. the book refers to david bosch, leonard sweet, tom beaudoin, dorothy bass, pierson & riddell & kirkpatrick, and many others.

is it a systematic, theoretical description of alt-worship? No. is it a bubbling, creative, thoughtful stir-fry of ideas and inspiration. Yes!

To get a copy (I'm not sure of price of availability, hopefully it will be downloadable) email the Youth Unit.

(now Rob, have I earned the 'spare link' on the 'blogs i read' section of your blog.....?)

rabbit and roo

about time for a food post.....

we had rabbit stew the other night, a bit of a rarity as other family members don't like the taste or concept or usual toughness of the meat. but this time it was great (thanks to Mercatos at Campbelltown)

since we had leftovers, I made my first Dolmades of the summer (my first lot were made two years ago with the leftover Christmas turkey). we have two grape vines - around the front of the house are some kind of sultana that the birds always get, and around the gazebo is a "glory vine" that doesnt give any fruit but goes a brilliant red in autumn. (in case you think that sounds spectacular, combine it with a 1970's yellow brick house.....)

Back to the dolmades......

filling:
cooked rice
leftover rabbit and bacon (chopped)
onion caramelised in Vino Cotto (Maggie Beer's)
some diced red cabbage
1/2 preserved lemon diced
1 tablespoon of tomatoe paste
cracked black pepper and salt

blanch the vine leaves until they lose their bright greenness
put filling in vine leaves and roll them up

put in a casserole dish and cover with cheap mushroom and red wine pasta sauce
bake in a moderate overn for 20 mins

It was pretty tasty, I'd have to say.

and the roo?

well, i bought kangaroo sausages, and we chopped some up for the kids lunches....

so they had kanga banga sangas!

(apologies for that.......)

survey of australian young people

in case you missed it, Mission Australia's 2006 survey of young australians is now online here.

From the Mission Australia press release:

A national survey of 14,700 young people, aged 11-24 (95% between 11-19), has found family conflict, alcohol and other drugs and body image are their three main issues of concern, according to the survey’s authors, community service organisation, Mission Australia.

When asked to rank 12 issues in level of importance, family conflict was ranked most frequently in the top three by 28.6% of respondents. Alcohol and other drugs was a top concern for 28.2% of respondents, while body image – included as a category in the survey for the first time – came in third at 28.1%. Both females and males were similarly concerned about body image.

According to Mission Australia’s spokesperson, Anne Hampshire, changes in the 2006 survey reveal young people are confronting a broader and more complex range of issues.

“Body image is a new inclusion – requested by the young people themselves – as it had regularly been cited as an issue in the other concerns category in previous surveys,” Ms Hampshire said.
“In addition, suicide and self harm were listed separately as issues for the first time, whereas in previous surveys they had been listed together. The effect of separating suicide (28%) and self harm (21.5%) in 2006 highlights more clearly the levels of concern about each issue.”

This is Mission Australia’s fifth National Youth Survey – and its largest so far. It was conducted through schools and colleges around the country – and with the assistance of community organisations, government agencies, corporate partners – and was available on-line.

The survey asked a range of questions, including ‘What do young people value?’, ‘Where do you turn for advice/support?’ and ‘What people/organisations do you most admire?’.

ok go

this is so excellent!

thanks to darren for telling me about this. and to duncan for telling him.

band site here.

urban church

the recently-downunder steve collins has posted the diagrams that he used in his recent visit to melbourne to talk about what church today looks like here. i found that his insights resonated well with me as well as pushing me further. John Roberto talks about "gathered" and non-gathered" church - steve has depicted this very well in an urban environment. (BTW, John has just moved on from the Centre for Ministry Development that he co-founded in 1978).

places
john's non-gathered view of church, which has been immensely helpful for us for many years, tended to focus on recognised institutions (school, family, sporting groups) which had a recognisd place in the community and some degree of longevity. steve has portrayed a more fluid, intenerant and situational notion of gathering and networking. as a traveller to a regional congregation. I am beginning to understand in a new way how centralised the understanding of church is, and how much the programming revolves around perceived needs rather than actual interests (that's a big realisation for me to work through some more) and people's actual gathering places.

part of my interest in this is about sacred spaces. my example for some time has been the remembrance pool at port arthur. churches (and our college) have created public labyrinths. i did a consultancy for the christmas bowl in australia where I suggested that them make a public sculpture of a pair of hands in every capital city mall and invite people (famous and not) to make bowls to put in the hands each year. (there was a staff change so it didn't happen....). I'm not wishing to be trite about this - rather to learn from our aboriginal peoples' sense of sacred places, and wonder how to create them.

object
john also introduced my to the idea of people taking stuff home from church - i still recall his example of telling the story of the feeding of the 5000 in worship, then giving people a bread roll and a lunchtime prayer to take home with them (so simple, so obvious, so good). tom bandy has talked about 'talismans' - people carrying tangible symbols of faith and faith experiences. we know from many sources that there is a resurgence of interest by people in wearable symbols. steve took it a step further by suggesting that such symbols might be contemporary, transitory, mass-produced, whatever. I found that steve kept pushing us in small ways to see more of God in the 'ephemeral'.

communication
network talk is trendy, but it tends to mean decentralisation and cross-pollination. steve suggests to me that if we see church as network church, then we need to recognise, support and endorse multi-layered network communications as being an expression of church. of course, my church SMSes youth group announcements to my kids (via me...), and I've used SMS as a feedback mechanism at a large gathering. but steve is talking more about ways for people to navigate on a daily basis. how do spiritual wayfarers receive and send signals about spiritual connections? of course I'm intrigued by how a church might actively sponsor multi-channel, multi-way communication among its 'members'.

community
steve's description of 'quantum cloud' community once again sits well with roberto's non-gathered, by which he really meant non-centralised. this is not so much about the places, but about what happens there, and how the church might 'signal' expressions of community and spirituality to others.

great stuff steve!

green flame

just thought I should plug stephen garner's green flame blog. stephen is a kiwi, a theologian with a science background, and interested in technology, communication and media in relation to God, the church, mission, etc. we've only met online. I envy his science/tech attentiveness and how he brings that to bear on the God-stuff. he constantly posts intriguing stuff.

for mac newbies

in response to darren's new mac, I thought I'd post some things to get him started, and no doubt others will add their own comments.

first up, for multimedia authoring, I have my hard disk partitioned. why? so that I have a boot-software disk and a 'project' disk. it means that I can clear and defragment the latter without the tedium of having to defragment the former.

you can partition the disk on setup, but if it's already set up, the tool to use is iPartition, with also comes with iDefreg Lite. iPartition lets you change the size of your disk partitions later, which is brilliant.

I think a 40 Gb project disk (minimum is necessary). Mind you, more and more Apple software seems to want to be on the boot drive. In some cases (such as iPhoto and iTunes), you can simply move the folder and put an alias where its supposed to be (in the Pictures or Music folder in your user folder).

And when you format the second partition, make sure that journalling is turned off. (use Disk Utility to erase and reformat it if you like).

Some folk suggest making the project drive the first partition, as the computer will access it quicker. I think that's mainly an issue for multitrack audio recording, when you really do need maximum disk access speed.

The second initial thing was to install the XCode Developer tools - you'll want some of them later.

The third thing is NOT to install all of the additional languages or printer drivers - they take up bucketloads of hard disk space.

More coming soon - Quicktime stuff, essential free and cheap software...

BTW, I usually let Software Update tell me what is needed. and then go to the Support section of the Apple website to download the required files. Why? So I can burn a backup copy of the file in case I ever need to reinstall it and don't want to have to download gigabytes of files again.

(I use DiskTracker to catalog my backup disks - it doesnt look fancy but it does the job.)

quartonian mixer

right on the heels of discovering apple's quartz composer, I discovered today that roger bolton has his quartonian mixer also available as a free download. Looks fantastic. BUT he's also just posted that Apple have removed that ability of Quartz Composer to mix other Quartz compositions! Hmmm... my guess is something going on here with the forthcoming Leopard and perhaps copyright issues re mixing other people's stuff. Anyway, I'm going to have a play with it regardless. how good does this thing look!!