It does well to quote the CS Lewis guy once in a while as I tend to find him quite wise and he simply refuses to be annoying in any way whatsoever- which is much to be said about a theologian. I found this quote this morning and rather than glossing over yet another lot of clever words, I read it, mainly because it had the word renovation in it. That word seems to have jumped around in my face inadvertently lately, like a lemming.

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right, and stopping the leaks in the roof, and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably, and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”

- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London: William Collins, 1970), 172.

It feels like a bit of renovation is going on at the moment.

I picked up a copy of Organic God the other day and it’s one of those books where you kind of get half an idea that God has dumped it in front of you quite purposely.

I am jaded about the church and expression of Christianity that I see, the messiness of the lives around me and frustrated by my own apathy.

Their website looks crap, but the hard copy brochure that one of my bosses waved my way this morning was quite impressive. The concept of roles associated with feet, or rather our shoes is a strong one and whats more, it is quite unique.

This is clever marketing, and although I think the swirly font looks crap (especially in light blue), the overall message is clear, a bit quirky and fun and definitely caught our attention. I would be very happy if I had paid for this concept. It’s nice to see an accountancy firm being a little bit brave in how they present themselves to the world.

The fact that I know a couple people who work at Saward Dawson is entirely irrelevant, besides one of them would kill me if I revealed his more of his identity on the interweb (You’ll have to virtually go through my sidebar to work it out).

Tags: accounting, branding, clever, marketing, shoes

Mike Hogan and David Crowder’s book Everybody wants to go to Heaven but nobody wants to die was a lovely surprise. I found it randomly one day on sale (so bought it)- didn’t even know the man had written a book or two despite loving his music for quite a while.

It is a really interesting and honest look at death and grieving and place of the soul in current culture. Although personally having minimal actual musical interest, the speckled lot of bluegrass history added value to the theme and as history tends to be, was actually quite interesting.

I loved the book for it’s Pratchett style footnotes and humor - it’s candidity, and the beautiful sections of prose interspersed through the bulk of the text. It was a relatively easy read once I got used the unusual format and the small sections made it great for that ‘last few minutes before bed’ thing. The combo of personal story, theory, history, prose, IM thoughts and general wikipedia fun was really good mix for me personally, and I would go back and tackle it again sometime to probably get a lot more from it.

Besides all of the thumbs ups for what’s inside, if you don’t care and just want to judge it by it’s cover, by all means, go ahead. I reckon the cover is pretty fun itself.

Tags: banjo, bluegrass, Books, David Crowder, Death, grieving, soul

Last night when I was in the mood for something fairly light hearted, I rented Margot at the Wedding, foolishly forgetting that it is a Noah Baumbach - creator of The Squid and the Whale, another recent watch.

Both films are entirely brilliant and yet have left me profoundly disturbed, hence why Margot was a poor choice in regards to ’something light’. I was thinking more along the lines of arthouse in an Amelie sense.

These movies delve the chasm of human character and the richness and ugliness of humanity.

Disturbing movies that are brilliant all the same and worth watching at least once:

• Margot at the Wedding
• The Squid and the Whale
• The House of Sand and Fog
• Notes on a Scandal
• Last King of Scotland
• Hotel Rwanda

And to lesser degree - just as brilliant but perhaps slightly less disturbing:

• Life is Beautiful
• Crash

*Note that your kiddies should probably not be watching these movies unless you intend to scar them deeply - then you yourself are rather disturbing.

Tags: arthouse, film, great movies

Today I sat and looked at the most massive pile (electronically speaking) of starred Google Reader posts and decided it was time to do something different.

My previously ’starred’ items that I used as link love and reader love, now reside under Google shared Items. This means that I do not have to individually pull their link out and into a standard blog post. I share it and it gos up automatically, there is even an rss feed for the purpose and I will dump the link I’m about to give you somewhere in the sidebar.

As the backlog was horrendous, this also means that the current ’shared list’ is quite long. So if you have some time and want some eye candy or brain candy, here it is. Collected for you. They live there forever.

Needless to say, links will not disappear coming through here, but now get to spy on things I find inspiring, both in the art, personal and theological world sooner, I get to be distinctly more lazy (or perhaps more efficient) and probably get less back traffic (not such a good thing, but for the sake of dealing with it all, is for the best).

Now if only Google would let me categorise the shared items?

Bec’s Google Shared Items.

Tags: google, link love, shared items, starred items