Bats with baby faces in the violet light

So, I changed the randomly generated avatars for people with no uploaded pictures from geometric patterns to cartoon faces. Apparently, they generate from your email address, so that you always get the same one. I hope no-one is offended by the way they came out…

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What branches grow out of this stony rubbish?

A chance conversation this morning worried me. It seems that someone had read something on this blog and, knowing something of the contexts I live and work in here in St Andrews, had assumed it was intended as a veiled criticism of a particular person. It wasn’t. In all honesty, it surprised me to discover that folk in the ‘town’ rather than ‘gown’ side of St Andrews might find anything of interest here. This blog is intentionally an academic exploration of ideas – if that’s not obvious enough, check out the regular quotations in Greek and Latin… The ideas that I explore here are suggested by all sorts of contexts and triggers. Almost always, it is the coincidence of three or four conversations or things I’ve read or listened to that coalesce to form the belief that a blog post might be worthwhile. The subjects I deal with – the nature of Evangelicalism; theological concepts; church life – are such, however, than inevitably several of the ideas I explore or criticise will be ideas held, and perhaps taught, by people I know: colleagues in St Mary’s, or pastors in the town, or leaders in student Christian organisations. In some cases I am aware of this; in others, no doubt, I am not. Because I had assumed that the readership was mostly further afield and more ‘academic’, I had not been particularly careful about the phrasing of comments even when I have known. I now see that this was a mistake, which has led to misunderstanding in at least one case, and I am sorry for it. I will try to be more conscious of potential overlaps between what I say here and the people I worship with and live and work amongst in real life. All that said, my task as an academic is to discuss ideas. I have found this blog a useful place to do that. Inevitably, the ideas discussed will on occasion be topical, controversial even, in one context or another here in St Andrews. Not all of my colleagues, or all of the local pastors, are right about everything (some of them aren’t even Baptists!) But if there is no-one named in a blog comment, it is not aimed at anyone in particular. That simple. I’m not in the business of trying to undermine unnamed people behind their backs (and, to be honest, if I was, I’d find a more effective way of doing it than a blog that only occasionally gets 100 hits in a...

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‘Unreal city’

This blog went live on the 16th of December, receiving four views, according to the WordPress stats counter. Today, that counter topped 5000. I imagine long-term theobloggers like Andy, Jason and particularly Ben will regard that as pretty paltry, and I am sure that WordPress set it up to maximise the numbers (their business depends on encouraging their bloggers, after all), but it seems a big enough number to make the blog feel worthwhile. Thanks to all who have stopped by or blogged about this blog, and particularly to all who have engaged in debate. Although (looking at the stats) if you were one or more of the 97 visits on Christmas day, you probably should have had something better to do… (Incidentally, if anyone is wondering, all the ‘admin’ posts have titles taken, like the blog title, from Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’, and hopefully not totally unrelated to the topic of the post. For this one, the choice was between ‘unreal city’, ‘I had not thought death had undone so many’ and ‘hypocrite...

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‘A heap of broken images’?

So, just as soon as I work out why every post is appearing in a different font, I will stop it…

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‘Mixing memory and desire’: by way of introduction

Why a blog? My various computer hard drives have been littered with brief attempts to open up a subject in prose, expounding and beginning to explore a single idea. Over time, I fell into the habit of entitling these files ‘fragment on xxx’—hence, in part, the title of the blog. (That, and all the good titles were taken long ago…) Some of these fragments have grown into publications; some have been woven in as footnotes or asides here or there; but many others have remained as fragments, and so have remained unpublished. I believe, rightly or wrongly, that there have been one or two worthwhile ideas in those fragments, and so a place more public (and, based on last month’s unpleasant experience, more permanent…) that a computer hard drive seems...

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