‘In Memory of Her’

In Memory of Her is an idea I’ve been working on for a while; it’s not quite where I wanted it to be before going live, but International Women’s Day seems the right day to launch it. It’s a website, telling the stories of women who have had significant preaching or teaching ministries, or otherwise led the church. Nothing more than that. I hope it will grow to include hundreds of stories. I hope that perhaps someday a young woman sensing God’s call in a context that does not encourage her might discover some of these narratives of mothers in the faith and find the courage and faith to follow her vocation as a result. That’s all. Do have a look, and if you’d like to write someone’s story, or draw a picture or something for the site, you’d be most...

Read More

iPray: reviewing prayer apps for iOS

For anyone who ever travels, though, a daily office is a really natural thing to look for on your smartphone; I’ve tried quite a number of prayer apps – I think all the ones currently available for iOS, at least – and have come to some views on what’s good, what’s bad, and what someone really ought to do better soon. Here are some app reviews…

Read More

‘Why do you call me good?’ On trying and (largely) failing to be a male feminist online

Jesus said, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.’ (Mk 10:18) Some weeks ago, I had the strangest experience I have yet had online. Someone I do not know called me ‘good’. It stunned me. Horrified me. And flattered me, of course. I have been trying to process this ever since. I have not yet succeeded. But I promised a friend that I would try to blog on the subject this week because it seems to matter. And maybe my half-formed thoughts can be of some little use. * * * I was reading a blog; I vaguely knew of the author, but did not know her. She was writing about being a woman online, and about men online. She made many criticisms about how men online behave towards/around women online, qualified with ‘of course there are some good men, who get it’ – a phrase that was hyperlinked. I clicked the link, hoping to learn a little better how to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. My browser opened a page right here, on my own blog. I was, apparently, for a woman I have never met, had at that point never connected directly with online, the ‘good man,’ the one who ‘got it’. I was stunned. Then I was horrified. (And, yes, somewhere in the back of my head or the depths of my gut or both I was pleased and proud. Compliments are nice, even when you cannot believe rationally that you deserve them.) Stunned because I clicked the link looking for something, anything, to help me to be even slightly better, and found myself constructed as ‘good’. Horrified because if I my grasp of this issue is worthy of being held up as an example, we are so far behind where I thought we were that I despair. Horrified because I know I don’t ‘get it’. * * * And this question of ‘getting it’ surfaced again this week, in reflecting in conversation with Jody Stowell on the gendered reactions to the abuse women so regularly receive online. Jody asked, fairly, why all the (Christian) men were not leaping to the defence of women who were abused. We talked – you can see the interaction in the comment thread on Jody’s post. I suggested hesitantly that there was something about ‘getting it,’ about an experience common to women but generally opaque to men – including me – that made involvement in this issue feel at some visceral level more important for women than for men. And then I immediately reflected – the ‘I don’t know what it feels like’ line is the classic refuge of the misogynist – and the racist, and the homophobe, and the rest of the grotesque menagerie of oppressors. I don’t want to use that line. I don’t want to justify that argument. But… But I don’t know what it feels like. I have never been threatened with rape, asked to get my tits out for the lads, told to get back in the kitchen, informed that ‘I love it anal,’ and so on, and so on. I can check my privilege, but I can’t pretend to know what it would mean to live without my privilege. I know, deep down in my gut, that I don’t ‘get it’. And I worry profoundly when someone thinks I do. * * * But let me try some analysis – as I say, half-formed, at best. I get the fact of privilege, and the fact of oppression, and the fact of misogyny, and the fact of racism, and – well, you can do the list… What I constantly realise I don’t get is the power of these prejudices, or the power of intervention in them. I have been told many, many times that I moved someone – and I am thinking of people I know, people who I know are much stronger and much more capable than I am – I moved someone to tears just by saying something simple about this or that issue of prejudice. This always – still – takes me by surprise; if I (sometimes) ‘get it’ where ‘it’ is the wrongness of prejudice, I have to admit that I really do not ‘get it’ where ‘it’ is the power of prejudice to disable, disempower, dehumanise a person. And so I do not ‘get it’ where ‘it’ is the power a very simple intervention can have. And I wonder if that is the answer to Jody’s question, and the reason for my failures? * * * I don’t, particularly, need to understand what...

Read More

Online objects of spiritual significance

Tomorrow I am heading down to London to take part in the (so far excellent – tomorrow might pull the average down) Westminster Faith Debates series. One of the organisers contacted me and the other speakers to introduce us to an artist, a photographer, who is working on a series of portraits of people holding an object that is of spiritual significance to them. Would we like to take part? Yes, I said, and then today thought about what to take… What objects matter to me, spiritually? My initial thoughts could not get very far beyond a Bible. This seemed rather cliched, and I wondered whether just to pull out. I did what every good digital native would do, and crowd-sourced the question on Twitter. A rapid and fascinating exchange ensued with – as is common in at least that corner of Twitter I inhabit – much humour (WWJD bracelet; plain chocolate digestives); much wisdom (‘take one of your daughters’ – YES! but impractical…; ‘the Bible doesn’t matter as an object, it is the teaching it transmits’…); and some surprising realisations (‘take a cross’ // ‘you know what – I don’t actually own a cross, and I’d never consciously noticed that before …’) Helped by friends, I began to think more deeply. A book that has influenced me? Yes – but my good copies of Brother Lawrence and Mother Julian are in the wrong office for me to take either tomorrow now, and actually today I’d pick Phoebe Palmer’s Promise of the Father over either, which I’ve only ever read online – I have no physical copy to take. There is music – Matt Redman’s You Never Let Go was the track Heather and I both had on repeat the weekend she was hospitalised by blood loss following the birth of our third daughter, and I was hearing of the death of my father. But I don’t think I own the CD – I listen to it on iPlayer. Alongside that there are places – I think of several, but one in particular, a place where I have only ever prayed with deep seriousness, on the seashore, always at dawn or dusk. There, echoing Jacob’s own liminal encounter, I have from time to time wrestled with God – and never yet found my prayers unanswered. But I cannot take chunks of Fife coastline with me to a photoshoot in London! I reflected. I threw an idea out, with an explicit hesitation: what about my iPhone? On that screen I read Scripture, more often than not; follow the daily office that structures my prayers; listen to the music that means most to me; and connect to the very friends who were encouraging, entertaining, and challenging me right then. But the phone itself is not a spiritual object for me – it is, in my eyes, beautifully designed, but to lose it would be a financial issue, but not a spiritual one. And so I realised, with the help of friends: the things I value most spiritually are actually virtual objects. They are texts, or even meanings of texts, regardless of the format they come in – I have a beautiful leather-bound Bible, delightful to stroke, but the words are not more – or less – powerful there than read off a screen. They are recorded tunes, but the physical medium of the recording means nothing to me – I can play You Never Let Go from a dozen different devices, or hear/sing it ‘live’ in a congregation, and the personal impact does not change. And they are relationships: does the screen I skype my family on when away from home matter? No – it is replaceable; but the fact of being able to skype my family matters enormously. I value the Bible, not any particular Bible. And ‘the Bible’ is a virtual object: it is a set of data and meta-data, that can be expressed in various physical forms. My smartphone is profoundly important to me spiritually, because by carrying that one object I have access to the virtual objects necessary or helpful for my own practices of devotion; I have contact with friends who I can pray for, or who will pray for me; and I have access to a wealth of resources, audio, video, text, many of which are profoundly meaningful for stages in my journey so far. I am not sure I can explain all that in a one-line caption, and so I am not sure whether a smart phone is the right object. The Bible still says something clearly and powerfully, something that does matter to me profoundly. I will probably take several things with me...

Read More

Thinking about social media

I’ve been a bit slow in blogging here, over the past few weeks, but I have been writing things elsewhere, particularly in the area of churches and social media. If you’ve not seen them, and are interested, I have three pieces on the Baptist Times website about this: What is ‘social media’? The future of social media A theology of social media I also did a video interview with the American site Ethics Daily on a similar...

Read More
get facebook like button