fishers, surfers and casters

Last week I knelt by my bed and placed my hands together and said, “Dear God, if it’s not too much trouble, please find me new ways to pleasure my partner, get me some cheap Microsoft software, and direct me to a new oil company that I can invest my money in. A herbal medicine that could lengthen my you-know-what would also be appreciated.”

My faith was increased, as was my inbox the very next day. And the next day. And the day after that.

I know it was God who sent me these emails, as they were writeen some divine language that I could not quite decipher, as:

The rose, without which
we could not waste him
no such possible sustainability
pleasure her so

God, I thank you for your trouble. But you can stop sending the emails now.

Right now my podcast feeder is downloading last night’s program of The Spirit of Things (ABC Radio National), which I haven’t listened to yet. The title of the program is Emerging Church: Small Boat Big Sea. Must be a look into the small Manly community. I’ve got some shopping and housework to do, so can’t listen to it now.

Go get it yourself at: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/feeds/sot_20061119.mp3

Update: I’ve just listened to the podcast. It was a breezy sail through SBBS, and offered a thorough and warm illustration of daily life in the community. While the preliminary focus was on community life, it finished with an in-depth interview with Mike Frost about his book, Exiles. I’ve always thought Rachel Kohn (the program presenter and interviewer) to be a little warm to evangelicalism (not that there’s anything wrong with that), at least the Sydney version of it, and her presentation seems at some instances to place the emerging church, and SBBS as an example, against it. But she did it positively and warmly, as always. Good to hear Frost’s passion for social justice come through.

It’s not the first time the emerging church has been discussed on the ABC, and in nearly all stories I’ve heard it’s described as the new church for Gen Y, or X. Or it’s the christianity for post-christians. Are these descriptions fair? If you need to describe the emerging church in a five-second sound-byte then power to it, but there is so much more to it, I think.

Technorati: Emerging church, Spirit of Things, Mike Frost, Small Boat Big Sea.

5 years ago tonight I was ordained into the ministry in the Uniting Church in Australia. This means I have finally graduated from the level of “newbie” to the level of “little dude”.

Being a denomination that has no bishops or monsignors, ordained ministers progress along a system of levels, kinda like the coloured belts in Judo. Each level carries with it no real ministry powers or responsibilities, but there are a few non-financial allowances.

For instance I can now give any newbie a wedgie, so long as there is no minister of higher level in the room.

I am also eligible to sit the exorcist exams, for which I have been practising for a couple of months. I can now, with 95% accuracy, cast out all the chocolate from an unbroken M&M. Cool, huh?

Too much detail to go into all the levels, but the final level is called the black-belt-high-swat, which is rarely awarded to the ordained before retirement. Only the high-swats are allowed to wear goatees or ties with shorts, unless they are full-time high school chaplains.

I just read Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the emerging Internet by Ron Scollon and Suzie Wong Scollon (New York: Routledge, 2004). It was recommended to me by someone on the AoIR list, after I had sent an email asking what people knew about discourse analysis on web pages.

After reading about 150 pages of what was more a research biography than a research methodology, although it was really interesting, I found the most useful stuff way back in the appendix.

I have to say it confused me a lot for a while, and I think it’s because it’s not a book about discourse analysis, or about the Internet. There was a chapter on how the Internet changes how discourses take place, but the example they used was when CMC entered their unviersity in the early-mid 1980s. Hardly the Internet we know today.

It’s more a book about where to place discourse analysis when looking at new media technology and social change. The experiences from which they draw their knowledge are working with indigenous populations in Alaska, which made it a great read, if you weren’t looking for stuff in particular. I found the pictures of shoes and mooses really unhelpful.

But they do posit a theory that new media shape social interactions, and we can study them by identifying a nexus of practice, where three elements meet: the historical body of the participants in the social interaction (i.e. the assumptions, values, experiences, beliefs and motivations that shape their knowledge of their role in the social setting), the interaction order (i.e. the way the relationship is structured in the environment, who’s got authority to do what and say what and stuff), and the discourses in place (i.e. the multitude of messages and texts that are present, and which discourses are made prominent or foreground, compared to those that are in the background).

I took this stuff and applied it the best I could at 2am on a Monday morning to EC blogs. I have a meeting tomorrow morning with my supervisor and I’m sure he’ll ask “what will you do with it?”. Of course, I’ll reply, “Shred it and make a pillow. Sleep and then tape it back together.” Before I shred it, it’s online here if you want something to make a nice cushion out of.

I started reading hoping it would give me a set of tasks, or questions to ask, when starting a discourse analysis. It didn’t give me much of that at all. But it offered me a framework to set the analysis in, which is actually better than what I expected. Still, I need a good book on analysing media texts. I have one in front of me by Andrew Burn and David Parker, called “Analysing Media Texts”. I might give it a try.

Technorati tags: Scollon, nexus analysis.