Daydream Lab
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“Early Christians transformed the world by thinking different and living different, not by complaining about everybody else’s morals.”

—Alan Wilson

“‘You are destroying yourself,’ he cried. ‘You have the inclination to be alone and to dream and you are afraid of dreams. You want to be like others in town here. You hear them talk and you try to imitate them.’”

—Sherwood Anderson

“On earth we are wayfarers, always on the go. This means that we have to keep on moving forward. Therefore be always unhappy about what you are if you want to reach what you are not.”

—St. Augustine

“In the third month they began to pile up the heaps, and finished them in the seventh month.”

—2 Chronicles 31:7 (ESV)

“There would so much less laughter in the world if evil people stopped talking.”

—MadPriest

“Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry…”

—Ecclesiastes 8:15

“Did they teach you how to question when you were at the school? Did the factory help you grow? were you the maker or the tool?”

—Ewan MacColl

“Happiness happens when you are not thinking about it, when you are inhabiting your body comfortably…when you feel at peace with yourself and the world. When we live overprotective, overstimulated lives we expect more all the time, we find it hard to be unself-conscious and just do what we do; we overanalyse.”

—Rowan Williams

“You can never win a war against terror as long as there are conditions in the world that make people desperate—poverty, disease, ignorance, et cetera….I think people are beginning to realize that you can’t have pockets of prosperity in one part of the world and huge deserts of poverty and deprivation and think that you can have a stable and secure world.”

—Desmond Tutu

“The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.”

—Edward Abbey
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“Once, when I lectured at the University of California at Fullerton, a student asked me for a short, simple definition of reality. I thought it over and answered, ‘Reality is that which when you stop believing in it doesn’t go away.’”

—Philip K. Dick,

in Valis

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Authoritative biblical examples (5 February 2008)

The Right Rev James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool, has apologized for his opposition to the appointment of Jeffery John, a gay priest, as bishop of Reading, and argued that the Bible contains “authoritative biblical examples of love between two people of the same gender most notably in the relationship of Jesus and his beloved [John] and David and Jonathan” in his new book, A Fallible Church.

Black Iron Prison

A friend recommended Philip K. Dick’s Valis to me, and I’ve been reading it sporadically the last couple of weeks. Today, I came across this:

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Web 2.0 as a tangle of hidden agendas (23 January 2008)

Who Is Grady Harp?

“To apply a decent standard to the ordinary run of novels is like weighing a flea on a spring-balance intended for elephants.”

—George Orwell,

“In Defence of the Novel”

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"Where was your Church before Luther?" (9 August 2007)

“Naphy offers a tidy survey of this extraordinary historical process. He begins with the first stirrings of religious revolt in Wittenberg, Zurich and Geneva, traces how idiosyncratic versions of Protestantism emerged in the nations of both western and eastern Europe, and shows how the Protestant vision was transplanted across the Atlantic to New England. Next we see the efforts to revitalise and reform Protestantism during the 18th century (Methodism, the Great Awakening in colonial America, pietism in Germany and so on), while the later chapters sketch the blossoming of a more socially engaged Protestant sensibility: engagement with the cause of abolitionism, the social gospel movement, and so forth. A final section offers an overview of the tensions that defined Protestantism during the 20th century: attitudes towards modern science, racial segregation and biblical interpretation.”

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Have a Nice Doomsday (19 July 2007)

A tour of the American apocalypse industry.

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Gleefully gory and gripping. (6 July 2007)

Empire of Blue Water: Henry Morgan and the Pirates Who Ruled the Caribbean Waves

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Jesus doesn’t have any family values (14 June 2007)

“Jesus challenges people’s concepts of the ‘traditional family’ just as much as he provides coherence,” according to Deirdre Good.