Luminous Darkness

Mark Harris has a very thoughtful post commenting on the fact that the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq has today reached 2,804 which is more than the 2,801 people killed in the towers on September 11, 2001. He says:

These numbers mean nothing by themselves. The numbing and stunning death of so many on that one day, and the death of the firefighters who tried to save them, stands as a single terrible event. The slow agonizing trickle of news of deaths in Iraq has taken years. Yet for everyone who knew of someone who died in New York that day, there are equally people who know of someone who has died in Iraq. The news is devastating either way.

I encourage you to read his full reflection at Preludium.

With Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.0 being released in close proximity, I have been doing a bit of research. This is partly because I am now using a Windows machine for the first time in years, since that is what is provided by my new job. A few interesting articles have been published online comparing the new browsers. The author of this article on Playfuls. com makes a particularly sideways compliment to Microsoft:

I should begin my demonstration by paradoxically thanking IE and MS. It is IE’s flaws, bugs, exploits and lack of attractiveness that have triggered the revolution called FireFox. So thank you Microsoft for giving us FireFox!

Much of the discussion has reminded us that it seems strange that Microsoft has taken so long to update Internet Explorer, and thus browsers such as Firefox (and Safari for Macs as well as a number of smaller competitors) have slowly but surely been digging away at Explorer’s market share.

The conclusion that many seem to have reached in their testing of the new versions of these top browsers is echoed by Walter Mossberg, who writes about technology for the Wall Street Journal, in this article on HeraldNet:

The new Internet Explorer is a solid upgrade, but it’s disappointing that after five years, the best Microsoft could do was to mostly catch up to smaller competitors.

As for me, one of the first things I did on my new Windows PC was to install Firefox, and I haven’t looked back to Internet Explorer since!

One of the points that I am going to make in my eventually to be published article about an Anglican covenant (which came out of my M.Phil. dissertation at Cambridge) is that the term ‘Anglican Church’ is one with which we are not familiar. In fact, it is particularly important that we remember that a ‘church’ is not the same as our ‘communion’. As Anglicans around the world, we may disagree with exactly what a ‘communion’ is, but I hope that we can agree that it is not a ‘church’. The Anglican Communion is made up of churches, but it is definitely not a church itself. It is part of the ‘Church’ — that body of all faithful Christians living and dead (the great cloud of witnesses), but each national church maintains its own integrity. This is what we bring to the Christian world — an understanding of the particular relationship between our provinces — something of real value to the rest of the Christian tradition and we need to remember that.

What brought on this little comment on was this article from Reuters about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent trip to China, where he is referred to as the ‘head of the world’s Anglican church’. (I suppose there is a whole other article to be written dealing with the ‘head’ part rather than the ‘church’ part, but I’ll leave that for another time.)

I’ve read several things by Richard Dawkins, the well-known British atheist scientist, and had heard about his new book, The God Delusion last week on The Colbert Report. I’ve never been particularly impressed by his arguments, but hadn’t been able to fully articulate why until I saw this article in the Church Times (pointed out by the daily episcopalian). The author, Giles Fraser, notes that

The root of the problem is that too many modern atheists adopt a position that is a photographic negative of a sort of Christianity believed only by the most conservative. God is X, says the modern atheist, giving a short definition that allegedly captures what all believers believe. This means that the God they reject doesn’t look anything like the God that most of us meet in our prayers.

This encapsulates pretty closely the way that I feel about Dawkins and his compatriots. There are any number of my atheist friends over the years with whom I have discussed my Christian faith at great length and in significant intellectual depth. I have never seen this kind of real understanding of the issues from Dawkins.

Thanks to One Thing I Know, I was led to an article about church shopping in the evangelical Christian community: iChurch: All We Like Sheep. The author makes a number of interesting points about how following a Christian lifestyle in the United States has become in many ways synonymous with the consumerist culture that we have here. He points out that Christianity for many has become simply another product that we buy in order to continue on our journey of making ourselves happy and fulfilled:

Approaching Christianity as a brand (rather than a worldview) explains why the majority of people who identify themselves as born-again Christians live no differently than other Americans. According to George Barna, most churchgoers have not adopted a biblical worldview, they have simply added a Jesus fish to the bumper of their unregenerate consumer identities. As Mark Riddle observes, “Conversion in the U.S. seems to mean we’ve exchanged some of our shopping at Wal-Mart, Blockbuster, and Borders for the Christian bookstore down the street. We’ve taken our lack of purchasing control to God’s store, where we buy our office supplies in Jesus’ name.

He rightly goes on to point out that:

Consumers demand options, but this poses a problem. Formation into the likeness of Christ is not accomplished by always getting what we want.

For me, as a member of a so-called ‘mainline’ denomination and not an independent church, this is important in the way that I have to commit to going to the church of my denomination which happens to be geographically near me. Although as Episcopalians we do not quite have the cannonical parish structure of the Roman Catholic church, unless one lives in a city, there is usually not a whole lot of choice about what church to go to if ones considers onself to be a member of that specific denomination. This means that I have to make that choice to commit to something greater than simply a local expression of the church.

This, in turn, is one of the reasons why I value our worldwide Anglican Communion. Despite the problems inherent in being in relationship with people across the world who differ from my views about Christianity, we are still members together in somethin greater than any of our own local expressions of it. That is what the Church (big ‘C’) is all about — being part of that community of belivers who follow Jesus and serve him together in community. The community is both local and global, and I believe that we throw that off to our long-term peril.