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Yes, you must be glad you came to read this post today. I had an exceptionally boring lecture, driving me to producing the artwork on the left.

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” - W.B. Yeats

To many people I know I think that lacking conviction would be seen as a great loss, and having passionate intensity as a great virtue.

But I found this quote in Phillip Yancey’s What’s So Amazing About Grace. I read about two chapters standing at the bookstall at church this week, realising why it is so well recomended. It has an idea of Christianity which sounds a lot more like the Jesus the gospels talk about than much of Christian stuff. I think it was about God being good, and being nice to people who don’t expect it. I liked it.

And I liked this quote above. Because it made me feel like I could sit on the ‘best’ side of the fence and be approved of. Because almost all the times when someone is without reserve in their convictions, be they Christian or otherwise, it doesn’t seem great. And I’m pretty wishy-washy.

Enter Smugness stage-left, who sits down on the nice comfy armchair of Righteousness and starts flicking through the Reasons Why Most Other People Are Probably A Bit Less Holy Than Me.

Ooops.

How someone managed to find this, I don’t know (but it was on a unicycle forum)…

A performer on a unicycle in Munich… look at the shadow in the centre of the square around which the crowd has formed.  Also it is a beautiful example of crowd behaviour to see the dense grouping near the marked out performance area and the gradually dispersing crowd further away.

 Also note the circus tent elsewhere in Munich (zoom out and move east from the performer).  Coincidence?

This Sunday we had a visit to our church from Barnabas Fund’s Patrick Sookhdeo, who spoke graphically about violence and discrimination of christians in Iraq, and about the threatening ideology of Islam against christianity.

And I felt rather unneasy, but not for the reasons he wanted.  I am told that he is apparently an academic authority on jihadist ideology, and is a former muslim.  But I still felt like I was not being given an objective and fair picture of either the violent actions or the motivation.

All I can really add is this article from the New York Times about the newly elevated Cardinal of Baghdad, Emmanuel III Delly.  He is a prominent christian leader from Mosul in Iraq, and surely is worth hearing too:

“Christians and Muslims have lived together here for 1,400 years,” Cardinal Delly said in an interview. “We have much in common; in Iraq, the Christian house is next to the Muslim house.”

…

“I am not happy when people ask, ‘How is the situation for Christians?’” he said. “Those who kill don’t kill only Christians. They kill Muslims as well — the situation is the same for both.”

So it’s not that things aren’t terrible, but that it’s surely more complicated than ‘nasty muslims’ attacking ‘nice christians’.

As my regular readers will note, I have got a new blog template… again.

I don’t have much to say today, but I thought I would have to post something to overcome the ‘blank page’ feeling of starting blogging again.

I intend to post about all the little interesting and beautiful things about life in Aberystwyth, which I wish to share with the world.