Sheltered from a crisis

These figures on the food crisis are quite incredible. The price of wheat has risen 130% since March last year. The increase in the price of rice has had huge effects worldwide.

Some of the effects to be caused by the crisis include a new craze for eating spaghetti in Liberia, families in Bangladesh surviving on one meal a day, 100 million extra families plunged into poverty, and food riots in Haiti, Cameroon, Indonesia and Egypt.

Read the BBC's Q&A on the crisis.

If ever there was a good reason to become a vegetarian, this is one.

How fixed is the script?

I was interested to read Ben Witherington's view on God's 'script' and the significance of human decisions.

"Whilst, God could have done otherwise, he has chosen to allow us to be viable partners with God in ministry and the working out of his will and Kingdom on earth, beings capable of making un-predetermined choices that have incredible consequences. The issue is not the sovereignty of God - the issue is how God has chosen to exercise his power and will. And what the Bible says about this is that he has not pre-determined all things from before the foundations of the world.

Human history is not merely a preordained play, played out perfectly to a pre-ordained script. On the contrary while there is a blue-print, or a general script, God has allowed, indeed invited us to make the drama like a night at the Improv, improvising our roles as we go, and making viable choices of moment and consequence along the way. Are we supposed to follow the general instructions in the script? Well yes, as they provide the boundaries beyond which we ought not to go and show us what character and kind of roles we should play. But of course we may fail to play our parts well, or indeed at all."

I absolutely agree. Saying that God always gets his way makes no sense of Jesus' instructions on prayer, in particular the Lord's prayer:
"Let your kingdom come, your will be done..."

Another interesting link I came across on Ben's blog is a 'blogalogue' between Bart Ehrman and N. T. Wright on the problem of suffering. Ehrman has just published a book called 'God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer'. NT Wright is as eloquent and graceful in his replies as ever. I always find him refreshing on this subject as he takes the existence of evil seriously and isn't content to attribute all suffering in the world to human choices.

"...the Gospels constituted, and still constitute, a challenge to all expectations, particularly in that they link – as readers for hundreds have years have found it difficult to do – the story of Jesus’ kingdom-inauguration with the story of his crucifixion and resurrection. Somehow, they are saying, this is what it looks like when the good, all-powerful and all-loving God is in charge of the world. You may say that if this is what they’re saying then the God of whom they speak is not ‘all-powerful’ in the way we might have imagined, and I suspect that is in a sense correct. Near the heart of Jesus’ proclamation lies a striking redefinition of power itself, which looks as though it’s pointing in the direction of God’s ‘running of the world’ (if that’s the right phrase) in what you might call a deliberately, almost studiedly, self-abnegating way, running the world through an obedient, and ultimately suffering, human being, with that obedience, and especially that suffering, somehow instrumental in the whole process. What ‘we would want God to do’ – to have God measure up to our standards of ‘how a proper, good and powerful God would be running the world’! – seems to be the very thing that Jesus was calling into question.

The mystery of Jesus himself, then, is for me near the heart of – not ‘the answer’, because I don’t think there is such a thing as ‘the answer’, but – the matrix of thought and life within which God’s people are called to continue to grapple with the problem. This is where, in Evil and the Justice of God, I try to draw together traditional discussions of ‘the atonement’ and traditional discussions of ‘the problem of evil’ and suggest that it’s odd that they should ever have been separated, since they seem to go together so closely in the Bible itself. (And can’t be reduced, I suggest, to the ‘God punishes sin’ logic; I have tended to include some elements of that within the Christus Victor motif, which, yes, involves suprahuman cosmic powers and all that. Hard though they are to describe adequately, they are even harder, in my view, to ignore.)"

Clip clip and away

How did I survive so long without an MP3 player? I've wanted one for years, but just kept putting off the crucial decision. Now, finally, I have my very own shiny red, matchbook-size 2GB player and I'm quite addicted to its charms.

The player that's captured my heart is the Sansa Clip 2GB with Radio - the red version, of course!

After first being drawn to its shiny red gorgeousness and miniature proportions and then charmed by its helpful little screen and friendliness to others (computers and software alike), you could now say I'm looking forward to a comfortable, committed future together...

It has a fantastic inbuilt clip - thus the name - which has proven really useful at the gym, the good sense to keep your place in an audio book even when you switch over to listen to something else, a radio, sensible controls, easy volume adjustment and it sounds great!

[advert over] :-)

I've also rediscovered audio books. Not a cheap option compared to a book, but what a treat! I signed up to Audible for a couple of months and this may be a new addiction! I listened to The Hobbit (unabridged) first - all 12 or so hours of it. Absolutely brilliant! For days you couldn't get much sense out of me at all, it was all 'What has he got in his pocketsess?' and 'the eagles! the eagles!'

My second find, and another treasure, has been Tim Butcher's Blood River, read by the author. In 2004 Tim, a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, made his way alone across one of the most dangerous countries in the world, the Congo, inspired to follow the route of the famous explorer HM Stanley. This is his account of the adventure, the people he met and the history of this apparently doomed country. Obsessed, yes; crazy, probably. Yet this is a fantastic tale and a deeply provoking and affecting account of the present-day Congo and the forces which have shaped it and continue to do so. Thoroughly recommended.

No Lions...

I really enjoyed this story in the Guardian about the Maasai Warriors running in the London Marathon and their thoughts on England.

We heard about showers before, in a briefing about the country. It said be careful - when the shower is hot it is really hot, and when cold, really cold. This is true.

The Telegraph also has some great quotes from the guide to England they were given.