I’m a fan of PBS’s Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly – this week they had a really thoughtful interview exploring sin and repentance – well worth watching (or reading). Here’s the link.

I’m a big fan of the Internet Archive – it’s where we store the interviews for the Indie Voices Archive, it is also where I store my other vids too. The Internet Archive is great for another reason – there are loads of 19th and early 20th century theology resources there, available free to all.

Recently, one of the contributing Canadian libraries, has been posting Migne’s Patrilogia Grecae (there are some from the Latin series too). Google made some of these available earlier in the year, but the files were often corrupt, empty, or incomplete – not much use when you’re looking for a text.

For those unfamiliar with PG – and its author; Migne was a french priest known as “God’s Publisher” he collected Greek and Latin texts, organised them and published them. The man was a bit of a phenomenon. There was a rather interesting bio of him published a few years ago, sadly I can’t find it any longer. All the texts are printed int two column format in Greek and Latin, with notes. I believe there were 160 some odd volumes in total. Sadly this fantastic patristic and early medieval resource has not been re-produced in a convenient format for modern users.

The 13 volumes currently available on the Internet Archive are scans – you can download the complete PDF or view it online with an easy to use inline reader.

After a few weeks of testing the new system on my personal blog and site; and spending some time thinking about the best method of consolidation and presentation, I’ve finally begun the process of moving the blog, the web pages, and the Indie Voices Archive to its new home. I’m hoping that I’ve given consideration to all the various pieces and parts and that you will see things appearing over the course of the next week or so.

I’ll set up the re-direct from the blogger account today. That appears to need a few days to kick in.

Thanks, everyone for your patience. I’m both excited about the move, and hopeful that it will make this project even more user friendly than before.

. . . Well almost. I’m a few day’s late I know, but the sentiment is there all the same. The liturgical new year began on Monday and, at the time, I did not have immediate access to the net.

New year, new ideas, new experiences . . . renewal generally. Hey, I like it. Regular visitors will know that over the past two weeks we’ve been moving to a new system in an effort to better integrate the various GC web projects including the Indie Voices Archive. Things are progressing nicely, and this might very well be the last post here in Blogger (we’re moving to WordPress). The other, non-blog related web projects will take a bit more time to finalise but there will be some temporary placeholders up shortly.

Switching gears just a bit – I recently revisited one of my favourite little books “Tales of the Magic Monastary”. In it, the monks recieve Bhudda has a guest and in the morning discover that he has unexpectedly left, and scrawled the word “TRIVIA” all over the walls of his cell. The monks are at first incensed at this act of vandalism and rudeness but then they calm down and begin to reflect. They realise that while unorthodox in his method, the Bhudda’s message was spot on – much of what we say and do, and invest with “importance” is trivia. Even more is “filler” – you know the stuff often used in food manufacture that on its own is useless, even tasteless or of little substance, but blend it in with other things and it makes a paltry product look great, taste appealing, and have the effect of filling you up. To use another example – one that in our contemporary age driven by a desire for information and instant access – consider a 24 hour news service like BBC24, or CNN – reflect on what happens during an incident that is in some way newsworthy. After the first 30 seconds when the incident is announced, they then spend a further 5 minutes in the studio struggling to fill in time, they display the film footage on a loop, and wait for a reporter to get on the scene, and repeat everything all over again – it becomes comedy really – two anchors, and a field reporter reflecting “filler” to one another for 5 or ten minutes when that time could have been used for something else – something truly useful, or informative.

Trivia. I’ve been reflecting alot lately on how various monastic communities strive to minimise trivia using various methods (a rule of silence, for example). Trivia interrupts, and distracts. Trivia gives a false sense of enrichment and satisfaction. Then I spent the other day – Monday in fact – thinking about the amount of trivia I generate in a day! It was . . . . embarrassing!

My new years resolution then is to be more conscious of trivia in my own life, and to explore new ways of reducing it, and to see what (if any) positive effects are generated by this experiment.