You can purchase Walking the Emmaus Journey from the following booksellers:
Living Word Book Centre and Distribution
52 Collingwood Street, Hamilton
07 839 5707
University Book Shop, Otago
378 Great King Street, Dunedin North
03 477 6976
www.unibooks.co.nz
Marsden Books.
159 Karori Road, Karori Road, Wellington
04 476 8066
It’s Thanksgiving time in the United States. It’s the time for writing up those lists of things we can be thankful for, even if it’s only that we lost our car keys fewer times this year than we did last year.
It’s also the beginning of the ‘list’ season in general. You know the ones. Lists of famous people who died this year. Lists of the ten worst Christmas carols you’ve ever heard. Lists of the best Santa impersonators. Lists of the number of New Years’ resolutions we never quite kept.
Well foreignpolicy.com has given us some reasons to be thankful (so they say). You can read their five reasons to be thankful here. Not sure I’d agree with all of then, not least that their reasons to be thankful are the absence rather than presence of something. But maybe that’s the best they could come up with?
At a wedding recently, a friend of mine came up to my girlfriend, whom he had never met, and said ‘I’ve seen you on Facebook!’ This same friend discovered other people at the wedding he went on to refer to as ‘my Facebook friends’.
At last count, I have something like 240 Facebook friends (if you don’t believe me, visit my page, invite yourself to be my friend and become Number 241). If I invited them all over for a dinner party, well, there wouldn’t quite be enough room, or sausage rolls, or wine glasses. But frankly, and with all respect to my Facebook friends, I wouldn’t want to invite them all around for a dinner party. Most of them I knew ten years ago and we’ve lost touch and somehow found each other in that big cyber-world out there.
So, when I came across this quite brilliant article by Time columnist Joel Stein I was, as the Queen wouldn’t say, quite amused.
It’s not often you find the words ‘Asian’ and ‘theologian’ in the same sentence, at least not in this part of the world.
But this is the way that theology should go: embracing theologians that are not white men and Professors. There are some great female theologians emerging - Kathryn Tanner springs to mind. But they are still largely trans-Atlantic or European.
So when you come across a good theologian like Ajith Fernando, who I heard and met in person last year in Kuala Lumpur, then he is worth reading. You can do so here
Somebody asked me the other day what my “Personal Brand†was. I had no idea what they were talking about.
After some investigation it, this was their response:
Personal Branding is where the participants will consider how to best represent themselves in a way that is authentic and honest, whilst also ensuring that their goals and passions in life are known/assisted by the people they meet.
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We would like to give the participants some examples of how other people have made their decisions about personal brand (or image or reputation). Accordingly we would be grateful if you could answer the following questions:
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1.      During your working life have you made a conscious decision to portray yourself in a way that you thought would be most beneficial to you? Can you tell us a little about this?
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2.      Did you decide to make Asia part of your personal brand? What was your thinking around that decision?
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Put Personal Branding alongside Facebook and you get an interesting phenomenon that, once upon a time, we would have called narcissism.
Facebook brands us according to how many friends they have, how many ‘pokes’ we have, how many photos we have, how many times we’ve been bitten by a vampire or a zombie, and how often we update our ‘status’ and let our friends, family and others who probably don’t care all that much, that we’re eating a sandwich, or we’re tired, or we’re glad it’s Friday.
It’s like sharing our inner monologue on a large billboard so everyone can read it. It is also, perhaps, a way of trying to find meaning in a life where we need other people to listen and legitimate what we’re doing or thinking. It’s about personal branding: who I am or, more accurately, who I want you to see me to be.
This is the best in self-absorption. No sense of community here – and having 200 friends does not a community make. No sense, either, that our “personal brand†does not come either from within us or from those around us. For those of us who are Christ-followers, we say, assert and believe that our personal brand is through being created and loved by God. There is no alternative. There are things that look like good alternatives, but they’re merely illusions, facades, or a mirage in the desert.
As that great theologian Augustine put it, our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.
Watch an interview with me on TVNZ’s 6pm One News bulletin from Saturday 10 November, talking about New Zealanders’ perceptions of Asia, at http://tvnz.co.nz/view/video_popup_windows_skin/1440762 and read the text of the item at http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/1440425
Stanley Fish is a regular contributor to the New York Times. Today, he has written a piece profiling some new books that examine suffering and the existence of God - one book from a thiest who became an athiest, and the other book from someone who took the opposite journey. These two authors follow a long line of writers who have sought to grapple with the problem of suffering - theodicy. You can read Fish’s article here
Read more about me, and the work I do, in Asia:NZ’s quarterly Review magazine at
http://www.asianz.org.nz/files/SpringREVIEW2007.pdf (pp.9-10)
