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Welcome to enCompass for May 2011. There's a lot going on this edition, so enjoy the read.
Welcome Paul Henderson
We're thrilled to welcome Paul Henderson to the Compass staff team. He has been a regular speaker since the first Compass conference in 2004 and will be well known to many of you. He can be contacted at our Australian office in Queensland or at paul.henderson@compass.org.au Back to top^
Upcoming EventsWhy should we read the Old Testament, and how? (Auckland)
An evening with Professor Iain Provan, hosted by Compass Foundation and Regent College. Why read the Old Testament? What relevance could this old collection of books have for us today? And how should we read it? How do we approach this text from a very different time and culture? Iain will be exploring these questions, drawing on his many years of teaching, study and wrestling with these ancient texts. He will give special attention to the book of Jonah as an example of why we should read the Old Testament and how we should do it.
When: Monday 4 July, 7pm to 9pm
Tasmanian Schools ConferenceFollowing on from the recent Compass Schools Conference in Perth, David Yates, Paul Henderson and Andrew Shamy are in Tasmania this week speaking to Year 12 students. They will be challenging and inspiring the students to look at the Gospel with a fresh perspective. Compass alumni in Tasmania are welcome to join them Thursday night (tonight) for a catch up. Contact Salli on 07 5518 8839 or email salli.taylor@compass.org.au
Conversation events
Christchurch (Tonight, Thursday 5 May)
Brisbane (Friday 6 May)
Sydney planning (Friday 6 May)
The Insect and the Buffalo now available on Kindle
Particularly for those of you outside Australasia, or those who really enjoy reading things electronically, The Insect and the Buffalo is now available on Amazon's Kindle store as an eBook. Or if you prefer the paper version, you can still order these at: Back to top^
Seeing the Sacred
The sacred is sometimes hard to see these days. To find it you have to look in the sad corners of life, in dusty traditions, and only very, very occasionally, where there are crowds. It comes dressed in tears, in silence, in duty and in selfless reverence, and we think it old fashioned, meaningless or uncomfortable. Sacredness has been in the news a lot lately, if not always by that name. Tens of thousands gathered at the Christchurch memorial service. Crowds at ANZAC dawn services get bigger every year despite the cold and dark. City councilors have been debating whether they need to pray at the start of meetings. Even a mass-murderer’s body is treated with respect by his enemies. In a secular society, what role does sacredness have? Cynics might say that in many cases it is merely a combination of savvy PR and fond but empty tradition. But the sacred is vital to any society. It delineates meaning. Sacredness marks that which has intrinsic worth. It reminds us that we are not the arbiters of all value. Sacred is not about market value, entertainment value, PR value, sentimental value, or how many ‘likes’ something gets. Sacredness is independent of the people who recognize it. It reminds politicians that they are not the highest authority. It reminds citizens that their peaceful lives are the result of generations of sacrifice. It reminds consumers that their desires and purchasing decisions are not the final word. Even untended graves and empty naves, unrecognized, are sacred. For Christians the sacred is a tension. When we mark dates in our calendars, or draw lines on the floors of our buildings (even our church buildings), and say this time or this place is sacred – too often, we mean to say that nothing else is. The other days and spaces are for us. The sacred is treated as a way to keep meaning – to keep God – contained. Yet when we do see the elusive sacred in a thing or a place or an action, or a person, we must treasure it. It reminds us that the claim of the Gospel is that everything is now sacred. All ground now lies under God’s burning bush. Our tension is to affirm that the sacred exists and that it exists in places that we might not have expected or chosen. This is a difficult task because we do live in a world where other ‘values’ (market value, PR value, etc) are pervasive throughout culture. It is a Gospel task because we know that we walk barefoot after a God who is making all things new. Roshan Allpress
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Book Review: Planet Narnia
When you love something like C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series as a child, reading a book about it as an adult is a bit risky – it tends to douse the magic. Planet Narnia is a rare find for lovers of Lewis’ fiction in that it has the opposite effect. Michael Ward unpacks just how brilliant Lewis was, showing how each of the seven books was themed around one of the planetary bodies of Medieval cosmology. Modern readers who are unfamiliar with the imagery and assumptions of the worldview that was dominant in Europe in an older age have tended to miss this aspect of Lewis’ writing, instead trying to read the stories through a twentieth-century lens, and coming up with all sorts of anomalous readings. Ward’s theory is that even the most apparently random details, such as the appearance of Father Christmas in The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe, the naming of The Dawn Treader, or the terrible poetry of Calormen in The horse and his boy, are in fact carefully coordinated features that feed into the coherence of Lewis’ vision. Ward even has to create a word (technically he ends up borrowing one from Lewis) to describe the kind of effect that Lewis was going for. Donegality describes the atmosphere, “the spiritual essence or quiddity of a work of art as intended by the artist and inhabited unconsciously by the reader.” (p75) If you’ve ever loved Narnia, then Planet Narnia will breathe new life into the stories for you. By exposing the donegality of each of the seven books in order, and exploring the Ransom Trilogy at the same time, Michael Ward has unlocked a whole world of imagination, and shown how Lewis infused the Gospel into everything he wrote. Roshan Allpress See also, "The Discarded Image" by C.S. Lewis Back to top^
Compass Calendar: May
May’s Calendar is all about the time of the Kings and the spiritual discipline of celebration. If the Exodus is the great event at the start of Israel's story, then the peak of the narrative is the Kingdom of David and Solomon. After the false start under King Saul, here was a nation that looked like it was living in the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham. The King ruled over a united Israel from his capital in Jerusalem. The land was fertile, and the surrounding nations came in peace to Jerusalem to learn from and participate in the blessed life. Practicing celebration might seem strange in a world where partying is a lifestyle. Yet, by celebration, we mean something more than hedonism, something that relates to gratitude, joy, and response to a world full of beauty and goodness. Back to top^
Latest blog postsThe top conversation in the past month in our blog is Rob Bell's latest (and controversial) book, Love Wins. See part 1, part 2 and part 3 of a review of the book by Andrew Shamy.
Other recent posts include:
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