As I am sure you will appreciate these are times of heightened security for ecclesiastical cartoonists. It is likely that my every move is being watched by a member of Reform hiding in the undergrowth clutching a copy of Two Ways to Live and reporting back at regular intervals to a coalition of interested parties gathered in a secret underground nerve centre / bunker sort of area. I imagine this includes people like the Church Society, Evangelicals Now, etc etc, but no-one can really be sure.

With this in mind I am being deliberately vague.

Today I may or may not have been packing to go on a holiday which I may or may not go on on a day that may or may not be tomorrow. I therefore may or may not be posting on this blog for a while. Comments may or may not be set to the ‘moderated’ setting.

I may or may not add updates using Twitter. Please note that my Twitter additions will not show up in the feed - if you want to you can subscribe to my Twittering via this feed. I wouldn’t really bother though.

Have a good next week or so everyone. See you soon.

Posted by Dave at 12:06 am on July 27, 2007 and filed under Sundry posts, CartoonChurch progress, Religion.

9 Comments

I’ve been wondering about whether the Greenbelt Festival was going to happen, what with the weather and everything. This has been posted on their website and in the ‘Dispatches’ newsletter:

Thanks for all your calls and emails concerning the flooding in
Gloucestershire and how this might affect Greenbelt. Our site team live and
work out of Cheltenham and we are in daily contact with the Racecourse there
­ which is unaffected by any flooding ­ and Greenbelt will be going ahead as
planned.* We will continue to update you on this situation ­ if it changes ­
via the website and through Dispatches. This is a very busy time of the year
for us, so we’d appreciate it if you didn’t call or email the office about
this issue. Please spread the word. The show will go on!

*This is not to ignore that things are extremely difficult for
Gloucestershire residents at present. Our thoughts are with them.

I have to say that it is the drinking water issue that has been concerning me rather than flooding of the racecourse itself. With so many people having no water to be bringing an extra 20000 people into the area seemed to me not the most helpful thing. But the organisers have obviously thought this through and decided that by the time of the Festival it should not be a problem. Hopefully the situation will have been resolved well before the August bank holiday.

Update: I have learned, by eavesdropping at various doors, that:
1) The drainage at the racecourse is generally very good. Last year there was extreme weather the week before, but most areas had drained very well by the time the festival opened.
2) The festival has been investing in more temporary trekway for the centre course village.
3) The one change that might have to happen is restriction of vehicles onto the campsite areas. So you might have to park in the car parks and carry your camping gear to the campsite.

My advice would be to keep an eye on the Festival website for further informational updates.

Posted by Dave at 11:16 am on July 26, 2007 and filed under Festivals and Exhibitions, Greenbelt, Religion.

13 Comments

The Chancellor of Hereford Cathedral has been in touch to clear up the cartoon confusion.

First of all, the Cathedral did contact the original publisher of the cartoon for permission, but I didn’t get any message about it. These things sometimes happen.

Secondly it should be made clear that the cartoon was used, not as I (jokingly) suggested in my last post as an image perpetuating distortion, prejudice etc, but rather as one ‘challenging us all to see discriminatory injustice cloaked under the guise of theology.‘

Mr Walker’s excellent cartoon is in the exhibition as it satirises the very point with which we want people to engage: that if we distort the humanity of another person we may somehow justify unreasonable, prejudiced behaviour. The position of this contemporary work alongside `old books` is to try to raise the consciousness of people to current distorted images with their consequent current injustices, and not allow a semi-comfortable historical focus which shows the mistakes of those in previous generations but does not encourage us to look at our own attitudes towards those we marginalize. Far from perpetuating such distortion, Mr Walker’s cartoon succinctly captures its presence amongst some of our church leaders today.

Apologies for misleading anyone with my larking around in the previous post.

To be honest the licence fee aspect of it doesn’t really bother me. The Diocese of Hereford has enough to be worrying about at the moment in responding to the terrible flooding situation that that part of the country has been dealing with.

Posted by Dave at 5:25 pm on July 24, 2007 and filed under Church, Cartooning, Religion.

4 Comments

I’ve always found that the word ‘row’ helps to attract visitors to a blog post, hence the title.

One of my cartoons is being used as part of an exhibition in the Hereford Cathedral library. I was unaware of the fact until Simon, of Thinking Anglicans website fame, saw it there and reported the fact to me. I am flattered of course, as I am rarely exhibited, although it might have been nice to have been told.

The exhibition is called Distorted Image, and…

It explores how distorted images throughout history have resulted in prejudice, discrimination and enslavement.

…which is encouraging.

I’d like to apologise now for all of the prejudice, discrimination and enslavement that my work has caused. The cartoon in question, which is in a display case along with several old books including Amazing Grace originals and suchlike, is this one:

Posted by Dave at 11:59 pm on July 22, 2007 and filed under Cartoons, Art, Festivals and Exhibitions, Anglican goings-on, Religion.

34 Comments

I have signed up to Twitter, the service that allows anyone to make their own version of the dullest blog in the world (which, incidentally, will come back. In the fullness of time). All over the world people are sending text-message-length messages to Twitter saying what they are doing. Which is not terribly interesting, but it is a well designed website and an easy to use and free service, so a lot of people use it.

My latest Twitter update appears in the column on the left there. I was thinking that I might use Twitter to update this website over the summer at the times when I am away from the computer. But then again, you have no interest in whether I am drinking a cup of earl grey or looking out of the window at a parked car, so there does not seem much point. Perhaps I should send texts with some other sort of information, such as the current temperature or the colour of camper vans I have spotted.

In any case it is likely that from this point forward until the end of August my blogging will not be daily. There are far too many other things to be doing, like drinking earl grey and looking out of the window at parked cars.

Posted by Dave at 5:32 pm on July 20, 2007 and filed under Sundry posts.

7 Comments

All bloggers like a little bit of recognition. We all did our best to appear terribly humble when talking about the Christian Blog Awards, but secretly we all think that it would be nice to have a few more readers and a few more links and that sort of thing.

This week two ‘top of the blogs’ lists were published in the religion sphere. The 30 Most influential religion blogs by Libby Purves of the Times and the Top 100 Christian blogs by Joe Carter of the Evangelical Outpost. Obviously I have no interest in being included in such lists, but I did have a look - you know - just in case. It would be rude not to notice had one been included, which of course, one wasn’t.

Having established that I wasn’t on the list I became free to decide that these lists are a load of nonsense anyway. The Times one consists mainly of fairly dull ‘religion and politics mixed together’ blogs, whereas Joe’s (as he says himself) consists mainly of those from ‘the conservative wing of evangelicalism and Catholicism’ (and Richard).

Fortunately one of the teachings of the Bible is that ‘the last will be first and the first will be last’. This means that those who have received great acclaim for their blogging on this earth will have a really rubbish place on the blogger’s table at the heavenly banquet - behind a pillar and next to the person who sniffs every eight seconds. Meanwhile those whose names are included in the ‘100 worst Christian bloggers’ list will receive the places of honour.

There may be a prize for the person who posts the most convincing ‘I really don’t care about top blog lists and awards anyway, so there‘ post in the comments.

By the way, the Christian Blog Awards people are now offering a £1000 prize for the best church website. There’s also an award for the best 16-25 year old blogger. I’m still going to suggest they move the emphasis away from self-nomination though.

Posted by Dave at 6:13 pm on July 19, 2007 and filed under Cartoons, Blogging, Religion.

6 Comments

It seems like it is a little while since I had a go at ‘Reform’, so I think I’ll do so again today. Reform, if you remember, are the Anglicans who don’t like women or gay people leading things. One of their members has got into a bit of a kerfuffle locally here in the Diocese of Chelmsford by agreeing to be ordained by the Bishop but not agreeing to receive communion from him because of the Bishop’s views on gay people. In the event he was not ordained - the story is here, a statement by the Vicar of his parish is here, and a parish magazine article ‘Why I wrote to the Bishop asking for another Bishop’ is here.

The cartoon was inspired by this rather splendid line from the letter of protest written to the Bishop:

we will not go along with the extra and non-essential aspects of the day

In addition there were plans for a scruffy dress protest “I shall not robe up” and a ‘non-co-operation in photographs’ protest, “Richard will respectfully decline to be photographed with you if asked“, which I assume meant that silly faces were to be pulled if any covert attempts were made by the diocesan photographers.

If you ask me (and many wouldn’t) they are just trying to be difficult. If they had a real problem with the Bishop they wouldn’t attend the ordination at all.

I quite like the idea of creative protests though. If anyone else has suggestions for minor ways to protest in church without causing too much of a fuss then please leave them in the comments.

Feel free to use this cartoon on your own blog with a link back here.

Posted by Dave at 1:48 pm on July 18, 2007 and filed under Cartoons, Church, Anglican goings-on, Religion.

39 Comments

I’ve removed my post about the M25 motorcycle ride in the light of this sad news.

Posted by Dave at 3:54 pm on July 17, 2007 and filed under Sundry posts, Religion.

6 Comments

The Church of England Newspaper website has suddenly turned rather splendidly bizarre. They have started to use the ‘adbrite’ advertising system with some gloriously inappropriate messages that pop up when you roll your mouse over certain words. I fund the one above quite pleasing - I had not heard that there is a demand for ’saber tooth cat skulls’ amongst Evangelical Anglicans, but perhaps someone reading knows better.

It really is quite baffling - even some of the menu items at the top have these irritating rollovers added, making the site immensely annoying to use. None of the adverts have anything at all to do with any of the words they pop up from.

Perhaps there is more money to be made from peddling loans and remortgages online that there is from reporting Anglican news from an Evangelical perspective. Who would have thought it?

Posted by Dave at 9:40 am on July 17, 2007 and filed under Anglican goings-on, Religion.

9 Comments

Posted by Dave at 11:58 pm on July 15, 2007 and filed under Cartoons.

3 Comments

Posted by Dave at 11:23 pm on July 14, 2007 and filed under Sundry posts.

4 Comments

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Dave at 11:10 pm on July 13, 2007 and filed under Photographs.

8 Comments