I have a surplus of good links clogging up my system. Here are a selection, Christmas-related and otherwise:

Here’s a good use for a disused church, though I suspect it would work in a used one. Si Smith: the walk-through advent calendar

25 little stations, each of which looks at one character or place or item from the christmas story (mary, joseph, the magi, bethlehem, the gifts, the star etc etc…) and a cafe serving festive foodstuffs. folk volunteer in advance to create the stations, and when it’s all up and running, you go round and ‘do’ the stations like you’d open the doors on an advent calendar, exploring the advent/christmas story in the process.

Should have posted this weeks ago: rejesus blog » Generating Christmas Kindness

This Christmas rejesus has a mission for you. How much kindness can you generate with a budget of less than £10. If you think really creatively how far could your act of kindness spread? Follow the instructions below and tell us about what happened in the comments section.

The Recusant Rector returns, but this time with podcasts.

For three hundred and fifty years the Church of England has been haunted by a pattern of parochial ministry, based upon a fantasy and untenable for more than a hundred of those years. The pattern, coming from a romantic and wrong-headed false memory of the life and ministry of George Herbert, finally died on the South Bank of the Thames in the mid 1960s… and nobody noticed.

Joe from Freedom Clothing has been doing a little series ‘Things I Relearnt This Advent’. This from No 8 – the Middle Class Jesus:

We have this perception of antiseptic stables, clean birthing chambers, obedient animals. Yet is it possible we have erected a false god to please our middle class christian sentiments? In India the animals walk in the street and feed on the garbage. A feeding trough/manger is most likely to be on a street corner as anywhere else. The open sewers and filth is overpowering. People scratch a living, their children playing with the dirt as they have nothing else.

Lastly, Hennell has been blogging Advent cartoons:

Also as I’m now halfway through this, I feel I should link to Dave Walker’s Cartoon Blog which is where I stole the advent cartooning idea from. Unfortunately he didn’t say how time consuming it was.

Posted by Dave at 12:36 pm on December 20, 2007 and filed under Saturday links.

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I know you’ve seen this one before. There is nothing new under the sun. Everything is just like the wheel, but reinvented in different sizes, shapes, colours etc.

Talking of unrelated things, Advent seems to have become the season for bad religious memorabilia. Various websites have gone to the trouble of gathering it together:

The young Anglicans in Canada have The Cavalcade of Bad Nativities.

[Update: It turns out that the above Cavalcade of Bad Nativities was inspired by this earlier Cavalcade of Bad Nativities on GoingJesus. To confuse matters, this latest GoingJesus Cavalcade of Bad Nativities seems to feature some nativities from the aforementioned second Cavalcade of Bad Nativities, which in turn used some nativities from the first Cavalcade of Bad Nativities.]

Dean at the Heal Your Church Website is currently on day 3 of 12 Days of Jesus Junk.

…and of course the people who (probably) started it: Ship of Fools: The 12 Days of Kitschmas.

Talking of Ship of Fools, the pictures from their recent ecclesiastical pub crawl following in the steps of the Bishop of Southwark are on line: It’s what we did – the Southwark Pilgrimage. Mrs W and I went along at the end heavily disguised as ourselves so as not to get into the photographs. I came away with a box of Anglican fudge. Not quite sure how.

Finally, another great article on the Ship: Steve Tomkins – When Santa met Darwin.

I’m filing this under ‘Saturday links’. Future generations need never know that today has been a Monday.

Posted by Dave at 6:19 pm on December 17, 2007 and filed under Advent, Cartoons, Religion, Saturday links.

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I am tired and morale is down 25-30% on the usual levels, so I am just posting links:

The Old Argued Cross
If you’ve enjoyed the posts here about Spring Harvest and UCCF and the like you might enjoy this song by John of Sprowston (posted in the comments below). Very good. Click the link and then click the picture. It is a bit under 2mb.

Noah’s Ark finished
The Dutch version. This is the website of it, mostly meaningless to me as I do not speak the language.

Blogs4God
Blogs4god was the main centre of Christian blogging back in the 2003-2005 sort of time or thereabouts. Dean is getting it going again – this is the story of why it failed and how it will be coming back.

Gospel Procession Video
Raspberry Rabbit of Scotland posted this. I gawped when I saw it. I suspect some of you may gawp too. There will be gawpers everywhere.

Posted by Dave at 10:27 pm on April 30, 2007 and filed under Saturday links.

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Things that I’ve found on the internet over the last week which I haven’t managed an individual blog post about:

Picturedots: Make your own dot to dot puzzles
This looks really fun and will be very useful to somebody. I can’t quite think who at this moment.

A4 PAPER CUT (Found via the Cartoonist)
Sculptures froma sheet of A4 paper.

FlickrBlockrs: Say NO To Online Photos
How to remain anonymous on the internet.

Andertoons Cartoon Blog: Writing Gags
People always ask ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ Cartoonist Mark Anderson guides us through his thought processes.

Raspberry Rabbit: Bringing the orchestra back from the dead
Something a bit more profound from Raspberry Rabbit.

Posted by Dave at 10:39 pm on April 28, 2007 and filed under Saturday links.

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