Projects

This handbook is intended as an introduction for people who have no background in Christianity but want to understand more about it. It does not promote a particular form of Christianity but outlines the various past and present forms and their distinctive characteristics, as well as providing an overview of what most Christians in most times and places share in common. It attempts to include non-Western and non-European Christianity as much as possible. (more...)

Contemporary Rituals and Ceremonies: A Handbook for Intelligent Beginners

This handbook sets out to provide answers to the five basic questions, first more theoretically and then more practically.

Creating Computer Applications: A Handbook for Intelligent Beginners

Whether you have a need for a computer application for your work or hobby but can't find exactly what you want, or you want to learn to program for fun or as a useful extra skill in your work, this book will quickly teach you the techniques and the way of thinking that professional programmers use to make reliable, usable applications.

Creating Computer Applications is an introduction for the non-programmer that builds key skills and knowledge applicable to creating practically any computer application. It uses the free, simple and increasingly popular Python programming language (available for Windows, Mac or Linux) to teach the basics of designing and constructing usable applications, using free software on any reasonably recent computer. (more...)

Fresh Ancient Sacred: A reopening of texts

The goal of Fresh Ancient Sacred is to take ancient sacred texts and, by re-presenting them as poetry, reopen their richness, allusiveness and multiple meanings which may have been closed down by the way they have been treated as logical, doctrinal statements with a single, knowable interpretation. It is to remind us that these texts are (in the Zen metaphor) a finger pointing at the moon; that they are about things which can't be tied down to one form of words, or indeed to words at all. The words can only point, and if we obsess about the thing pointing we miss the thing pointed to. (more...)

Handbooks for Intelligent Beginners

Handbooks for Intelligent Beginners is a series of books for people who are not lacking in intelligence, but realise that they are lacking in knowledge and understanding of particular areas of human culture (broadly defined). They are not aimed at would-be professional practitioners but at interested laypeople who want to increase their cultural literacy beyond the often narrow bounds of a specialised education. However, there is an emphasis on developing basic skills, not just academic knowledge. (more...)

Latin: Language of European Culture

This title concentrates on Latin not in its first incarnation, as the language of classical Rome, but in its much longer-lasting second incarnation as the common language of European intellectual culture over a period of more than 1000 years.

The usual approach to teaching medieval Latin is to teach classical Latin first. In grammatical terms, this is like having to get a motorcycle license in order to ride a bicycle. (more...)

Manukau Moods and Moments

My house looks out over the Manukau Harbour in Auckland, New Zealand. Whenever I notice an interesting combination of light, cloud and water out the window, I step outside and take a photograph. These are a selection. (more...)

The Base Game Set

The Base Game Set is a set of simple elements that practically anyone who enjoys games will already own, and which can be easily bought for minimal amounts of money if you don't. It can be used to create your own board-and-card games, or play the ones listed here.

The Base Game Set was inspired by two very fine ideas: Cheapass Games, which create games using "generic small parts" rather than selling you a complicated and expensive set with pawns, dice, money etc. (more...)

The Heritage Resurrection Project

The Heritage Resurrection Project aims to restore interesting texts which are out of print and out of copyright to public circulation. It does this in three ways:

"Out of print" means that the text in question can't currently be bought new; "out of copyright" means that it is in the public domain, i. (more...)

Unsystematic Theology

Unsystematic Theology is an attempt to open up the definition of theology to be something broader than the Graeco-Roman philosophical approach practiced by the European tradition (since the 18th century, virtually as the sole approach). To this end, rather than using analytical prose to "close down" the meanings of sacred texts to a single, completely correct interpretation, Unsystematic Theology responds to the texts artistically, reflectively and mystically, allowing their meanings to "open up". It is a commentary of a new kind - and yet, not really new, because there have always been artistic and reflective responses to these texts. (more...)

What I Have Learned

What I Have Learned takes the unusual step of setting out useful learnings from philosophies, religions and worldviews which I do not (currently) hold or practice, but have found interesting, including Catholicism, Evangelical Protestantism, Liberal Protestantism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Wicca, Neopaganism, New Age, Western Occultism, Freudianism, Jungianism, classical, medieval and modernist philosophies.

The intent is to have a brief, and hence inevitably superficial, explanation of the main features of the viewpoint as I understand it, and then an exploration of what it has taught me. It is a personal view and is not intended to be "objective", but it may have some resonance for others who, like me, grew up in the West during the last third of the 20th century. (more...)