Thursday links

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.