Always Hope

Twitter users will know that the Twitter interface continuously displays the top 10 trending topics at any moment in time. It's simply a matter of which 10 phrases are most rapidly being adopted by the mass of Twitter users, and is usually dominated by a combination of the current news headlines, what's on telly, and whatever silly word games have been set in motion by minor celebs that day. But on Friday, we were all treated to the sight of "The Lord's Prayer" registering as one of the top 10 UK trends. What prompted this apparent revival? It was Archbishop Rowan, who had opined, in response to a question from BBC Newsround , that he thought it would be quite good if the Lord's Prayer was re-introduced in schools. I wonder what people think about the idea. The loss of the Lord's Prayer from the collective memory of the nation is, or is a symptom of (not sure which), a massive shift in the cultural landscape of this country. I was probably one of the l...

Thanks to Stuart at echurch Blog for drawing attention to Stephen Smith's list of what Twitterers gave up for Lent . Stephen, with techie skills beyond the comprehension of mere mortals, trawled Twitter between March 7 th and 10 th , aggregating all the tweets that referenced "giving up for Lent" and came up with a ranked list (as apparently he does every year). Here's the top 10 (with the number of occurences in brackets): 1. Twitter (4297) 2. Facebook (4060) 3. Chocolate (3185) 4. Swearing (2527) 5. Alcohol (2347)  6. Sex (2093) 7. Soda (1959) 8. Lent (1493) 9. Meat (1352) 10. Fast food (1303) There's serious intent here, but also sarcasm ("religion" also ranks at 14), and humour (147 people went for "lint"). Click on the link to see the top 100, and see what you think. But my reaction to this is more like a bronze age tribesman gazing at the stars and feeling very small. We post things on Twitter and the like and imagine t...

Poor old Tim Ross. The Methodist minister, who had organised the first ever Twitter communion service, had to back down and cancel it after getting a call from the enforcement arm of the Methodist church. He said that while he "hadn't been absolutely forbidden" to perform the rite, he had been "strongly urged" to do so. (Always Hope notes in passing that the Methodists can now expect a few calls from C of E Bishops, who will be dying to know how to exert that level of control over their clergy). I hadn't really followed this incident, and only looked into it after encountering Tim on Twitter this week. Initially, I had imagined it to be an insubstantial idea, something novel just for the sake of a quick headline, but the fact is that there's nothing particularly controversial about it at all. Essentially, the proposal was to tweet the communion service ( ie . broadcast the liturgy by text-based messages), and then, at the appropriate moment, for particip...