Confessing Evangelical

Interesting item on Radio 4's "Sunday" this week (Real Audio format), about the centenary of The English Hymnal, which falls on Ascension Day, tomorrow.

The item includes an archive recording of Ralph Vaughan Williams, who (while at that time still virtually unknown as a composer) was approached by the compiler of the English Hymnal, Percy Dearmer, to take responsibility for the musical settings in the hymnal.

Some of the subjects covered in this brief (5 minutes or so) item include:

• Vaughan Williams regarded finding appropriate settings (with appropriate notation, including metronome markings to discourage "rushing" the hymns) as a moral matter as much as a musical one - a question of assisting the congregation to worship God as they sang.


• Some of the controversies surrounding the hymnal, which was regarded by many Church of England bishops as being too "Catholic" (thanks to hymns such as "Thee we adore, O hidden Saviour, thee" and "O glorious Maid, exalted far").


• How Percy Dearmer's Christian Socialist convictions influenced the choice of many hymns, including GK Chesterton's "O God of earth and altar", with its rousing lines:
  

  Our earthly rulers falter,
  Our people drift and die;
  The walls of gold entomb us,
  The swords of scorn divide,
  Take not thy thunder from us,
  But take away our pride.

  (Shades of Timothy Dudley-Smith's hymn "Lord, for the years", with its line about "spirits oppressed by pleasure, wealth and care".)

Percy Dearmer is probably best known as the writer of "He who would valiant be". But let's not hold that against him, even if it is a travesty compared with Bunyan's original. The two can be compared here. However, without Dearmer's bowdlerisation, we wouldn't have that marvellous tune Monk's Gate, which Vaughan Williams wrote for The English Hymnal. Percy, you're forgiven.

As the Internet Monk and Thomas remind us, it's best all round not to take The Da Vinci Code too seriously. But that does raise two questions: why do so many people who have read the book appear to take seriously some of the claims it makes? And are Christians missing the point when they attack a book that is just a trashy airport thriller?

In other words, have both groups made an error that is basically literary in nature: misunderstanding the book, failing to understand it as a work of "genre fiction" and mistaking it for something of greater significance than is intended?

Well, to some extent that's no doubt true. But when we look more closely at the genre to which DVC belongs, I'd suggest that the confusion arising from the book stems from the fact that Dan Brown is breaking the rules of his chosen genre.

The film critic Mark Kermode has argued that many "serious" film critics often completely misunderstand "trashy" films, because they fail to understand the importance of genre. In particular, Kermode makes the interesting suggestion that most genres rely on a "contract" between the film-maker/author and the viewer/reader. So, for example, the "comedy" contract is: "You make me laugh, and then you can do what you want". The "horror" contract is: "You scare me, and then you can do what you want".

The Da Vinci Code presents itself as belonging to a genre that we might call, "educational thriller". This is the genre to which books such as Robert Harris' books (Fatherland, Enigma, Pompeii) belong, as well as books by the likes of Tom Clancy. The father of the genre is probably Frederick Forsyth, whose Day of the Jackal famously included detailed research on how to obtain a forged UK passport, using a loophole that Forsyth insists remains unclosed even today.

The "contract" for the "educational thriller" is: "You give me an exciting pageturner of a read, and make me feel like I'm learning something, and then you can do what you want". Robert Harris' Pompeii is an excellent example: it's a rattling good read, great fun, but you also feel you've learnt something about life in Pompeii in AD76, and about the eruption of Vesuvius.

Of course, this means that you are taking the author on trust: the rules of the genre are that the author does piles and piles of research, and then incorporates that research into the novel in a manner that is interesting and educational, but also serves the plot rather than interrupting it. (Robert Harris is excellent at this, and I recommend any of his books as great holiday reading.)

This then explains the surprising influence of the ideas contained in The Da Vinci Code. People are reading it as an "educational thriller". They are taking Dan Brown's assertions about early church history on trust, as they take Robert Harris' assertions about the history of Bletchley Park on trust, and as they take Tom Clancy's excursions into the technical details of US Navy submarines on trust. And the book itself encourages them to do so, with its introductory note explaining that the Priory of Sion really exists, and that all details of history and architecture in the book are true.

However, Dan Brown is betraying that trust. He is breaking the contract between himself and his audience, transgressing the rules of his chosen genre, and thus betraying his audience's trust. It is not "missing the point" to object to the misrepresentations of Jesus and early church history found in DVC: it is taking the book on its own terms, and in terms of its genre.

Well, it looks like the film version of DVC is proving as big a hit with the film critics as the book was with the literary world. The consensus seems to be it's a dud (sorry, make that a "a dreary, droning, dull-witted adaptation of Dan Brown's religioso detective story" - Rolling Stone. Now there's one for the posters).

This should at least mitigate the film's negative effects: the reviews won't stop it being a huge hit, but if it's a bad film then it is likely to have a fairly short shelf-life. It was at least theoretically possible that the adaptation could have achieved a Godfather-style potboiler-to-masterpiece transformation - though perhaps Ron Howard's involvement made that unlikely.

But it is clear that the book has had a negative effect on people's perception of historic Christianity, as seen in the poll reported in yesterday's Telegraph, which showed that two-thirds of people who had read The Da Vinci Code - as many as six or seven million people in total - believe that Jesus fathered a child with Mary Magdalene. This is somewhat depressing, if only because many of those six or seven million people are still allowed to vote.

However, in this post I want to look at one reason why this news might not be as bad as it sounds, and one reason why it might be.

1. Looking on the bright side

What these polls rarely manage to uncover is how strongly people hold a given view, and how much it matters to them. I suspect many (if not most) of the two-thirds who have swallowed Dan Brown's thesis previously had pretty vague ideas about Jesus, and Jesus was a pretty marginal figure in their lives. They now probably have similarly vague ideas about Jesus marrying Mary Magdalene and having children, in a manner that is similarly peripheral and unimportant to their daily lives.

In other words, as a politician might put it, the numbers may be bad, but they're soft.

Dan Brown's historical errors are so glaring that it should not be difficult to convince an honest enquirer that Brown's account is not to be trusted. Contrast someone like Richard Dawkins (sorry, Thomas), who I think is far more dangerous, because on the scientific level he is as knowledgeable, persuasive and convincing as Brown isn't on the historical level. So when Dawkins says, "...and all this implies that God does not exist and that religion is a hoax", he has established a level of scientific credibility that makes it easier for people to accept the metaphysical conclusions he claims to draw from the science.

2. Why Da Vinci is still a serious problem

As Boris Johnson points out today, one reason why Brown's potboiler is a "seditious text" is that it resurrects heresies that the church thought it had dealt with over 1500 years ago, including Arianism, which Johnson describes as the heresy:

...for everyone who has ever said that "Jesus was a really great guy and a great teacher, but I don't think he was really the biological son of God"

That may be part of it. But our old friend NT Wright, in a superb dissection of Brown's book dating from last year, points out that the power of Brown's book lies in its popularisation, not of an old heresy, but of a "new myth of Christian origins". This myth "is well known and widespread", asserts Wright:

I have met it at Harvard; I have met it in Baptist churches in the South; I have seen bits of it all over the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature.

This myth has five main components:

1. In addition to the NT, there were dozens (at least) of other documents about Jesus, which present him as a human being rather than as divine.


2. The four canonical gospels are later products, adopted under Constantine to secure power for the church by reinventing Jesus as a divine being. The other documents were then suppressed.


3. Jesus wasn't at all like the four gospels describe him. He didn't think he was God's son; he was just a Great Moral Teacher™, and may also have been married to Mary Magdalene and had a child by her.


4. Christianity is founded on a huge mistake, and is also anti-women, anti-sex and politically powerful and conformist.


5. So we need to abandon the traditional (and deeply damaging) picture of Jesus and Christian origins, in favour of the "original vision of Jesus himself", a process of "getting in touch with a different form of spirituality based on metaphor rather than literal truth, of feeling rather than structure, of discovering whatever faith you find you can believe in"

As Wright goes on to point out:

I had met this myth in various forms all over the place, long before Dan Brown wrote his book. Brown has, however, given it wings, and I fear that it is now flying all over the place and confusing many people as to what they can and can’t believe.

The deepest irony about it is that it portrays itself as historically rooted, when it is a tissue of fantasy; as going back to Jesus himself, when he would not have recognized anything like it; as embodying the really creative new voice of Jesus, when it is simply offering a variation on a well-known pattern of postmodern spirituality.

So there is the real danger of Brown's book (and the film adaptation): it helps create an intellectual/social "mood" in which there is a generalised, diffuse sense that the "real story" of Christianity is the one outlined above.

Close examination shows that the "new myth", while having some elements of truth in it (such as the church's attitude at times towards power, women and sex), does not stand up to proper scrutiny. However, the effect of the myth is to give people the sense that they don't need to bother with that close examination or scrutiny. It helps that the "real story" presented by the myth is so appealing to our contemporary mindset, with our suspicion of "authorised narratives", our love of conspiracy theories, and our tendency towards an introspective spiritual narcissism.

And that is why The Da Vinci Code, while it may be a turkey, is still a killer turkey.

I've added some more links to the Daily Prayer section of my sidebar, which is now a bizarre Lutheran/Anglican/Presbyterian mash-up reflecting my own personal usage rather than any coherent Christian tradition. Sue me.

The new links are for Prayer during the Day and the Psalter (both from Common Worship:Daily Prayer), and the readings for the day from Robert M'Cheyne's daily Bible-reading calendar (on a site featuring some of the most hideous CSS skins known to humanity). Enjoy!

Update: For a 100% Lutheran office experience, then hurry over to Fort Wayne Seminary's website, where you can listen to each day's morning office online (HT: Thomas). (Previous posted separately with a totally lame title.)

Update (2): Now, if I can just find a way to edit my template without Blogger eating half my sidebar each time, I'll be a happy man. At least that explains why yesterday was just about my worst weekday in living memory ever for hits - I'd deleted the site counter...

In the comments to my previous post the other day, I rather ungraciously referred to Roger Penrose's book The Road to Reality as "Climbing Mount Unreadable". Since then, I've made it to about page 220, showing it's not as bad as all that; but it is still a challenging read. I was given it for Christmas 2004, and my first attempt at reading it ground to a halt by about page 100 (out of 1,045), but this time I'm making life easier for myself by skipping the exercises.

"Exercises"? Yes, indeed: unusually for a bestselling "popular science" book, Penrose doesn't stint on the "hard sums". The book was written out of his conviction that most popular books about cosmology and quantum physics are potentially misleading, because they skip over the mathematical concepts that are fundamental to understanding - and, more important, evaluating - the scientific concepts involved. So the first half of the book provides an overview of mathematical concepts such as geometry, complex numbers and topology.

This has given the book - which, remarkably, made it into the top-ten bestsellers list here in the UK - a reputation for being rather more purchased than read, which I imagine is pretty accurate. While the blurb says that the book "assumes no particular specialist knowledge on the part of the reader", it's difficult to see how a reader without mathematical training could make it through the first half without taking to drink. I'm a mathematics graduate, and I'm still finding it pretty tough going at times.

That said, Penrose does as good a job as anyone possibly could of making these fundamentally complex concepts comprehensible, and one of the real pleasures of the book is reading a section, finding it utterly baffling, then stopping to think, re-read a few sentences, and discovering that the concepts involved suddenly spring to life in one's head: what Penrose himself has been known to call an "A-ha!" moment. (This is particularly appropriate, given Penrose's conviction - expounded in his best-known book, The Emperor's New Mind - that understanding the "A-ha!" experience is fundamental to understanding human consciousness as a whole.)

There's an illuminating review of Penrose's "physically huge" book on the American Scientist website, by computer scientist (and composer, artist and author) Jaron Lanier, who starts his review by saying:

Roger Penrose's latest book, The Road to Reality, is so generous in scope that it is difficult to absorb the breadth of its offerings.

Though Lanier admits that while "the text will seem gloriously variegated to some readers", it will seem "frustratingly inaccessible to others".

Lanier describes the mathematics section as "eerily liberating":

It is shocking that so much can be explained so well ... [T]he book starts at such an elementary level and soars to such heights, without any glitches along the way. It's a magical escape from the bounds of gravity.

One of the most engaging aspects of the review is Lanier's insight into the human aspects of Penrose's book:

The first half of The Road to Reality can be read as a love story about a little boy who adored numbers - especially complex numbers - like life itself, and who never grew up. Penrose's warm, funny temperament comes across in an understated way, and the reader is able to feel a little of what it would be like to have his superlative mathematical ease and intuition.

This is helped along by Penrose's liberal use of illustrations, hand-drawn by himself:

Unlike the sterile draftsman's renderings usually seen in math books, these drawings present metaphors. Some of the sketches depict the cute mental mnemonics that Penrose employs to keep ideas clearly in his mind. When he shows us a little bubble universe with assorted junk flung about, bursting out of a representative point in a potato chip-like configuration space, we know he has shared an intimate thought with us.

(The diagram in question is displayed above - click the thumbnail for a full-size version, with caption in a new window.)

Lanier summarises Penrose's book as "the lifetime statement of a devoted thinker who has defied the mainstream and can cast powerful if unusual light on a canon of familiar thoughts". Lanier then takes a quick detour into Pseud's Corner as he compares the book to Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae, on the basis that "both are big books that at turns amaze and infuriate many readers".

The "infuriations" come from the second half of the book, in which Penrose turns from the mathematics undergirding modern physics to the physics itself:

[T]his second ascent to the heavens from scratch is almost as smooth and inviting as the brilliant math presentation that precedes it. The big difference is that here Penrose is giving us a tour of controversies, and he's in fighting form.

Theoretical physics "has become a rough sport lately", and Penrose is out of step with the prevailing fashion for regarding "string theory" as the most likely way in which quantum physics and general relativity can be reconciled (the biggest challenge currently facing theoretical physics). This has led to some "shockingly negative" responses to Penrose, some of which are so vehement they lead Lanier to conclude that "some physicists have gone for so long without any experimental data that might resolve the quantum-gravity debates that they are going a little crazy".

Lanier suggests that Penrose's status as something of an "outcast" in modern physics is one driver for his writing this book. He suggests that Penrose's motivation can be summed up as follows:

"I'm going to bypass the physicists who have succumbed to a mob mentality and make my case by addressing everyone else - whether they have the technical background to understand me or not. None of us really knows what the right theory of quantum gravity will turn out to be, and unfortunately it's hard to do experiments, so we'll have to be patient to work this out.

"But in the meantime, just look at what a creative thinker I am and how productive I've been, despite my inclination to explore the unusual. The fact that I can explain my ideas to novices also shows that I am thinking clearly. Are you really ready to close your mind off and believe those string people, who are so sure of themselves? None of us has real evidence, but I'm the kind of guy you want to pay attention to."

Lanier concludes by applauding Penrose's "cosmic, romantic sense of human history":

Penrose gives us something that has been missing from the public discourse on science lately - a reason to live, something to look forward to ... One of the problems with the pompous triumphalism of string theory is that it suggests a premature decrease in mystery. One can practically hear Peggy Lee singing "Is That All There Is?" If it's true that that is all there is, that message would be fine, but Penrose makes a persuasive case that we are still surrounded by a sea of inviting mystery.

Incidentally, if anyone reading this has an unfinished copy of The Road to Reality glowering down at them from the bookshelf, then apparently Penrose's recommendation is that, if the worst comes to the worst, you should just read the last chapter. I haven't got that far yet - I'll post another update in, ooh, October or so ;-) - so can't comment any further on that suggestion. But according to another review (PDF) it contains something of a "happy ending" - "late-breaking news" of a new proposed theory that could reconcile string theory with Penrose's own "twistor" concept, and thus finally bring the "twice outcast" Penrose back in from the cold.

I recently acquired a Fisher "Bullet" Space Pen (above), which has rapidly become one of my must-carry-everywhere items. I didn't buy it because of all the "features" the Innovations catalogue used to get so breathless about - used by astronauts! can write upside down! in space! under water! - but because I wanted a small but good-quality pen I could keep in my trouser pocket, in particular for using with my Hipster PDA. It also has the side benefits of being a good pen and, above all, a gorgeous, tactile object.

(If you're wondering what a Hipster PDA is, the linked site gives the following explanation:

The Hipster PDA (Parietal Disgorgement Aid) is a fully extensible system for coordinating incoming and outgoing data for any aspect of your life and work. It scales brilliantly, degrades gracefully, supports optional categories and "beaming," and is configurable to an unlimited number of options. Best of all, the Hipster PDA fits into your hip pocket and costs practically nothing to purchase and maintain.

In other words, it's a small bundle of 3x5 index cards held together with a clip. Simple, but brilliantly useful for jotting down notes and processing them. But anyway, were we? Oh yes: space pens.)

There is a famous urban myth that does the rounds about how NASA spent [millions][billions][an amount equal to the entire annual GDP of Texas][your figure here] on developing this pen that would work in space, while those crafty Russians saved a fortune by using a pencil. Utter codswallop, of course - the problem that drove the adoption of the space pen was precisely that pencils were unsuitable to zero gravity, because broken leads were so hazardous in that environment. But hey, the truth never got in the way of a good meme.

But the real story of how the Fisher Space Pen came to be developed (by a private business using its own funds, not by NASA) is also interesting: a heartwarming tale of private enterprise and shameless huckstering, related in this article at The Space Review. (HT: 43 Folders.)

The article points out that the urban myth's appeal lies in its reinforcing of several stereotypes: "the NASA 'nerdgineers' who like to redesign the wheel ... the government bureaucrats who waste money on stupid things ... the crude but practical Russians who lack flash, but still get the job done", but in fact:

The Million Dollar Space Pen Myth is just that, a myth. The pens never cost a lot of money and were not developed by wasteful bureaucrats or overactive NASA engineers. The real story of the Space Pen is less interesting than the myth, but in many ways more inspiring. It is not a story of NASA bureaucrats versus simplistic Russians, but a story of a clever capitalist who built a superior product and conducted some innovative marketing. That story, however, is a little harder to sell to a public that believes what it wants to believe.

"Sting" was, of course, Frodo's sword in Lord of the Rings, which had the useful feature of glowing blue whenever orcs were in the vicinity. Conrad Gempf reports on an ingenious real-life counterpart: an umbrella that glows blue depending on how likely it is to rain.

How does it know? Well, depending on where you are on the poetic/literal continuum, it's either elvish magic, lost in the mists of Middle Earth history; or else it's WiFi technology cooked up by a couple of guys in Chicago. Your choice, but I know which I prefer to believe. ;-)

A quick appeal for help: my sister is putting together a pitch to write a script for a school TV drama programme about quantum physics, aimed at Key Stage 3 (11-14yrs) students. She's after a "simple" (now hear me out, hear me out) introductory guide to quantum mechanics suitable for 11 to 14 year olds (or, to be more precise, for thirty-year old physiology graduates who are writing dramas about quantum mechanics for 11 to 14 year olds...).

Particularly areas of interest include the particle/wave duality of light, the "cloud of probabilities", lasers/holograms as applications of quantum mechanics, and applications of the theory for "good or evil".

Any suggestions, particularly of books ("Quantum Mechanics for Dummies"?) or online resources, are welcome in the comments.

(I've already had one idea for a character my sister could include: a brilliant young Lutheran mathematician who spends his entire day drawing really cool Feynman diagrams - which he thinks are the best thing ever - while single-handedly refuting the errors of Calvinism...)

While sorting through some old issues of Scientific American, I found a great article from February 2001 on The Science of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini (the linked article is subscription-only, but Cialdini's Wikipedia entry summarises the main headings of his argument in the SciAm article).

Cialdini argues that "six basic tendencies of human behaviour" influence our willingness to comply with a request from another - in other words, to be persuaded into doing (or refraining from doing) something. These tendencies are:

• reciprocation


• consistency


• social validation


• liking


• authority


• scarcity

Cialdini gives examples of how each of these can be used to influence our choices, of which some of the highlights follow.

1. Reciprocation

"All societies subscribe to a norm that obligates individuals to repay in kind what they have received," writes Cialdini. This is one reason why companies offer free samples of their products, or free trial memberships - because those who receive these "free" gifts will tend to feel that they are under an obligation to reciprocate by buying the full-price product.

This can also apply to concessions we make to one another. Cialdini writes:

[A]ssume you reject my large request, and I then make a concession to you by retreating to a smaller request. You may very well then reciprocate with a concession of your own: agreement with my lesser request

In one experiment, 17 percent of passersby agreed to chaperone juvenile detention centre inmates on a day trip to the zoo. However, when people were first asked if they would like to serve as an unpaid counsellor working at the centre two hours a week for a year - a request that was universally declined - the rate of those agreeing to the "lesser" request of helping out with a day trip rose to 50 percent.

2. Consistency

People tend to want to be consistent with their public commitments. In 1998, the Chicago restauranteur, Gordon Sinclair, reduced the no-show rate at his restaurant from 30 percent to 10 percent by changing two words in the question his receptionist asked those making bookings.

The original request was:

"Please call if you have to change your plans."

Sinclair changed this to:

"Will you please call if you have to change your plans?"

At this point, the receptionist politely paused, inducing customers to fill the conversational void by agreeing to call if they needed to cancel - thus making a public commitment that they were far more likely to fulfil than a merely unspoken understanding.

3. Social validation

In its positive form, this is pretty familiar: people will tend to do what people around them are doing, as this will make the behaviour involved seem "normal". One example is the old trick of getting a large crowd people to stare up into the air by getting a small group to do so first - the larger the starting group, the larger the eventual crowd of sky-starers.

More interesting though are the times when this can backfire. This often happens in public education campaigns, such as campaigns to encourage healthier lifestyles or more environmentally-aware behaviour (such as the 1970s "Give a hoot - don't pollute" campaign which inspired the title to this post).

The campaigners say, "Look how many people are doing this undesirable thing!". But what the public hears is, "Look how many people are doing this undesirable thing!" - and if everybody else is doing it, what difference is it going to make if I stop?

This can have some serious consequences - a campaign in New Jersey alerted teenagers to the high number of teenage suicides. The result was a significant increase in the number of teenagers seeing suicide as a potential solution to their problems.

4. Liking

While "like" can seem quite a limp word in everyday usage - "Do you love him?" "Well, I quite like him..." - apparently it has become "the standard designation in the social science literature" for the range of ways in which we can feel a connection (such as "affinity", "rapport", "affection") with other people.

"People prefer to say yes to those they like," observes Cialdini. This explains the success for many years of the Tupperware party, where the in-home demonstration means people feel they are buying from a "liked friend" rather than from a salesperson. (The death of the actual Tupperware party in the UK does not negate this point, as the format is still used for a wide range of products ranging from beauty products to products of, ahem, a more intimate nature.)

This also explains the salesperson's ploy of exploiting a connection (real or imagined) with their customer ("Well, no kidding, your from Minneapolis? I went to school in Minnesota!").

5. Authority

Remember the getting-people-to-stare-into-the-sky game? It works even better if you dress the starting participants in a suit and tie. Makes them look like authority figures, you see - and if you don't want to believe me, then believe the 9 out 10 qualified psychologists who'll back up that statement.

The SciAm article includes a picture of Charlton Heston holding a rifle aloft at an NRA rally (they have presumably cropped out of the picture the ACLU activist busily trying to prise said firearm out of Heston's cold, dead hands), with a caption suggesting that Heston's association with authority figures such as Moses is used by the NRA to its advantage.

6. Scarcity

Perceived scarcity of an item will tend to make it more valuable in our eyes. This is one reason why marketers engage in "limited time only!" promotions, or why there are never quite enough of this year's Hot Toy in the shops during December.

This also applies to information. Information that is "exclusive" is seen as more persuasive. In one test, one of Cialdini's former students, who owns a beef importing company in the US, instructed his salespeople to phone a random sample of customers to tell them (truthfully) that a shortage of Australian beef was anticipated. This information doubled purchases compared with a control group of customers who were not given that information.

However, when customers were told not only that there was about to be a shortage of Australian beef, but that this information came from "his company's exclusive sources in the Australian National Weather Service", sales went up 600 per cent.

The scarcity of the beef itself had increased sales, but not as much as the scarcity of the information about that scarcity.

Cultural variations

One further observation by Cialdini in the article is the way these six influences vary according to different cultures. All six tendencies are found in different cultures, but the weight given to each varies. One test looked at different responses from Citibank employees to a co-worker's request for assistance in a task:

Employees in the US took a reciprocation-based approach ... [they] felt obligated to volunteer if they owed the requester a favour. Chinese employees responded primarily to authority, in the form of loyalties to those of high status within their small group ... Spanish Citibank personnel based the decision mostly on liking/friendship ... German employees were most compelled by consistency ... they decided to comply by asking, "According to official regulations and categories, am I supposed to assist this requester?"

Finally, and importantly, Cialdini argues that we are not "doomed to be helplessly manipulated by these techniques". An understanding of them can help us to recognise strategies of persuasion that are used on us, helping us to analyse requests more effectively. It may also, of course, help us to persuade other people - and there is no shortage of times when it is perfectly legitimate to want to persuade somebody in the most effective way possible.

And finally, it can help us identify times when we might otherwise behave (consciously or unconsciously) in a manner that is improperly manipulative rather than properly persuasive. For example, we might consider the JoePix "viral evangelism" initiative that is doing the rounds in the blogosphere at the moment to be making inappropriate use of "reciprocation" - making people feel subtly obligated to read your gospel presentation just because you took their photo for them.

In his book, The Ancestor's Tale, Richard Dawkins quotes "the brilliant theoretical physicist Richard Feynman", who is "rumoured to have said":

"If you think you understand quantum theory, you don't understand quantum theory."

Dawkins then offers as an "evolutionist's equivalent":

"If you think you understand sex, you don't understand sex."

Well, this is a game for all the family, isn't it? Feel free to add similar sayings in that "If you think you understand _____, you don't understand _____" in the comments. Here's an easy one to start things off:

"If you think you understand the Trinity, you don't understand the Trinity."

Alert readers may have spotted that the sidebar now includes three "Daily Prayer" links. These are taken from the daily prayer "feeds" supplied by the Church of England, and based on the C of E's new (and unutterably splendid) daily office, Common Worship: Daily Prayer (aka "CW:DP").

CW:DP is based on Celebrating Common Prayer ("CCP"), and is part of a concerted effort over the past couple of decades by the Church of England to revive the daily office as the prayer of the whole church, clergy and laity. It provides for morning and evening prayer, night prayer, and a simple form for "prayer during the day". For each office, there are different versions for each day of the week during ordinary time and then for each season of the church year.

(That latter aspect is in contrast to CCP, which combined the offices for ordinary time with those for seasonal time, so that, for example, the Sunday office was used throughout the season of Easter. Occasionally this led in some churches to people wishing one another a "Merry Christmas!" following a particularly "incarnation-heavy" Wednesday office during August, say.)

One downside to CW:DP is that it is a bit too large and heavy to carry around for use while travelling or commuting. I was therefore delighted to find that an unofficial pocket version has been produced, Celebrating Daily Prayer, which is a cross between CW:DP and the old pocket edition of Celebrating Common Prayer.

This recombines the offices for seasonal and ordinary time (which I personally prefer anyway) and omits the "prayer during the day" office. One useful feature is that it includes psalms for each day within the main body of the office, rather than needing to flip back and forth between the office and the psalms (and use a separate lectionary) as with CW:DP.

Both books are a delight, and highly recommended. Alternatively you can just check out the daily feeds.

And as a final note, in case anyone raises a quizzical eyebrow at this supposed Lutheran yet again raving about something emanating from the Church of England: I would love it if the Lutheran Church were to produce a daily office of this quality. The new Lutheran Service Book has some good material in it, but with nothing like the richness and variety of CW:DP. And anyway, there is less divergence between Anglicans and Lutherans on the daily office than on Holy Communion.

For now, we can just be grateful that, for all its problems, the church of Cranmer can still produce liturgical triumphs such as this.