Would you like to listen to some of my handiwork?

Hitler's Muslim Legions is a history documentary I worked on with Jenny Chryss about use of Muslim recruits to strengthen the German army in the second world war. This is from the BBC web site.

It was after Germany's invasion of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in 1941 that Hitler's attention was first drawn to the potential for Muslim recruits to swell his ranks. For the many thousands of captured Soviet Muslims, the opportunity to serve in the Wehrmacht offered an escape from the brutality and starvation of the prison camps. Elsewhere, a major recruitment drive amongst Bosnian Muslims led to tens of thousands signing up for the Waffen-SS. Formed into exclusive Muslim units, these men fought in some of the most brutal campaigns of the entire war. This programme investigates why Hitler and Himmler apparently cast aside their Nazi ideal of an Aryan master race, justifying the admission of Islam into their ranks. It asks what attracted these men to fight for the Third Reich, how they were treated by their German officers and how they conducted themselves in the bedlam of war. Were they hopeless soldiers who committed unspeakable atrocities; or did they fight bravely for the Fuhrer? We examine the fate of these Muslims at the end of the war. With Hitler dead and the Third Reich defeated there was nothing to protect them, and most were killed as traitors.
Presented by Julian O'Halloran.
Producer: Jennifer Chryss
A Juniper production for BBC Radio 4.

The story was a revelation to me and you will hear an eyewitness account from a German, now in his 80s, who lived and worked with Muslim soldiers when he was 19.

For more on the background to the programme go to the Radio 4 blog to read a post from Samir Shah who is the Executive Producer of Hitler's Muslim Legions.

The programme goes out on Monday 26th July on BBC Radio 4. If you miss it then pick it up on the iPlayer.

Faith should harness art's appeal

I came across this very interesting article in The Guardian by Jennie Hogan and here strap line is...

Tate Modern shows that art now inspires on a scale that religion once did. Churches should get a piece of the action

As she points out churches were once major patrons of the arts but no more....

Despite the centrality of faith in the art of centuries past, religious themes within contemporary art are fading fast. At Chelsea College of Art & Design, where I work as chaplain, God is dead. As students in their studios aspire to join the avant garde there is only a faint desire to look back at works in which the Christian tradition is central. Perhaps when universal themes such as death, suffering and delight are explored though a religious and theological lens the students cannot see them. Could it be then that art is replacing religion?

But as the article goes on to say it isn't all doom and gloom...

The Reformation damaged the natural connection between art and faith but some places are making serious attempts to heal it. All Hallows on the Wall in the City has created a venue, Wallspace, and describes itself as a spiritual home for visual art. St Paul's Cathedral may not attract the same numbers as Tate Modern, but the UK's most famous church has recently been commissioning work from prominent artists. Antony Gormley created Flare II, a shimmering, almost abstract form which revolves mysteriously below Wren's geometric staircase. Bill Viola is creating video installations for two altarpieces. Some commissioned works are explicitly religious but many others are not. Clearly, the dean and chapter are keen to explore faith though art. 

I know from the work we do with Wellspring helping Christian musicians as well as other artists, that many are not respected or understood and remain sat in the pew unable to use their gifts to express their response to God in church. The church also has a view that artists should give their gifts for free especially in this country. The church is no longer a patron of the arts commissioning (paying for) art in all its forms. There are all sorts of opportunities for engaging all sectors of our communities like asking artists to explore issues, as Jenny suggests, starting with the universal themes like birth, life, suffering, delight, and death.

Come on Church, engage with your communities and use people's creative talents to explore the issues that are front and centre in their lifes.

Simple thoughts on the Sabbath

Liz Hunter on the MediaNet site has posted a simple and thought provoking article on the importance of taking a break. She says....

Being frazzled is a badge of honour.  Most of the freelancers I know avoid booking holidays because they fear having to turn down a brilliant job, and they don't rest in the periods in between work because they are out touting for more!

As a freelancer I learnt the hard way that not having a holiday, in case a dream job came up, was a big mistake.

Now I book my summer holiday dates early in January and book and pay for a proper holiday which is a digital fast as well for 2 weeks. I tried one week so as not to take me out for too long but it isn't long enough. I find that I am only just winding down by the end of one week and if there is any significant travel too it really isn't long enough to do what a holiday should do.

My only concession is I check my answer phone every 48 hours and deal with any important calls but then the phone goes off again. My clients know this is what I do, they regularly ask earlier in the year when I am going to be on holiday so they can plan accordingly, and I send a global email out about a week before reminding everyone I will be away and my responses will be limited to checking my answer phone, but no emails, blogs tweets for two weeks.

Liz continues.....

As usual, the Bible has some pretty good advice on how to avoid burnout, and it's very straightforward.Take one day off a week. Really off. Complete downtime, family time, God time. I'm not sure it matters when we take it, just that we do. It should not be something we feel guilty about, as it was made for our good, not the other way around (Mark 2:27), but we can't go too long avoiding something God designed us to need.

As to a sabbath, that is more of a challenge. As a family we take a Jewish sabbath, from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday, as being involved in church as both Sally & I are, means that Sunday is rarely a day of rest! However maintaining a digital fast is more of a challenge, although it does remain an aim. I do love Rob Bell's description of the Sabbath and as we often see on school reports "must try harder!"

More on the paywall issue

There are two interesting articles in The Observer on The Guardian web site relating to newspapers and paywalls. The first from David Teather reports the drop in users of The Times web site since the pay wall went up...

The Times newspaper's website has lost two‑thirds of its audience following the implementation of a paywall, according to data published yesterday – a dramatic decline, but not as steep as many had forecast.

But David reports there may have been reasons for this...

The drop may have been softened by an introductory charge of £1 for the first 30 days. Murdoch aims to charge £1 per day for access to the site or £2 for a week. According to Experian Hitwise, which monitors internet traffic, the biggest drop in audience came in the five weeks ahead of the paywall going up, when visitors were asked to register their details. The site lost 58% during that period and the decline has only been modest since the wall went up.

The second article by Peter Preston reports that whilst The Times might be loosing on line readers The Daily Mail is doing very well the increasing traffic appears to be bringing in the ad revenue....

Take the Mail in print. Around 1.9 million punters buying a copy every day, which means 4,881,000 readers scanning their favourite sheet each morning. And online, the growth from nothing much four years ago to 40,500,000 unique browsers a month is verging on the phenomenal: up 72% year on year. Through 2009, the Telegraph and the Guardian were two close competitors – sometimes ahead, often very near to, the Mail. Not now. Both still have good growth of their own, but Associated's electronic baby – 16 million unique browsers in the UK, 26.3 million in the rest of the world – begins to hint at a different league.

He reports that The Mail is doing some things differently, firstly....

Unlike its rivals, the Mail shuns newsroom integration and runs online operations totally separately, which means that costings and revenue are separate, too.

and secondly....

There is no rule that says online papers must play print's little brother. On the contrary, the most successful ones are more like inspired riffs on a print theme. Nor is there a rule that says big print sellers carry the same clout when they transfer to screen. 

So it seems that The Mail is doing things differently and is driving traffic to its on line site to an extent that the on line product could be about to turn a profit soon. But at what cost....

Look at those yards of celebrity gossip and pictures on the site; this isn't the Mail we know (and don't much love). This is a different beast that somehow doesn't count because it fights unfair.

So offer gossip and celeb pictures for free and watch the traffic come in.  It is a sad reflection on our society that to get the traffic to the on line version of a newspaper,  increase the amount of gossip and celeb pictures and you can soon turn a profit from advertising alone.

Does our image of God always have to be male?

We read in the first book of the bible - Genesis that "God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created him".

All the way through the bible there are descriptions of God as compassionate. Reading the bible in the language it was written in - Hebrew; the word used for compassionate is 'raham' which is also the word for 'womb'. So when the writers of the bible refer to God as compassionate thy are describing God as womb-like, which is a completely feminine image of God.

With all the discussions going on about women in leadership, surely if God created us in his image both male and female then if we don't have her leadership, if we don't have her wisdom, her voice, her perspective; we are not just missing her, but so much of what is central to the very core of who God is.

The prophet Isaiah wrote in chapter 66 and verse 13 "As a mother comforts her child so will I comfort you". When Isaiah spoke these words, his people didn't know if they had a future, they were full of despair and had little hope. Sound familiar in these times of recession, cuts and job losses? Isaiah was saying, and I believe God is still saying today 'You have seen a mother comfort her child, and this is what God is going to do for you.

God is so much bigger than the language we use; so if then limit his diversity, by saying than some people are second class citizens, then surely it's like cutting off parts of our body?

So my prayer is that you may be able to embrace the God who is way bigger than anything we can say.



This was inspired by one of Rob Bell's Nooma videos called "She". For more information on this and others go to the Nooma web site.

The Guardian's response to The Times' pay wall.

This has got to be a brilliant response to The Times putting the final bricks in their pay wall......

And a very warm welcome to all our readers from The Times. We're very sorry you awoke to find you could no longer read your newspaper online without a credit card and we feel your pain.

They continue to make their introductions.....

To many of you, much of our website may seem a bit unfamiliar. We're not going to try to hide the fact that on certain – make that all – issues we tend to be the teensiest bit liberal.
But don't let that scare you. We don't bite. Very hard. And we do have a few of our very own Tories writing for us, though apparently they don't like being called Tories so I'm not allowed to say who they are as they have friends in very high places and could get me fired.

And this bit I love especially as I am no fan of the Murdoch dynasty.....

There will of course be a few very noticeable differences. We don't always write about Rupert Murdoch in the way the North Korean media reports Kim Jong-il and we have occasionally made a critical remark about Sky and News International. You may however find it refreshing that we do also criticise the Guardian Media Group when they step out of line.

Lets hope the new readers, and their traffic, will help to put back the losses they suffered last year.

Finished working on this year's series of The Choice for BBC Radio 4

I have just finished editing and uploading the series of 4 "The Choice" produced by Dawn Bryan. Still can't tell you who the interviewees are yet as Radio 4 have yet to announce them but they are another excellent set of stories all very different from each other. They are due to go out from August 12th.

Michael Buerk interviews people who have made life-altering decisions and talks them through the whole process, from the original dilemma to living with the consequences.

Gwyneth Williams appointed BBC Radio 4 controller

Following on from my earlier posts here and here the BBC has announced that Gwyneth Williams is to be appointed to replace Mark This from John Plunkett of The Guardian....

A senior BBC World Service executive, Gwyneth Williams, has been appointed as the new controller of BBC Radio 4. Williams, who began her BBC career in 1976 and was most recently responsible for the World Service's international radio programmes in English, will succeed Mark Damazer in the autumn.
She will also oversee the digital radio station BBC Radio 7, which is being rebranded Radio 4 Extra with closer ties to its parent speech station.
Williams was previously head of radio current affairs, responsible for programmes such as File On 4, Analysis and From Our Own Correspondent, as well as editor of the Reith lectures.
She began her career in Bush House as a trainee talks writer for the World Service in 1976. She went on to become producer and duty editor of the World Tonight and deputy editor, special current affairs programmes, overseeing election coverage. She was editor of policy and social programmes from 1994 to 1996 and oversaw the launch of current affairs programmes on BBC Radio 5 Live, edited Radio 4's The Week in Westminster and worked briefly for BBC1's On The Record. She has also been editor of foreign affairs radio and the bi-media editor for home current affairs.

More on social media trends - is blogging the future for publishing?

Jeff Bullas has posted this question on his blog. He writes....

Blogging is publishing, it is content, and that can be a video, images, text or all of these. Blogging is about niches and  allows those that are passionate about their interests to start publishing and sharing online and through promotion drive traffic, eyeballs and then revenue.

Sure, the big blogs he refers to are going to be succesful like  The Huffington Post with 37.6 Million hits for the month of March, 2010. Other big sites are

• Mashable – 5.16 Million views (Technology Blog)
• Nymag.com -  3.4 million views (Entertainment Blog)
• BoingBoing.com – 3.1 Million views (Cultural curiosities and interesting technologies Blog)
• Businessinsider.com – 2.8 Million views (Business Blog)
• Inhabitat.com – 656,000 views (Environmental Blog)

 for the same period. But it is some of the comments that are almost more interesting than the post itself like this from Jean Sarauer...

I definitely think blogging is the future of publishing. As a writer, I’m seeing print markets shrink and fold all the time now, and some excellent writers are skipping that whole route and going straight into blogging. And why not? No editor to cramp your style, immediate publication, direct interaction with readers, and the ability to create your own products. I don’t see this going away anytime soon.

and then this from Crosbie Fitch

Yup, blogging is the future. It’s journalists publishing their intellectual work directly to their readers – missing out the publisher, no longer needing to charge the reader for printing, distribution, retail.

But my question is in all this freeing up how does the writer get paid? How are they going to monetise their blogs to get a reasonable income?

Social Media usage trends

Two articles have come up today that are interesting if a little contradictory.

The first posted on MacWorld but clipped from ComputerWorld is titled "Are we burning out on Facebook?"

Could it be that Americans are starting to grow a bit weary of Facebook, which has captivated our attention and much of our free time?That just might be the case, according to numbers released by Inside Facebook, a site that tracks its usage. The site reported last week that the Facebook’s growth dropped dramatically between May and June. This follows news in March that Facebook replaced Google as the most visited Web site in the U.S. for a full week. Facebook only picked up 320,800 new users in the U.S. in June, Inside Facebook reported. That might sound like a lot until you compare it with the number of new U.S. users the site grabbed in May: 7.8 million. The tracking site also noted that fewer current users in Facebook’s prime age category of 18 to 44 were active on the site last month, though it didn’t offer any specific numbers.

There is some debate as to whether Facebook's privacy issues might be having an effect on usage.

The second article is another one form the pen of Jemima Kiss at The Guardian. Entitled "Waging war on Wordpress: Posterous prepares the switch" Jemima writes...

Twitter has played a significant role in the demise of 'full' blogging, not because it replaced the medium but more that it claimed people's web time and pushed the focus of web publishing towards real time. Facebook, too, is a famous online time sink. But sites like Posterous and Tumblr have refined blogging by streamlining the posting process, stripping out many of the bulky features and offering slicker, more real-time features and designs. 
What's the attraction? A less bloated back end (there's pills for that) without multiple features you never use. An end to the barrage of spam comments that plague Wordpress - Posterous is free of those, for now. And a service designed to be so email-post friendly that you never even need to login at your desktop; I post everything to my trial Posterous blog from my phone. Photos, videos, text docs, even spreadsheets - if you can email it, you can blog it from your phone. I'm converted.

It is interesting that at last people are considering the time all this social networking takes and the desire for a simple interface as well as tools to make multi-platform posting easier appear to be coming to the fore.

How the internet really affected the election from The Guardian

In today's media section of The Guardian is an interesting article by Jemima Kiss on how the internet affected the election following a report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Jemima wrote...

Nic Newman, the BBC's former future media controller for journalism, spent six weeks reviewing Facebook groups, Twitter coverage and the use of social media by traditional media organisations. "This was never going to be an internet election," he says. "Social media is just another layer ... it has always been there, through discussion and networks in the pub."
Facebook dominated the media behaviour of the 18-24 age group he surveyed, with an emphatic 97% saying they used the site during the election. The same group used the web more than any other source of news – 89%, compared with 81% for TV and 59% for newspapers.

in conclusion she wrote....

"Mainstream media are largely getting it right, and recognising that this is about conversation and not broadcast," Newman says. "For politicians, this is the first election where they are really having a go and some, like John Prescott, have been authentic and posted regularly while others have been in broadcast mode, still finding their feet."
Easy to dismiss, but less easy to master – social media is yet to come of age. But its growing influence and ubiquity, particularly among younger voters, cannot be ignored. Newman cites one of the more modest estimates, by Mori, that the voting turnout of 18- to 24-year-olds increased by 7%, above the national average of 5%.
"The complications of this new reality are that 18- to 24-year-olds do enjoy big events like the TV debates, but they are not prepared to consume political messages passively," he says. "[Social media] puts more tools in the hands of audiences to make politicians and the media more accountable."

So Social Media hasn't made it yet, but this election has shown it is a way that the 18 to 24 generation are having their say, they are not prepared to be passive and absorb whatever is fed them.

Social Trends 2010 - an article from LICC

This is an article from the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity......

Middle age is always a good time to take stock, to analyse where we have come from and think through where we are going.

Social Trends, the Office for National Statistics' annual survey into British life, is 40-years-old this week. It is now, officially, middle-aged and its latest publication offers much material with which we can take stock.

Some of the signs are good. Britons are living longer. We smoke less (surely not a disconnected fact). We are much richer, earning two-and-a-half times more today than forty years ago, and we holiday abroad much more often.

Some of the signs are ambiguous. There are five million more of us than in 1971, living in seven million more homes, spending less on necessities like food and non-alcoholic drink, and more on recreation and housing.

Some are negative. We are financially more unequal than we have been for generations. The prison population has more than doubled. We save less than we have for decades. We are choosing not to have children. And we are living unprecedentedly more fluid and isolated lives, the number of first marriages falling precipitously, while the number of single person households, divorces, and children born outside marriage rising.

Explaining this spaghetti junction of trends is not easy. Societies rarely undergo uniform or predictable change and are never amenable to single, simple explanations. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to tell stories that encompass and enlighten what is going on.

Listen to any funeral sermon and you will soon realise that what we value is not how rich or how independent we are, how far we travelled or how much we hoarded. It is how much we gave, how much we loved, how much we were loved.

Life is better for me today. I can expect to live longer, earn more and travel further. But it is worse for us. We are less likely to live together, stay together or maintain some measure of genuine equality. Our obsession with autonomy and choice may make us richer and more independent, but it is slowly eroding the bonds of trust, responsibility and perseverance that make loving relationships possible.

Are we so preoccupied with our desire to gain the whole world that we are in danger of losing our soul?

Nick Spencer

Working on a new series of "What's The Point of.." for Radio 4

I have recently started work on another series of What's The Point Of.. for BBC Radio 4, where Quentin Letts takes a look at whether there is still a need for some of our national institutions.

Last year Quentin took a witty but thought provoking look at the British Zoo, Gibraltar, Formula One motor racing & The Privy Council.



As with the new series of The Choice I can't tell you what Quentin will be investigating this series until they are published.