I ran out of time for preparing more Da Vinci Code audio for my site. I may put up a more recent one when the DVD comes out later in the year.

Meanwhile, the Above Bar Church website website now carries dowloads of Sunday sermons so there's some recent material from me there. Of particular interest might be my two-parter on Engaging with the real world - part one and part two.

Well, I'm behind schedule with just two weeks to go and a lot of revisions to do as well as writing appendices and other stuff. I'm pleased with what I've done, though, and hope it will make a valuable and distinctive contribution.

More soon - when I have some time again!

tony

I neglected to inform the world that my recording of a Men's Breakfast at King's Community Church, Hedge End (Southampton) is now available. It didn't seem to be the right context to talk about the sacred feminine and goddess spirituality, so instead I talked about The Da Vinci Code and conspiracy theories. I highlighted a number of features of conspiracy theories and suggested that, despite Dan Brown's protests, The Da Vinci Code strongly fits the criteria. I compared the lack of evidence for the ideas which Brown claims he believes with the strong evidence for the historically orthodox understanding of Christianity and the gospels.

All my available recordings are at www.tonywatkins.co.uk - or follow the Read More link below.

It's about time I said something about my current writing project. I am getting towards the end of writing a book about engaging with film at a worldview level. There are a number of books written by Christians which look at connections between films and theology - some of them extremely good. Robert K. Johnstone's Reel Spirituality is one of them (one day I will get around to putting my various bibliographies on this site - but not yet). But there is very little on how to understand, analyse and respond to what films are saying on their own terms.

I don't think we treat a film fairly if all we're doing is looking for parallels with the Christian story, or if we are preoccupied with how films handle explicitly theological issues. Thinking at a worldview level is much broader and requires us to consider what the film is saying about the nature of reality, the nature of human beings, how we know truth, how we know right and wrong, and what humans most need in order to attain fulfilment. All of these have a theological dimension to them, but a worldview approach allows us to think outside of a narrow framework and really hear what is being said. Then we can hopefully respond in richer, fuller, more helpful ways.

The plan is for me to finish writing by the end of July (I'm a long way behind at the moment) and for the book to be published in the spring of 2007. I'll keep you posted!

I've now added the recordings of Wednesday evening's events at Above Bar Church, Southampton, which I shared with David Couchman of Focus.

I talked about the appeal of The Da Vinci Code, its opposition to orthodox historical Christianity, the sacred feminine and goddess spirituality.

David addressed three key claims in the book: that the Gnostic gospels discovered at Nag Hammadi are earlier than the biblical gospels and give us a more historically truthful account of Jesus, that the council of Nicea in AD 325 voted to treat Jesus as divine although he had only been considered mortal until that point, and that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.