The Compassion Teepee

Interesting report in the Observer about an art installation in Liverpool, in which the public can leave messages, including many relating to the recent riots. What is most interesting is where it is: in the bombed church of St Luke, destroyed in 1941 and now in the hands of the city council. The church seems to function as an unofficial war memorial, and has a memorial to the victims of the Irish famine in the grounds. I'm interested that a site of memory should be used for the current installation. See the church website for more; on bombed churches in general, see my article on the subject

How to memorialise 9/11 ?

Interesting article of a few weeks back from Rowan Moore, the Observer's architecture critic, on what it is that is being built at Ground Zero. Although Moore doesn't address the issue directly, there are many artistic assumptions that have to be made if a memorial is to be intelligible; and I wonder how easy that is, in a time of very limited consensus on 'national' art forms and styles.

Church music and evangelical identity

I'm very pleased to be able to say that Ian Jones' and my article on 'pop' church music and Anglican evangelical identity since 1958 is now live in SAS-Space. It was first published in Mark Smith's edited volume British Evangelical Identities: volume 1 (Paternoster, 2008), which also includes a splendid piece from John Harvey on evangelical material culture.