Some Images in Paint and Pencil

 

A few images created over time 2010-2018. Mostly acrylic on wood blocks, but also pencil sketches and a couple of  larger pieces 

Augustine's Ordo Amoris and Keller's Counterfeit Gods

Augustine’s ordo amoris and Keller’s Jacob together: the painful wrestling that reorders desire, leaving us dependent on God’s grace.

In his book "Counterfeit Gods",  Timothy Keller ( 1950 – 2023: American Presbyterian pastor, preacher, theologian, and Christian Apologist) references  Jacob's nocturnal wrestling match in Genesis 32. Far from a curious or marginal episode, Keller presents it as a paradigm for how human beings truly encounter God.

Read alongside Augustine's doctrine of ordo amoris--the right ordering of love--the story becomes not merely dramatic, but diagnostic: it exposes how spiritual transformation occurs through the painful reordering of desire.

Augustine's central claim is that sin is not best understood as loving evil things, but as loving good things wrongly. Created goods--security, success, approval, even blessing--become destructive when they are elevated to ultimate status. "My weight is my love," Augustine writes in the Confessions; what we love most pulls us in a particular direction, shaping our character and destiny. The problem is not that the heart loves too much, but that it loves in the wrong order.

Jacob is a vivid embodiment of this condition. His life has been defined by cunning, manipulation, and self-reliance. He seeks blessing, but on his own terms; he wants security without vulnerability, promise without dependence. In Keller's striking phrase, Jacob is a "con artist," not because he loves bad things, but because he attempts to extract blessing from God without surrendering control.

Augustine would say that Jacob's loves are mis-ranked: God is useful, but not supreme.

The wrestling match at the Jabbok becomes the moment when this disorder is confronted. Crucially, Jacob meets God alone. The encounter is personal, stripped of props and strategies. And it is not serene or contemplative, but agonistic. Keller stresses that real engagement with God feels like wrestling precisely because God contradicts us. Augustine anticipates this psychological realism: the reordering of love involves inner conflict because the will resists the loss of its idols. Conversion is not a gentle adjustment but a profound disturbance.

The turning point comes when Jacob is wounded. God touches his hip, and Jacob's strength collapses. Paradoxically, this is not the end of the struggle but its resolution. Jacob stops striving and starts clinging. He no longer wrestles to win; he holds on in dependence. Augustine's theology of grace is unmistakably present here. The human will cannot heal or reorder itself; it must be acted upon. Grace does not merely assist our projects--it dismantles them. Jacob's limp is the bodily sign that his deepest love has been dethroned.

Yet Jacob is also blessed and renamed. He becomes Israel, "the one who struggles with God and prevails." Keller emphasises the paradox: Jacob wins by losing. Augustine would recognise this as the restoration of right order. God is no longer a means to an end, but the end itself. Other goods may still be loved, but now in relation to God rather than in competition with Him. True freedom, for Augustine, is not autonomy but rightly ordered dependence.

The lasting limp matters. Jacob is not perfected; he is transformed. Augustine is equally insistent that conversion leaves marks. The soul bears the memory of its reordering; humility replaces confidence, gratitude replaces control. Spiritual maturity is not marked by triumphalism, but by a certain vulnerability--a way of walking that remembers grace.

Read together, Keller and Augustine converge on a single insight: spiritual change occurs not when we try harder, but when we love differently. Jacob's struggle is the drama of ordo amoris enacted in flesh and bone.  We might conclude, then that to encounter God is to be wounded in our false strengths, so that our loves may be healed and reordered. The promise then becomes: what we lose is self-sufficiency; what we gain is God Himself.

References:

• Augustine. (1998). Confessions (H. Chadwick, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work ca. 397–400 CE)
• Keller, T. (2009). Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters. Dutton

Country Connect 1989-2020: A Brief Historical Outline

 

Background: The Remit of International Tourist Offices

Over time, and with the development of network technology in the past three decades, the role of international tourist offices in the UK has undergone big changes. The customer-focussed brochure distribution and counter services offered by the tourist offices of the major destinations for UK tourist - and many of the smaller countries also - have virtually disappeared. In their place are easy-access online facilities delivering detailed destination information and a platform for video and image-rich presentations for potential customers to enjoy at their leisure.

It was already clear in the early days of the evolving Country Connect relationship with UK-based tourist offices, that the focus was very much shifting. The preferred role was in building press and tour operator contacts, where knowledge of the attractions of individual countries could be cost-effectively disseminated in newspapers, magazines and the brochures of the major sellers. Coupled with this were programmes of "meet the public" holiday fairs and of course, a presence at landmark industry Travel shows including the embryonic World Travel Market which was growing apace in the late 1980's.

 

Emerging Technologies

During this time, and before the arrival of the world wide web, the use of technology to deliver information in the UK was limited in a way which is almost incomprehensible today. The available platform to reach the UK consumer from the early 1980s was BT's Prestel system, which never reached a userbase beyond 95,000 due to in part to the sheer cost, the difficulties of dealing with a monopoly supplier in the early days, the limitations of the viewdata technology it employed; and last but not least, the knowledge gaps amongst tourism management chiefs.

But it was always clear, with reduced budgets in the early 1990s, that the old model of direct customer focus was impossible to maintain without technology, and tourist offices increasingly placed themselves higher up the pyramid of consumer networking, relying on press, tour operator and travel agency partnerships to deliver their message. At the same time, viewdata technology had found great favour with tour operators and ferry companies. Thus from a few early adopters in the mid-1980s, viewdata ( with text and bizarrely limited graphics capability) became the platform of choice for tour operators to deliver reservations and product information facilities to the UK travel agency network.

 

Viewdata Systems

It was on this network that tourist offices were first able, through pioneering work done by Country Connect amongst others, to deliver its destination information to a receptive travel industry audience through travel-focussed independent  viewdata systems. Ideas of information delivery through technology thus became firmly established during these years. Eventually of course,  the future remit of tourism information delivery to the holidaymaker was going to move away from dedicated print and travel agency intermediaries  to online resources as soon as the technology allowed. Country Connect moved with those times and created its presence on the web as a portal to key destination information.

About Country Connect Tourist Office Directory

We researched our information through direct mailings, through contact with each office, and through contact with the individual Embassy representing each country in the UK.

Country Connect initially started working with UK-based national tourist offices in 1989, and since that time until its closedown in July 2020,  established regular newsfeeds for timely distribution to the UK travel industry via closed, managed networks including AT&T's ISTEL throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s. Over time, elements from these feeds were made available to the public via the Country Connect website directory and information platform, and comprised regular updates on travel offers, new airline routes, new holiday programmes from tour operators and much else of interest to the UK-resident world traveller and holidaymaker.

In addition to the contact information, Country Connect offered a country-by-country link to official government travel advice, BBC climate statistics, as well as to the Word Travels destination guide and the CIA factbook for in-depth country profiling.

 

But then the world continued to move on…..