A Miracle
I’ve been learning about St. Stephen the Great Charitable Trust. In particular, I have been watching a video about their plans to “Rescue Britain’s Christian Heritage“. Clearly, us Brits are not able to cope with the sheer amount of Christian Heritage that we have acquired, and so it is necessary for an American society to do it for us. Thank goodness.
Being a bit of a geek, the first thing I found out about SSG was who ran, updated, and owned the website on which I found the video. For those not in-the-know, every website has information about it published on the WHOIS database. This is the WHOIS record for ststephentrust.org.uk:
The Registrant’s address isn’t really a surprise. It’s the office of our friend Mark Brewer - a hard working man with a surprisingly high pitched voice. The bit that surprised me was the name of the Registrant, and who they were Trading as.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but a martyr is usually someone who is dead. Forty martyrs would therefore be forty dead people. The Forty Holy Martyrs of Sebaste were forty Christian people condemned to freeze to death next to a icy pond on a bitterly cold night - only for the survivors to be burned the next morning. It seems unlikely that these forty people had a meeting during the night and decided to register the domain name ststephentrust.org.uk for two reasons:
- The martyrs died in the year 320AD. Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web in 1989. I know it’s important to plan ahead, but I think 1,669 years is a little extreme.
- The martyrs had very little to do with St. Stephen the Great - who lived 1200 years after the martyrs died.
This leaves only one possible explanation. Mark Brewer was able to summon up the martyrs, persuade them that there was great benefit in registering the domain name, and then return them to wherever they had come from without ever announcing his incredible deed - he is, after all, a very private man.
That is the only explanation I can think of - it would be wrong, possibly even libellous, for him to have claimed the martyrs supported the website without their permission.
On another, quite similar, note, I found this article from The Rev’d Dr. Christian Troll rather amusing.
August 6th, 2008 at 3:29 am
I’m struggling to work out how the 40 holy martyrs engage in ‘trading’, but anyway….
A couple of questions:
- can a US-based organisation be a UK charity?
- the charity number is that of the St. Stephen the Great Charitable Trust. Maybe the original Greek for this is the same as ‘40 holy martyrs of Sebaste’ and there’s been an error in translation. Or maybe the information given isn’t entirely accurate. I think we should be told.
August 7th, 2008 at 11:09 am
It gets more bizarre by the day
August 8th, 2008 at 2:54 am
Perhaps I can help shed some light on the 40 martyrs issue:
http://40martyrs.org/joomla/index.php
Perhaps this is Mr J. Mark Brewers new church or over church?? Given their
Who knows? perhaps someone from the church could let us know?? because did they know they were connected with the UK charity thats registered in their name?
August 8th, 2008 at 4:43 am
[...] & Pritchard, flowing, Mark Brewer, St Stephen the Great, ststephentrust.org.uk So over at BenGallagher.com, Ben posted an interesting article on who the registered owner of the St Stephen the Greatofficial [...]
August 21st, 2008 at 4:32 am
Another interesting question is who exactly owns the online bookselling arm of the SPCK, particularly as they are now happy to offer books by such important religious writers as Aleister Crowley, let alone a wide range
of ‘adult’ material. spckonline.com is still registered to the SPCK although they of course say that they’ve passed the domain over to SSG. When you go on to spckonline though you are in reality on a twinned site ‘Third Space Books’. You’d have expected to find that to be registered to one of the Brewer brothers’ myriad enterprises, but it’s hard to tell. The whois for thirdspacebooks.com shows up thus:
Registrant Contact
Name: Carey A McDonald
Address: 202 N Curry St.
Carson City, NV 89703
US
Note that Andy McDonald is not listed as the registrant, merely as the contact. Andy himself has a site http://www.juland.com (correctly registered), which appears to have nothing whatever to do with bookselling, let alone the Orthodox faith. How do I know that he’s actually known as Andy? Well, I rung him up (his office number’s on the whois, and his answaphone gives out his mobile number). It would have been nice to establish what and who exactly lay behind an Orthodox Christian online bookseller prepared to use the name of a long-established and respected UK charity to flog such distinctly un-Christian literature, but alas I fear that Andy was not able to give me any assistance whatever.
August 21st, 2008 at 1:21 pm
[...] to a post I made about the WHOIS information on various SSG websites, the anonymous commenter [...]