DESIRING FAR MORE THAN A BIG 'IT'

Here's a fabulous piece by the highly creative Catholic theologian James Alison [pictured] - God and Desire, presented to the 2007 Quest Conference, Sheffield (England), on 21 July 2007. No wonder he's one of Rowan Williams' favourites. I'm honoured that one of James' pieces appears in the book that I edited with Jonathan Bartley in 2005, Consuming Passion: Why the killing of Jesus really matters (DLT). James' main website is here. This piece draws on an interesting dramaturgical/operatic metaphor to make its point - inter alia illustrating the central reason for "the poverty of modern discourse about God, whether it be to deny God, à la Dawkins or Hitchens, or to affirm God, in the way that so many of our religious representatives do."

What I’m trying to do here is to bring out something odd about the difference between “a god” and “God”, since it is too easy, in discussions of “the advent of Hebrew monotheism” to find ourselves talking about different sorts of “it” – on the one hand gods, which are “its”, objects, projections of ours, or of our social groupings, slalom poles within our negotiation of the piste which is our universe; and on the other hand, “God” which is a much bigger and more definitive sort of “it”. One which sets everything up, gives rules to go by, and cannot be negotiated round. Well, the trouble here is that both the little “its” and the big “it” share in the same essential quality of “itness” – that is to say, they are objects which are, to some degree or other, within our ken.

However, the whole point of the advent of Hebrew monotheism is that it doesn’t fit into this picture at all: in fact it completely reverses it. What the advent of Hebrew monotheism looked like could, and can, only be detected in the radical reversal of desire which it produces. It is not that a new “It” begins to open up before our gaze, a gaze which has been brought into being by the relationships which have taught us who we are and shown us what we can see and desire. Instead, “I Am bringing everything to be” (Ex 3,14) starts to emerge as it were from behind our capacity for gaze, behind everything that is, by producing profound alterations of the patterns of desire which enable us to be “selves” at all, such that we find ourselves ceasing to be self-grasping “I”s who share in the creation of “its” by rivalry, defence, paranoia and projection.

So what it feels like to us to undergo “I Am bringing everything to be” is much more like a loss of all those sacred projections and “its” on whom we could depend and over which we could fight. And in their place, there is nothing at all in our gaze, no god at all. This is because the new pattern of desire which is calling us into being is without ambivalence, conflict, scarcity or danger and so the new “I”s, the new “selves” which will be the embodied symptoms of this new pattern of desire, rest peacefully upon their own given-ness by another. It is not what we see, but our capacity for gaze itself that is undergoing transformation as we find ourselves being given an equality of heart so that we see as we are seen, we know as we are known (1 Cor 13,12; Gal 4,9), without distortion, because “I AM” is enlivening us into being.

SEARCHING FOR AUTHENTICITY OF SPIRIT

Andrew Clitherow is a canon of Blackburn Cathedral, vicar of St Cuthbert's, Lytham, and the author of Creative Love in Tough Times. Last week he wrote a very good 'Face to Faith' piece for the Guardian - on releasing Christ from the cul-de-sac of formal religion. In it, he comments:

"[In authentic religion we learn to] make way for the Spirit of love to confront evolutionary-driven human behaviour. Instead of grabbing what we want at the expense of others, we discover that our humanity is fulfilled as we learn how to share what we have. Rather than stereotyping others by the roles we give them, we allow them to find their own way. Instead of excluding others simply because they are different from ourselves, we embrace the diversity of human life.

"Inauthentic religion, on the other hand, treats its followers like children and keeps them in an infantile relationship with God while inhibiting human development. It is a dangerous tool in the hands of those who have highly destructive weapons of technology at their fingertips. Utterly convinced they have God on their side, they might one day tear the world apart with a second big bang (de-creation by our own will rather than recreation by the will of God) that could lead to the end of us all.

"With so much at stake, it is sad that the church still largely conforms to patterns of genetically driven behaviour, inherited and proudly preserved through its traditions. Until people of good faith - both within the church and beyond its precious boundaries - can release the Nazarene Christ from the present cul-de-sac of formal religion, there is little chance that the church can give the postmodern mind any real hope for the future. For Christ belongs not to the church but to the universe, although to listen to the establishment you would think it was the other way around."

Good stuff, though once again some of the respondents on the website take the breath away with their ignorance and bile - proving that a profound sickness of spirit is not the monopoly of 'the religious', whatever the perils of religion - ones that Clitherow acknowledges in his argument in a way that his critics spectacularly fail to do in relation to their own (supposedly rational) world views.

UNSETTLING OUR JUDGEMENT

My friend Alison Goodlad has written a thoughtful review (here on Ekklesia) of Rowan Williams' fine book, Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgement (London, Fount, 2000). In a world overrun by violence, accusation and leaping-to-judgement, it offers a salutary and mature response to our various attempts to vindicate ourselves at the expense of others.

"Pilate's questioning assumes that there is only one way to live – and that is in terms of power and territory, defended by violence. The idea that there can be a sort of authority derived from complete transparency to God, a living in truth, which is not concerned with territory, makes no sense to him."

CONFRONTING PREJUDICE ON ASYLUM

The reaction to Peter Tatchell's humane Guardian article about asylum seekers and refugees ('Figures of disgrace') is a depressing reflection of the current state of the 'debate' - which is now being rejoined by the Tories, sniffing a populist issue on which New Labour has moved so far to the right as to leave little room for manoeuvring toward more sensible policy terrain. In his radical (anti-apartheid) days, Peter Hain once remarked that the letters column of the Daily Telegraph was "a litmus paper for latent British fascism". I'm sure he would have said the same for Comment-is-Free if he had read some of the asylum ripostes; though nowadays he is more likely to be found nuzzling up to Home Office minister Tony McNulty.

Partly in response to all this, I have written a piece about re-framing migration as part of a reassessment of global concerns, which I hope will be up on the Guardian site in a day or so. I will post the link here. Like Peter T, I too have personal experience of these issues. In the past I have been part of the 'Bail Circle' established by the churches and NGOs - which aims to provide support and finance to vulnerable asylum seekers facing appeals that are often hugely stacked against them. This means that I have seen first-hand the Home Office trying to wriggle out of humanitarian and human rights obligations. It is a very distasteful thing to witness. To say the least.

Of the several asylum cases I supported, a couple were refused. But being a 'failed asylum seeker' no more means that your claim is unfounded than failing an exam means you wrote lies. The government, as Peter Tatchell {pictured} says, has "shamelessly rigged the asylum system to ensure the failure of as many applicants as possible.... Some are being sent back to countries where they are at risk of arrest, jail, torture, vigilante attacks, death squads and worse."

It is truly appalling. And it bears little relation to the real issues, as I hope to show.

CONTINUING TO HAVE A DREAM

Indefatigable human rights campaigner, rainbow politician and Baptist preacher the Rev Jesse Jackson has been making quite an impact on his UK visit, which has had two aims: to mobilise black communities into social action, and to mark the United Nations day for the remembrance of the transatlantic slave trade and its abolition. How much impact he will have on the outlook of some fast-growing but culturally and religiously conservative black churches remains to be seen. But he has been characteristically outspoken.

"Is the Bible a liberation manual, or does it teach you to adjust to oppressive conditions? Adjusting to oppression is unbiblical. Jesus leads us to the cross, not to the swimming pool"... "What made Dr Martin Luther King and Jesus and Moses most significant was not unity, because none achieved unity. Jesus killed at 33, Dr King killed at 39. But they were minorities with majority visions."

"Britain has been quite astute at covering up the lack of progress. Tony Blair said Colin Powell was a great guy. But if he believed that, why didn't he have a black secretary of state?"

On Monday, the anniversary of King's "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963, Jackson flies back to Washington DC, and his first task will be to lead a protest outside a suburban gun shop. Earlier this month he was in Chicago, where a black man died after being "subdued" by police in his own home using a Taser gun and pepper spray. Last month he was in San Francisco speaking at an anti-gun rally. The same month, he was also in Ghana calling for greater integration, and action in Dafur.

HOPES, WORRIES AND FROGS

I seem to be on the 'wise quotations' trail at the moment. Sometimes a pithy phrase can be worth a dozen insights and pages of analysis. This morning I stumbled across something from Jean Rostand (1894 - 1977), the biologist and philosopher. He wrote and studied very widely, and maintained a humanistic agnosticism which was suspicious of the claims of comfortable ideologists of all shapes and sizes. Son of the playwright Edmond Rostand and the poet Rosemonde Gérard, his brother was the writer Maurice Rostand. He campaigned vigorously against nuclear proliferation and the death penalty. Here are some bon mots, with the odd commentary from me. Some of them are as if Wilde had met Swift in a railway carriage on a foggy evening. Wonderful. The last one is beyond price.

"To love an idea is to love it a little more than one should." (from De l’amour des idées , 1926)

"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us worthy of using it." (They might be enough to remind us not to use it, however.)

"In order to remain true to oneself one ought to renounce one's party three times a day."

"It is not easy to imagine how little interested a scientist usually is in the work of any other, with the possible exception of the teacher who backs him or the student who honours him [sic]".

"In politics, yesterday's lie is attacked only to flatter today's."

"Kill one, and you are a murderer. Kill millions, and you are a conquerer. Kill everyone, and you are a god." (This is why good religion is about learning not to entertain the gods)

"A couple are well suited when both partners usually feel the need for a quarrel at the same time."

"To reflect is to disturb one's thoughts." (Or not, in the case of much modern commentary)

"Theories pass. The frog remains." (Now there's a good theology of creation!)

ACTING AGAINST THE VIRTUES

"The conduct which disclaims the ordinary maxims of reason excites our suspicion and eludes our enquiry. Whenever the spirit of fanaticism, at once so credulous and so crafty, has insinuated itself into a noble mind, it insensibly corrodes the vital principles of virtue and veracity." — Edward Gibbon

See also Alasdair McIntyre's important book Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago, USA: Open Court, 1999).

(Hat-tip to Howard Ingham for the Gibbon quote)

DARKNESS CANNOT EXPEL DARKNESS

"Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate.... Returning violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that." — Martin Luther King Jr.

BEATING OUT THE RHYTHM OF JUSTICE

Black America and the civil rights movement is joining music fans from across the globe tonight in mourning the death of Max Roach [pictured], the pioneer jazz drummer. He not only moved the percussive arts forward massively and helped jazz become recognised as a serious art form as well as a dance hall pastime, he also took his social responsibility seriously. As the BBC and othe obituarists have noted: "Roach also brought politics into his art, becoming one of jazz's loudest voices for civil rights. In 1960 he created We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite, a seven-part movement that addressed slavery and racism in America." He and Martin Luther King Jr shared a mutual respect. More going up on NewFrontEars.

EKKLESIA SITE PROBLEMS

We have been experiencing a few problems on the Ekklesia site over the past 36 hours, and for a time it was down temporarily. Hopefully it will all be working fine by the time you read this. But it may be a day or so before more news and features go up. Sorry.

Footnote: Now sorted. Thanks to the good people at http://www.unitedhosting.co.uk/ and to Joe Baker at http://www.eleutheria.biz/ We recommend their services :)

BEYOND AUNT SALLY A/THEISM

At the end of last month I mentioned the dialogue between the late Marxist-humanist philosopher Ernst Bloch and the Christian theologian Jurgen Moltmann. On 11 August 2007, Peter Thompson [picture], who is lecturer in German politics at the University of Sheffield and is currently in the process of establishing a much-needed Centre for Ernst Bloch Studies, had a very good piece in the The Guardian, Religion is not a delusion but a quest for 'home'. Thompson writes as an atheist. Inter alia he noted:

According to Ernst Bloch, "only an atheist can be a good Christian and only a Christian can be a good atheist." Since Bloch's death in 1977, he has been largely forgotten as a significant contributor to the debate about the role of religion in society. But in an age when theism is constantly in the news, it is time for a more considered atheistic response to the reawakening of faith than those of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. What Bloch meant was that the Aunt Sally atheism as practised by those writers brings us no further in understanding either the historical or social roots of religion. For him it was not enough to posit religious belief as a delusion. The basis of belief, he said, rests in a social context.

The quotation from Bloch is actually from the Moltmann exchanges. Indeed, I think it might be Bloch who uttered the first phrase and Moltmann the second (at least according Jose Miguez Bonino, the Argentinian liberation theologian).

What characterised many past conversations between thoughtful non-believers and thoughtful believers (I am thinking about the progressive dialogues of the 1960s and '70s) was three things, it appears to me. First, a common commitment to building a better world. Second, a recognition that learning the distinctive language of the other was central to moving beyond unhelpful stereotypes and too-easy subsumptions. Third, a certain epistemic humility. These qualities are sadly lacking from the current 'debate' (at least the one the media and loud-mouthed activists foist upon us). We need more voices like Thompson's, and their equivalent among academicians of religion.

One key heir to the earlier ethos of seeking mutual enrichment rather than self-asserting approbation is Jurgen Habermas, whose work on structures and theories of rationality is formative within post-war European humanistic thought. It's noteworthy that while many of the atheistic headline-grabbers in today' s 'religion debate' (none of whom are specialists) start from a position of dismissiveness and contempt toward religion and its intellectual shaping within theology, Habermas has moved towards an ever-deeper engagement.

Eduardo Mendieta notes that, "[f]or Habermas, religion, as well as theology, is not only a precursor or prior stage of rationality, it is the very catalyst of rationalization." He is not a believer, but he understands that there is rationality to belief as to non-belief - and he recognises that it "is neither dead, nor completely taken over, [n]or supplanted, by philosophy. In fact, Habermas calls for their co-existence and fruitful dialogue. ...[He] goes a long way to show how religion continues to be generative for social solidarity (and unrest and enmity) and philosophical creativity" (Mendieta). Habermas's own primary dialogues have been with the Christian theologian Johannes Baptist Metz, with whom has had a long-term friendship, and with the Jewish theologian Gershom Scholem.

In English, see Habermas's recent essay 'Religion in the Public Sphere', European Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2006): 1-25. An interesting critical take - which challenges Habermas' readings of Aquinas, Hobbes and Hegel on the way to an alternative, theologically fecund account of practical reason rooted in textuality - is Nick Adams' Habermas and Theology. Mendieta has written a critical appraisal of this in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Meanwhile, the book many eagerly await in translation is Herman Düringer's Universale Vernunft und partikularer Glaube: eine Theologische Ausweertung des Werkes von Jürgen Habermas.

THE PITY IN THE POETRY

"In the poetry for the Third Symphony, I included a line which I had been ‘forced’ to write: “My sibling is the torturer”. It is a frightening line, and I do not know that I understand what it means. And yet I know instinctively that it is something that we have got to face up to; there is some element, which we have not yet understood, about why people do things in this violent form. I am afraid that unless we make some definite effort to understand we shall not get ourselves round this corner. My emotional responses in favour of the victims of war and in opposition to notions of military heroism do not necessarily make me a better person than the ‘heroes’."

Composer and life-long pacifist Sir Michael Tippett, Individual Responsibility, Talk at PPU AGM. See also my occasional music weblog, NewFrontEars.

TRUTH HURTS. IN A GOOD WAY

"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth" (Niels Bohr - courtesy of Huw Spanner)

"There are many, many possible readings of any given text. But some of them are still wrong." (Nick Adams)

"There is all the difference in the world between a point of scholarship and a matter of thought." (Mark C. Taylor)

‘A conversation cannot belong to one person the way a narrative can. [….] Conversation addresses the ‘free stranger’ in any interlocutor’ (PocketVisions)

RETHINKING CHRISTIANITY

This is the title of the latest in an energetic series of recent, semi-popular books which have poured forth from the pen of Keith Ward, Professor of Divinity at Gresham College, London, and Regius Professor of Divinity Emeritus at the University of Oxford, over the past few years. I say "semi-popular" because these titles (God: A Guide for the Perplexed; Is Religion Dangerous?, What the Bible Really Teaches and Pascal's Fire: Scientific Faith and Religious Understanding) have their roots in careful, scholarly thought. But they are still crafted with a clarity and engagingness that ought to communicate to intelligent people who otherwise lack a grasp of much of the technical, historiographical, interpretative and conceptual vocabulary which needs to inform discussion of God and belief at the toughest level - that is, way beyond the pigeon-holing, point-scoring approach of both 'muscular religion' (in its many modern guises) and the new 'muscular atheism' (of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Grayling, Hitchens, et al).

Publishers OneWorld Books (Oxford, 2007) sum up the remit of Ward's new volume, made available in hardback on 30 March - which happens to be my birthday - as follows: "The Christian faith is often charged with being outmoded and anachronistic. [Subsisting in what is taken to be] a monolithic institution rooted in the past, many critics have claimed that it lacks the resources to adapt to modern society's needs and advances. In Re-thinking Christianity, popular Christian theologian Keith Ward sets out to challenge this view, arguing persuasively that it is not only uncharitable, but refuted by historical evidence.

"Mapping the evolution of six major beliefs, from the Hellenistic restatement to the challenge of evolutionary theory, Ward demonstrates that Christianity has always been expressed in constantly changing ways in response to new knowledge and understandings of the world. Controversial, liberal [in the sense of open and critical], and confronting the principal questions facing Christianity today, Ward uses this basis to support the construction of his own ground-breaking theology: a 'systematic theology' for the post-scientific age." [My interpolations added]

Full review article continued at: http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/5572

KEEPING UP THE PRESSURE

The campaign to get practical recognition of the vulnerability of Iraqi translators is having an impact. Now there's an entertaining and poignant campaign video (below), as well as the petition on the government's website - which is continuing beyond its assigned date. "We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to offer asylum in the UK to the Iraqis who have been working as translators and in other capacities for the UK armed forces."



The code for including this clip on your own site via a more modest button is linked in this bloggerheads post. Sunny Hundal notes: "The Guardian is reporting today that in a case earlier this year the Home Office made special considerations for an Iraqi translator, and this precedence may have an impact on this campaign. There is no doubt now that this issue has ratcheted up the media agenda and the government may be forced to take action. Through gritted teeth, even Guido admits it." (Hat tip: Pickled Politics, again.)

THINKING OUT OF THE STORM

Two days ago I was discussing with a friend what might be an appropriate title for a new church study and reflection group here in Exeter. Soundings came to mind, because its maritime metaphor connotes both a commitment to unbounded intellectual curiosity, and the recognition that in order to plumb the depths we need some kind of anchorage in turbulent times - a hybrid notion which acts as a suitable antidote to two fashionable but misplaced intellectual trends.

The first is the idea that there can be such a thing as un-traditioned, wholly autonomous thought (this fails to recognise the true debts we owe when we try to think freshly, and the need to build a reflexive account of these into what we offer). The second is the idea that 'tradition' is inherently about fixity in method, scope, reference and interpretation (which fails to acknowledge the diversity and dynamism of what we inherit, build on and modify).

In terms of theology (the articulation and exploration of Christian hope in reasoned discourse) Ken Leech comments well on this in the fourth part of his Samuel Ferguson Lecture 2006 given at the University of Manchester on 19th October 2006 (The Soul and the City: Urban ministry and theology 1956-2006). Cultivating a constructive "abnormal discourse" - in the sense he evokes from Rorty - is certainly the kind of approach we are committed to on Ekklesia. Not least because the conventions surrounding the discussion of religion at the moment, both anti- and pro-, are so stiflingly inadequate and forgetful.

"Theology begins to change when the ground on which we stand begins to crumble, or, to change the metaphor, when we find ourselves in the midst of violent storms. This was how many Christians, not least in the urban areas, experienced the 1960s. The sense of turbulence in theology was expressed memorably by the Chicago-based theologian Langdon Gilkey in 1965.

The most significant recent theological development has been the steady dissolution of all those certainties, the washing away of the firm ground on which our generation believed we were safely standing. What we thought was solid earth has turned out to be shifting ice -- and in recent years, as the weather has grown steadily warmer, some of us have, in horror, found ourselves staring down into rushing depths of dark water. (Gilkey 1965).

"It was not surprising that a number of the influential writings of this period were inspired by Paul's navigational escapades recorded in Acts 27. Soundings, edited by Alec Vidler, was followed by Four Anchors from the Stern and Praying for Daylight, while the inimitable Eric Mascall contributed his Up and Down in Adria.

"However, this encounter with turbulence has led to new creativity, new approaches, new insights, new methods of working which have served to liberate, to break the mould, to challenge and subvert accepted ways of working.

"How does this occur? Clearly it is not inevitable. (Many Christians, confronted by storm, cry out, 'Hide me , O my Saviour, hide / Till the storm of life is past'!) A clue lies, I believe, in the notion of 'abnormal discourse' described by Richard Rorty in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Rorty argues that much discussion and thought runs along predictable lines, based on certain accepted conventions. Abnormal discourse is 'what happens when someone joins in the discussion who is ignorant of these conventions or who sets them aside. . .The product of abnormal discourse can be anything from nonsense to intellectual revolution, and there is no discipline which describes it, any more than there is a discipline devoted to the study of the unpredictable or of 'creativity' (Rorty 1980: 5, 320-1).

"I believe that much of the progress in recent urban theology has come from such abnormal discourse, supported by abnormal practice, which over time has become normal and common." [Pic: Kenneth Leech]

HELP SAVE IRAQI LIVES

Journalist and commentator Sunny Hundal of the excellent Pickled Politics newsblog writes: "I recently wrote of a blog-campaign to petition the government to help save Iraqis who helped the British military. As with other bloggers, I believe it is our moral obligation to help those who are most likely to face reprisals from the Al-Qaeda insurgents. Yesterday the campaign became bigger, with The Times making it a front-page story. The BBC is now reporting that Gordon Brown has said he will look into [the matter]. Good, but not good enough. Dan Hardie wants people to post responses from their MPs, so we can list supporters of this campaign and those who don’t care. Chickyog has a list so far... Please sign the Petition if you haven’t already."

SHARING BREAD, NOT CONSUMING LIFE

Just as early Christians were honorifically accused of atheism (because they refused to bow to the gods and graven images of the Roman Imperial pantheon), so they were also accused of cannibalism (because their rituals seemed to involve a claim to eat flesh and blood). The former accusation was, in a sense, true. As Nicholas Lash points out: Christians, Muslims and atheists have this in common, at least - they all disbelieve in 'gods'. The fact that much modern religious understanding and its corresponding refutation does not see it this way is a function, as Lash says, of the almost comprehensive ignorance of what could reasonably be called 'traditional Christian belief' in today's world. The Christendom settlement, in corrupting the Gospel message, has both rendered it harmless and neutered it intellectually.

Much of this is the fault of Christians, of course. And the history of our disputes about the sharing of bread and wine is a good example of this. While the early accusations of cannibalism were misinformed and childish (more poignantly, politically directed against subversives), the church that did a deal with empire soon came to live out the message about it proclaimed by its accusers. It began, indeed, to eat itself and other people, consuming flesh in the fires of mutual admonition and denying bread to the hungry - actually, not figuratively.

In this context, the simple Christian meal of bread and wine, by which the death of Jesus at the hands of overbearing religion and politics is remembered, and through which a vision of a life-giving alternative world is created, takes on a fresh and demanding significance. This is especially the case in an age where religious thought and ritual is so readily co-opted to a death-dealing agenda. But, as is often the case, the solution is not to be found in abandoning the tradition, but in rediscovering it in a fresh, life-affirming way, true to its radical roots.

In large measure this is what my article How the church should learn to eat itself is about - looking at the dynamics of 'communion' as lived experience and ritualised good behaviour, rather than arcane metaphysics. It is adapted from a sermon I was honoured to be asked to preach during my recent US vacation, at Hyattsville Mennonite Church in Maryland. This is a church which models inclusive community It is part of a living Christian tradition where 'Eucharistic practice' is often built into the weave of life, even if the Catholic theology that underpins it is not always emphasised, not least because of its past misuse. The original text can be found here (note: *.PDF - Adobe file).

UNVEILING THE ART OF ETERNITY

Though it has mysteriously decided not to release it on DVD, the BBC has thankfully been re-broadcasting (on BBC 2) its superb series on early Christian art - a rich mixture of the history of society and ideas, reflective spirituality, theological revisionism and artistic creativity. Art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon sets out to unravel the mysteries of painting from the pre-perspective era - or rather from the era in which a decision was made to abandon mundane naturalism for a transcendent topography.

Tellingly, Raphael described the solidly representational Arch of Constantine as "brutal and primitive". This is a judgement which with hindsight we might share politically, if not artistically. The subsequent 'approved' Mosaic tradition accommodated Jesus to Apollo. Humility gave way to power. Meanwhile, Eastern Christian iconography sought to overcome the iconoclastic objection (you cannot and should not imprison the divine in an image) by creating images that are designed to be looked through, rather than at. They are windows onto a world without end.

The first programme in the Art of Eternity series (tonight) traces the beginnings of Christian art in the declining Roman Empire, Egypt and medieval France, and discusses the ideas which lay behind the transition from classical art to the first icons. Over the next two weeks, we move to Istanbul and the Byzantine Empire, then on to the evolutionary perspective of the Renaissance. Wonderful. Lux continua.

AN INTERNATIONAL CHALLENGE

Both Save The Children and the British Red Cross have launched appeals for the South Asia flood emergency, which has now claimed 500 lives and displaced 21 million people. Aid is going in, but the situation in many regions (especially Bihar in India) is pretty dire - and governments and multilateral agencies need to be doing much more.

Part of the problem is logistics. The BBC reports: "the UN's World Food Programme has been distributing emergency aid to flood-hit areas. The agency estimated that one million people had been directly affected and some were in need of urgent assistance. In Nepal, many roads in the flooded areas have been cut and bridges have been washed away. It is proving hard for aid agencies and the government to bring help. They have distributed food supplies to some communities, but many people who are still living in damaged mud and thatched homes complain it is not enough." More background on the monsoon can be found here, and accompanying this post is a map of the impacted region

A SCANDALOUS LACK OF PERSPECTIVE

As Bob Churchill commented [yesterday's post] regarding the South Asia flood tragedy - a massive monsoon which has displaced millions of people and will cause economic and social devastation in the region - the BBC broadcast news has given it relatively low prominence so far: though at least it was front page web news and made the headlines. Here is the US, it didn't make it into any of the TV news I saw yesterday. I have just scoured The Washington Post, a highly creditable paper. There is nothing on the front page and nothing on the international pages, where news stories with links to US interests (Iraq, Mexico, Afghanistan and France) are highlighted. Then on page 16 - that is, the back page of the front section - there is a column called World News In Brief' where the plight of millions of Indian, Bengali and Nepali citizens is dealt with in a column inch. I'd like to say that this beggars belief, but sadly it does not. It shows what an incredibly distorted view of the world the 'mainstream' media in the rich world still has.

SOUTH ASIA FLOOD EMERGENCY

The BBC reports that almost 20 million people have been displaced as some of the worst floods for years have hit a wide swathe of northern India, Bangladesh and Nepal. Roads have been washed away and hundreds of villages have been cut off by swollen rivers. NGOs and development agencies are acting swiftly. Donations can be made via Christian Aid, which operates with secular, multifaith and church partners - and promotes relief and development irrespective of creed.

ONGOING ADVENTURES OF ASBO JESUS

What a fantastic 'toon site by multimedia mirth maker Jon Birch. For non-British readers, an ASBO is an Anti-Social Behaviour Order. As Jon says: "… the courts here award them to people who are deemed to be constant trouble in their neighbourhoods… presumably according to their neighbours!" In some cases they bring liberation and in others oppression. Plus they blur the line between criminal and non-criminal behaviour in ways that human rights lawyers have deep suspicions about and many young people resent.

GORDON BROWN AND 'DOING GOD'

How will Gordon Brown keep the faith? (Ekklesia).

The new British Prime Minister will be less overt in his faith agenda and less establishment in his church instincts, suggests Simon Barrow. But religion and public life will remain hot political issues.

HARRY POTTER AND THE FEVERED IMAGINATION

'Reading Harry Potter too religiously' - Ekklesia culture and review section.

Religiously constructed rows over sorcery, metaphor and meaning in Harry Potter are hardly new, as Simon Barrow has personal reason to know. He suggests we all chill out and finding meaning not menace in the narrative. (Which he probably won't read, by the way).

INSPIRED AND OFF-CENTRE

She is a guide and provocateur for atheists and Christians, for revolutionaries, recidivists, romantics, and realists; for religious and non-religious; for philosophers, factory workers, sociologists, cooks and truck drivers. “In France”, declared the New York Times, “she is ranked with Pascal by some, condemned as a dangerous heretic by others, and recognised as a genius by all.”

For Andre Gide she is “the best spiritual writer of the twentieth century.” And T. S. Eliot, whose conservative political and ecclesial outlook was in many respects the opposite of hers, concluded: “We must simply expose ourselves to the personality of a woman of genius, or a kind of genius akin to that of the saints.

Truly, Simone Weil (1909-1943) has a unique voice which needs to be heard again in the twenty-first century – a supposedly ‘post ideological’ era in which views and ideas are hardening in spite of (or perhaps because of) cultural diversity, spiritual confusion, secular angst and social fragmentation.

Weil was, in many respects, a disturbed person who lived life in fragments. Yet there is an unsettling wholeness to her vision which offers connectedness without uniformity, spirit without dualism, rebellion without inhumanity, nourishment without gluttony, and God without illusion.

Perhaps the best place to start with her work is Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil’s first ever publication. This is now available from Routledge in an edition which includes not just a foreword by friend, interlocutor and interpreter Gustave Thibon, but also a postscript he wrote in 1990 and which was published in English for the first time in an edition re-issued in 1999.

Stephen Plant, who I had the pleasure of working with through the international committee of Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, has written a short introduction to Simone Weil (as well as one of my other lode stars, Dietrich Bonhoeffer) – one which is both appreciative and honest.

Reading Weil will always leave you unsettled at one level. But also inspired. It will not leave you unchanged. She is an eccentric in the technical (rather than purely pejorative) sense of the word: off-centre - when 'centre' is understood to mean "dominant ideas and ways of life".

“Our life is impossibility, absurdity. Everything we want contradicts the conditions or consequences attached to it. Every affirmation we put forward involves a contradictory affirmation. All our feelings are mixed up with their opposites. It is because we are a contradiction – being creatures – being godly and infinitely other than God… Impossibility is the door of that which is beyond nature. We can but knock at it. It is someone other who opens.”

[translation by the author – for Mary Metzler]

LEARNING TO LIVE IN HOPE

“Hope is believing in spite of the evidence, and watching the evidence change.” (Jim Wallis)

“ 'Til everything's right, we ain’t here no more” (Jake Krieder, quoted by Mary Metzler - describing it as a 'Zen Mennonite' kind of statement!)

“History belongs to the intercessors, who invoke the future into being” (Walter Wink)

“We do well to remember that we are human beings, not just human doings” (Eric Fromm)

"It takes no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to have hope" (Jonathan Sacks - thanks to Alison Goodlad for this one, from The Dignity Of Difference. See also his To Heal A Fractured World)

Antonio Gramsci, for whom I have great respect, is famous for commending an attitude to life which he summed up as “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.” This sparked an exchange between the German humanist-Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch (whose classic Der Princip Hoffnung, 'The Principle of Hope', was later translated into English by my friend Stephen Plaice) and the political theologian Jurgen Moltmann (best known for his A Theology of Hope). They agreed that ‘hope’ and ‘optimism’ are not the same thing.

At least as a cultural phenomenon, optimism is the haphazard trust in the idea that things will somehow work out. Hope, on the other hand, is an active commitment to seek out and practice the good, the just and the true in situations of seemingly intractable wrong, injustice and falsehood – knowing that to succumb to an emaciated version of ‘reality’ is to decide in favour of non-change and to distort ‘realism’.

Whereas the world is, we discover as we explore it, a process of inexorable change, encapsulating both growth and decay, renewal and degradation, life and death. Similarly, John Macmurray is right to claim that Descartes would have been nearer the truth to say “We act, therefore we are” instead of “I think therefore I am”.

In this context, to believe in the necessity of God is not to posit some ‘supernatural addition’ to the world, but to recognise in the world process, where God is given in excess or not at all, that what is essential stasis (hatred, killing, intellectual rigidity, social fixity) cannot have the final word. For such things have no word to speak, only words to deny.

God is not “finished being”, such as we are, or rather imagine ourselves to be. Instead, God is better thought of as endless potentiality ranged against the kind of human arrogance that improbably imagines it has adequate grounds, in the frame of this life, to decide what the full-stop is and where it comes. In that realisation resides true hope.

The kind of atheist that the later Jacques Derrida was, and the kind of Christian believer I seek to be, are united in this conviction about “refusing the full-stop”. The kind of believer that Jerry Falwell was, and the kind of atheist that Richard Dawkins is, seem to have decided otherwise, on the grounds of two incompatible certainties which I find equally non-compelling.

They are, I recognise, options. Just not ones I find either rational or faithful. [Picture: Jurgen Moltmann]

AGAINST THE GRAIN OF THE TEXT

This from former Archbishop of York Dr John Habgood, reviewing an excellent new collection of essays for the Times Literary Supplement - Duncan Dormor and Jeremy Morris, editors, An Acceptable Sacrifice? Homosexuality and the Church, SPCK Publishing. p/b, 190pp., £12.99.

The Bible is frequently claimed to be unequivocal in its condemnation of homosexuality. While there are texts which might at first sight give the claim some credibility, it is clear from reading them in context that they are not actually answering the kind of questions which today’s protagonists on both sides want to ask. There are many twenty-first-century questions which could not even be asked in biblical times, because the concepts which underlie them, that of homosexual orientation for instance, did not then exist. There is also an important sense in which the Bible is not a book of answers at all. It is a description of, and invitation to enter into, a historical process through which, it is claimed, the nature of God has been progressively revealed. Furthermore, the key ethical insight which forms the culmination of the entire story is the revelation of God as love. To extract a number of texts purporting to be about homosexuality, and to condemn a whole group of people for a personality trait which is not of their making, may look at first sight like faithfulness to the biblical text. In reality it is not to treat the Bible seriously, through failing to take account of its ultimate message about the sovereignty of love and the process by which this came to be.

That such formerly mainstream (and, frankly, pretty conservative) views of Scripture are now being viewed as wild radicalism in some sections of the Anglican Communion and elsewhere, shows just how far things have moved in recent theological debate - and how entrenched current antagonisms are. An Acceptable Sacrifice? suggests some constructive ways forward beyond the unedifying shouting match we now have. As David Paisley observes: "Much of the content is framed as a question or situation to be explored, rather than territory to be defended. That's refreshing in its own right."

A CLIMATE OF CHANGE

At this year’s WOMAD world music festival (27-29 July 2007) UK-based international development agency Christian Aid is asking visitors to join its 'Climate Changed' campaign as they listen to acts from developing countries which are struggling to adapt to the devastating effects of climate change.

Nazmul Chowdhury from Practical Action in Bangladesh, said: "Forget about making poverty history. Climate change will make poverty permanent."

More information here. [Picture: Cut The Carbon walk laces]

LIFE, FOR ART'S SAKE

"Art is a birth, and you can't go to a teacher and find out how to be born... you have to struggle... until that image, the one that comes out of your need to create, emerges." ~ Malcah Zeldis, 1978.

"You don't make it with your hands. You form it with your hands. You make it with your mind." ~ Edgar Tolson, 1971.

VOICES FROM THE MARGINS

Someone has asked me how my encouragement of putative bloggers was going. Well, I sent the link to four people (three female, out of interest). So far it has been one 'sorry, no', two heavily qualified 'maybes' and one yet-to-reply. I'm not giving away any secrets, but let's just say that my theory about how blogging is predominantly gendered are being borne out. But of course, there are people I have inexcusably overlooked; who I really would have sent it to if I had thought. (That's the danger of advertising your intentions. Everyone can see you goof.) Like Doug Hynd, from the Anabaptist Association of New Zealand and Australia, for sure. He has recently started Subversive Voices. I'm about to add it to my roll.

JUST DRINKING... AND MORE

"Give beer to those who are perishing, wine to those who are in anguish; let them drink and forget their poverty and remember their misery no more. Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute." Proverbs 31.6-8.

(Thanks to Sarah Hill for mining this delightful take on human dignity, a good bit of imbibing and the search for social justice).

WHAT GENE SAID TO ROWAN

This from an interesting sermon on the Good Samaritan by Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. About whom many people only know that he is gay, it seems. Hopefully Rowan Williams knows a bit more now. But he still won't invite him to the Lambeth Conference 2008.

A little while ago, in the only time that the Archbishop of Canterbury ever deigned to see me, we were having a little "chat", and at one point in our conversation, he was explaining to me that, actually what The Episcopal Church should have done prior to electing and consecrating me, was that we should have figured all this out theologically and intellectually... We should have come to a common mind, and then passed canons and and then done this thing. And I said to him with as much respect as I could, "Your Grace, it seems to me that all of the great steps that [the Church] has taken, have been as a result of our doing the right thing, and only then, "thinking" our way to what we did. It's not the other way around. I mean, if we had waited for instance in this country for everyone to have been on the same page about civil rights, there would still be separate drinking fountains, wouldn't there? And if we had waited until women were valued as equal and full members of society and the human race, for goodness sakes, all of that discrimination would still exist."

[Photo: Bishop Gene Robinson]. Thanks to The Religious Left for this snippet.

LIVING BEYOND DEATHLY FEAR

In his fine book ‘Search for Reality in Religion’ (1965, re-issued 1984), which I have been re-reading recently, the personalist Quaker philosopher John Macmurray writes: “[Removing] for ever the fear of death… is a tremendous gain in reality; for until we reach it – however we reach it – we cannot see our life as it really is, and so cannot live it as we should.”

He continues: “The fear of death is the symbol in us of all death; and fear is destructive of reality. It is true that one can gain this familiarity with death and use it falsely. We can say, as so many of my contemporaries did after the war, 'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’ But it may well lead us to the opposite conclusion. We may feel that life is precious because it is short; and because it may end at any moment we must live so that every day would be a good day to die in, if death should come. Without this knowledge of death… there can be no real knowledge of life and so no discovery of the reality of religion.”

I have written a longer piece for Ekklesia which explores this theme in relation to religious violence and the Gospel. It is called Re-evangelizing the religion of death.

Incidentally, Macmurray - a non-believer and soldier who became a Christian, Quaker and pacifist - was one of the finest philosophers of his generation. He was also a committed democratic socialist. Ironic, some would say, that Tony Blair cites him as a formative influence, along with the equally unlikely (from a Blairite perspective) radical Anglican Catholic, Kenneth Leech. (You there, Ken?).

The person who pointed me in the direction of Macmurray, incidentally, was the late Alan Ecclestone, dissident priest and writer on prayer. A wonderful man. See Tim Gorringe's tribute and exposition of his life. [Pic: John Macmurray, (c) the JM Fellowship]

A NEW WORLD SINGING

An absolutely wonderful poem by Niyi Osundare [note that this is (c) the author, with grateful acknowledgement]. From Selected Poems 1992, a verse which is appearing on London underground trains. Talk about an oasis in the desert...

I sing of Change

I sing of the beauty of Athens
Without its slaves

Of a world free of kings and queens
And other remnants of an arbitrary past

Of earth
With no sharp north
Or deep south

Without blind curtains
Or iron walls

Of the end of warlords and armourers
And prisons of hate and fear

Of deserts
Treeing and fruiting
After quickening rains

Of the sun
Radiating ignorance
And stars informing
Nights of unknowing

I sing of a world re-shaped.

GETTING STUFF INTO PERSPECTIVE

There is a powerful, personal piece from my valued friend Deirdre Good on Ekklesia (with acknowledgments to the excellent Episcopal Cafe), about suffering, God, blame, prejudice and the difficult need to let go of our desire to be 'in control' - both rationally and spiritually.

Stuff happens. Accidents. Mental illness. Death. Throughout human history, people have asked "Why?" To ask "why" is to presume that stuff happens for a reason, that behind events lie causes we can discover. It's a question from a privileged perspective. It suggests human omniscience...

Jesus' disciples, seeing a person blind from birth and wanting an explanation for his condition, asked, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" Jesus' reply shatters the snare of looking at illness as cause and effect: "It's not that this one sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be manifest in him." Stuff happens, Jesus says. There's not necessarily a reason for it. Put the emphasis elsewhere. It's not what happens but what you do with what happens that matters.

See the full piece here.

The same theme from St John is picked up in Rowan Williams' powerful and arresting post 9/11 reflection, Writing in the Dust (Hodders, 2001). It's a small essay (about 8,000 words) which merits re-reading in today's continuingly fearful climate. It connects the 'big issues' in life with those small human gestures, attititudes and responses which count more than we can ever know. [Pic: The Way of Suffering, (c) the Gandy Gallery]

THOUGHTS FOR SOMEONE WHO COULD BE TEMPTED TO BLOG

There are a couple of people out there who faithfully correspond with me and often make my day with the things they say: wise, funny, insightful or just very, very human... in the best sense of that term. (The guy who was vile to a shop assistant yesterday was also being human, but in a less helpful mode). Anyway, when I read my friends' e-pistles, I often think, "I wish so-and-so could see that!" Of such things are blogs made. Well, the ones I bother with, anyway. But the people who have the best things to say are often the most nervous, diffident or unsure about actually doing so. Unlike those of us with unblessed assurance. So I'm going to post (below) my virtual advice to someone on the verge of possibly, maybe (who knows?) being tempted into the blogosphere - which Maggi Dawn tells me I am already a member of. And I trust her. She also has a good, first-base definition of blogging: "thinking out loud" about life as it is from where it comes to you.

I shall now email this link to the people concerned so they know it's them. (If it's not you, please don't be offended. I'm a bit absent-minded, as well as being a rubbish correspondent.)

You really should do a blog. In my humble opinion. You write very well, and it is a good way to develop thoughts which others will bless you for (and, given how you are, only curse you for if they are bitter and twisted - which is not your issue or responsibility). Of course it goes without saying that cyberspace is full of ego and nonsense. But there is real spiritual enrichment out there, too. Plus genuine laughter and insight. And we sorely need more of that. The thing is, if you are sharing thoughts and feelings with friends in correspondence and they tell you (like I am right now) that what you say is helpful.... well why not make this available a little more widely - or some of it, anyway? People often say "it seems a bit egocentric to have a blog". True. But it could also be selfish not having one, by the same token. Things are a little more complicated (and a lot easier!) than we sometimes think. Even Buddha non-exists in cyber.

I stress that 'some of it', however. Because I think the contemporary trend to evacuate the vulnerability of the private into a welter of self-justifying public rhetoric (and surface-surfing neuroses) is a disturbing one. We are all threatened by the aloneness that is part of the human condition - and which is the only way we come into and go out of this world. In the cyber-age it is easy to expunge this, to mask it, or to project it onto others without realising. A blog can also be a way of negotiating that personal challenge, interestingly. Not an unimportant task, since much of the shittiness of the world is about people being unable to negotiate their boundaries or do anything other than punish others for their own fear and (or of) failure. This is a chance to turn that stuff into a positive, and to release the creativity and hopefulness which is also often denied, dear friend.

But I'm getting too heavy. None of this means that this there isn't a place for living in the sheer playfulness of the moment. or the ecstasy of the fleeting. Rowan Williams has said that prayer is wasting time with God. Go waste, profligately. Likewise, some of the silliness of the web is just fab. And I greatly admired Davina Macall's wry comment when being interviewed on TV about Big Brother: "The thing with me is that there really aren't that many hidden depths - but there are still loads of still-to-be explored superficialities!" I'm quoting from memory... but going around thinking you need to get points for being 'deep' is the most pathetic thing of all.

As with blogs, one of the reasons I like Facebook (apart from the fact that, it seems, I'm basically a cyberslut) is the fact that you get to see the daft or trivial side of some "serious" people. And vice versa. This is what we rightly call their "human" dimension - since to be human is inherently daft, messy, glorious and weighty: all at the same time. And the blogosphere can hold those together in ways that other media lack. What Simone Weil calls gravity and grace. Though she struggled to reverse those two.

Anyway, if you did decide to dip your toe into blogworld I would happily recommend and link yours to other people I love, enjoy and value. And remember, it doesn't have to be a chore. You can decide to blog regularly (like my friend Johan Maurer's excellent 'Thursday commentaries') You can work it into your routine (like I do, though of 'routine' there is not nearly enough), or you can use it as an occasional cipher and not feel any responsibility for regularity - or lack of it. Not caring too much is an importnat and learnable skill. Blogging is about not being a sausage. Except when you need to be. Or you're a weary pilgrim. Above all, have fun - grow - share - laugh... and discover. Something like that. OK, off for a cuppa. Hope I haven't put you off. Just write the darned thing, OK?!

Now, what was I supposed to be doing? Ah yes...

PS. When I got my first laptop, Carla J Roth - who I have the immense good fortune to be married to - tellingly observed: "Darling, that's marvellous - you never need have another unpublished thought again!" Though I think she borrowed it from Joe Orton, or someone equally droll... I only mention this because she will hate me mentioning it (though not too much). And because she doesn't read this stuff. Do you, dear?

PPS. None of this means that you couldn't be doing something far more useful with your life. But it sure beats shopping.

PPPS. No, of course, I'm not saying that private correspondence should give way to blogging. Heaven forfend! But it's not a zero-sum game. Plus the public can be more personal and the personal more public than we sometimes realise... Both/and. Yes.

ADVICE FOR DELUSIONISTS

Both those tempted to heroic despair and those tempted to denial in the face of the world's multiple lesions, which Weil embraced with frightening intensity...

"We must not seek the void, for it would be tempting God if we counted on supernatural bread to fill it. We must not run away from it either." Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, p 23.

Note to a friend: Do you know Simone Weil? I'm as big a fan of hers as I am of Bonhoeffer. She was way off kilter... the boundary between madness and genius, hope and despair. (The place where those of us who are not trhere should not pretend to be. Which is what she is saying here, I think.)

NOT SIMPLY FEET OF CLAY

"As human beings, we understand the world through simile, analogy, metaphor, narrative and, sometimes, claymation." - Bruce Mason.

(Thanks to Steven Sullivan for this gem, which has been virally marketed through his email signature file for some time, and which comes from a discussion on post-modernism and science on Pharyngula. Not a notably balanced, useful or informed one, admittedly - at least on the philosophy 'side'. But Dr Mason deserves to be canonised for this one... in the literary sense.)

POLITICS AS THE POSSIBILITY OF THE ARTFUL

Gordon Brown, artfully manoeuvred into Downing Street, will have little room to operate in for his global social justice agenda. But what tiny space there is will be created by the power of imagination and the pressure for change coming from below. Look at the example of Northern Ireland. And global warming, for that matter. There's miles to go, but we wouldn't be anywhere without the influence of civil society and the mobilisation of cyber-influence.

SPEAKING OUT OF THE WHIRLWIND

It is a sad reality that some of the greatest platitudes come out of the mouths of enthusiastic believers, while it is the sceptics who (more encouragingly) get closer to theological wisdom. Correspondingly, the crisis of Christendom - an ecclesial domination system whose interests have often obscured the gospel - has been well understood by a thoughtful minority from Kierkegaard onwards. But not usually by those most enmeshed in church polity. Combining those two thoughts, here is the late English composer Sir Michael Tippett (of whose music and passionate free-flowing artistic humanism I am a devotee), hitting the nail on the head. From among his disparate writings collected in The Age of Aquarius, I believe. Though it might have been Music of the Angels.

"I have .. not the slightest idea where healing will come [from] because the moment of complete dereliction for the Christian civilization has probably not been reached and so the moment of God's voice from the whirlwind has not come. Though perhaps the whirlwind has come! And that is the only kernel of truth I see - that God will be found in the refuse bin as of old - the stone that has been thrown away."

I know I have quoted that before, but it keeps coming back to me with great force. Incidentally, my recently revived and rather eclectic music blog is here. Something to keep life balanced and connected - music, that is. Not necessarily blogging ;)

CHANGE WITHIN ISLAM AND WELL BEYOND

There's a really interesting and important piece in the International Herald Tribune, Only traditional Islam can do it, by Phillip Blond a senior lecturer in philosophy and religion at the University of Cumbria (also an established Radical Orthodoxy luminary) and Adrian Pabst, lecturer in theology at the University of Nottingham.

What they are essentially arguing for is a strongly tradition-rooted resistance, from among Muslims, to the legitimation of terror within present, politicized Islam. Contemporary Islamic fundamentalism is, they point out, modern and heretical rather than 'traditional' - contrary to the mistaken assumptions of many commentators and a superficial reporting culture. (I think it's inevitably more cloudy than that, but in the final analysis they are right.) So, they write, "given that we are losing the battle of hearts and minds, we would be well advised to chart a different path. By encouraging an Islamic renaissance and reviving traditions that the fundamentalists have so violently suppressed, Muslim youth might be diverted from their present course." By contrast, trying to make Islam less Muslim (as if it was all corrupt, and non-religious modernity is all benign) is unworkable and counter-productive. Read it all here.

This is clearly related to the current news issue of who gets to be imams, how they are formed and equipped, and where they come from. That has actually been a Muslim (and inter-faith) concern for many, many years. And those like Philip Lewis in Bradford, and others, who have tried to get it recognised have often been ignored or misunderstood. So good on the BBC for finally getting there, courtesy of the University of Chester. But the media and government are only just coming up to speed with these things - and they still have no idea about how behind they remain and how much they don't know. Witness, in contrast to Blond and Pabst, Robert Piggott's simplistic meme-transmission that imams just need to be more modern and less foreign if they are to be any good. In other contexts this would be seen as deeply patronising and even racist, and not without warrant.

So I'm essentially in agreement with Blond and Pabst, I think. What will stop Muslims, Christians and other religionists (as well as humanists, atheists and non-believers) from developing into bigots, murderers and haters is not trying to tell them that they must become less Christian or Muslim (say) if they are to be civilized "like us". It is the recovery of deep traditions of compassion within each of these ways of believing, becoming and behaving.

I am really only qualified to talk about Christian faith here, which I am personally convinced offers a vital path to transformation and change - in spite of the distortions and crimes that have often been committed in its name. But the liberating message of the Gospel can only be surfaced by simultaneously identifying and combating the many corruptions of that message theologically (at the core of its intellectual and spiritual imagination). This requires active communities committed to 'the other way' which is, we will discover as we walk it, the way of Jesus in his filial relation to God and others; a way which has been obscured by numerous attempts to co-opt a Christ figure into the designs of imperial religion and the religion of imperialism.

Here I probably have a bit of a different emphasis to my RO friends. It seems to me that their narrative is so over-determined by the "tradition is good, modernity is bad" paradigm, that it is in danger of becoming yet another kind of Romanticism (with a huge Catholic cloak). That is, either a plea by an elite to let them civilize others, or a cosy smoothing of tradition and a dismissive abrasion of the contemporary. I don't think that's quite what they intend, but the presenting rhetoric moves in that direction.

According to St Matthew, Jesus spoke a more interesting, realistic and paradoxical truth about bringing things old and new out of the storehouse. But aren't "new things", by definition, found outside storehouses? Yes and no. It is the courage of deep convictions (ones that can't simply be dreamt up out-of-the-blue by heroic individuals) which enables us to embrace the best of the new, to innovate faithfully, to hope for change, to be grounded as we move into excitingly uncharted territory. (I love the here-and-now, in spite of its many warts, warps and weals!)

But this process is also continually reciprocal. Encountering goodness in the contemporary (think of the rightful pressure of feminism and the women's movement on the patriarchal assumptions of church polity, say) enables us to discover those elements in our tradition (the ekklesia of equals) which were actually way ahead of their time. It's just that we didn't get them. The newness of the kin-dom of God is startling. These 'traditional' recoveries can, in turn, challenge the excesses and corruptions of the present (the idea that either biology or gendered culture are destiny, say, which have been problematics within feminism throughout its history).

To make this kind of thing possible, we need living moral communities (congregations, networks, associations) which are also interpretative communities - those who take conscious and collective responsibility for carrying the past into the future in ways that free us, unite us, and respond to visions of humanity and the world which are enriching, compassionate, non-violent and expanding. This is a massive task, I know. The alternative belief in some round-the-corner political fix, or the temptation to seek a new piety (some current secularism has an unhealthy belief in its own inherent goodness and the evil of that which it contends, say) may look overwhelming.

But, being a Christian, I really do believe that the resources of an unlimited, fathomless, unbargainable, wholly non-competitive love can re-make us and enable us to be re-makers - if we start to help each other behave with the humility and commitment which is, in fact, a true life of prayer. (Prayer means "living beyond our means" as fallible creatures graced by God, rather than people who have to rely just on willpower).

What's depressing is that many Christians appear not to believe this at all, to judge from their public behaviour. They appear to believe that the Gospel somehow warrants them to compel others, to seize 'right' by might, and to defend their interests with every weapon at their disposal. Those convictions are the core of the US religious right, and of the newer UK "we are being persecuted" lobbies, sadly. And their distorted definitions of what is 'right' and what 'interests' really matter are, of course, central to the problem. Jesus suggested that those who seek to defend life to the death end up losing it. 'Christian ideology' fails to see this in any way.

Meanwhile, for all its failings (and I am sure they are many) Ekklesia and its allies are trying to point in a very different direction. I'd like to think that RO are too, but they seem to want to reinvent Christendom. Which is a very bad idea indeed, in my book. I've enjoyed the beginnings of an exchange with John Milbank about this, and hope it can continue at some point. Meanwhile, his Centre of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham has helpfully put up a link to the BBC Radio 4 Beyond Belief discussion on Christian Socialism which featured John and my colleague and friend Jonathan Bartley. [Picture: East London Mosque]

THE POLITICAL ART OF THE IMPOSSIBLE

Thanks to Deirdre Good (specifically her fine blog On Not Being A Sausage) for pointing me in the direction of Daniel J. Mahoney's 'City Journal' review of Vaclav Havel's memoir, To the Castle and Back, published by Knopf. The article explores the twists and turns of his interestingly textured thought. Whether politics can be substantially re-grounded in a notion of what John D. Caputo calls "a passion for the impossible" without a commitment to the transcendent as more than simply notional (otherwise it remains just a re-working of the C19th Romanticism of "the sublime"), is the interesting theological question inscribed (but not really explored) on the body of Havel's work - which commendably takes "doing the truth" - a quirky Johannine phrase, actually - as its datum. In many respects it could be described as the negotiable space between those two overlapping but distinctly different "apostles of the impossible", Jacques Derrida and Jean Luc Marion (q.v. on FaithInSociety).

Mahoney writes: "In his post-1989 books and speeches, Havel [pictured] continued to defend a moral vision of politics that he called “nonpolitical politics” or “politics as morality in practice.” He identified this vision with the demanding but liberating task of “living in truth.” Havel refused to identify politics with a dehumanizing “technology of power,” the notion that power was an end in itself. Instead he defended a moral order that stands above law, politics, and economics—a moral order that “has a metaphysical anchoring in the infinite and eternal.” His speeches as president, many collected in English in The Art of the Impossible (1997), were artful exercises in moral and political philosophizing, enthralling Western audiences."