[169.1] FOLLOWING CHRIST IN A VIOLENT WORLD

While media attention undestandably focusses on the fallout from televangelist Pat Robertson's recent hateful comments, it is worth reminding ourselves that responsible US Christian leaders (including people from key seminaries and academic institutions) earlier signed a powerful statement, Confessing Christ in A World of Violence, which gives a very different response to the use of force. Its signatories, up until February 2005, included ecumenicals, evangelicals and Catholics.

They write: Faithfully confessing Christ is the church's task, and never more so than when its confession is co-opted by militarism and nationalism.
* A "theology of war," emanating from the highest circles of American government, is seeping into our churches as well.
* The language of "righteous empire" is employed with growing frequency.
* The roles of God, church, and nation are confused by talk of an American "mission" and "divine appointment" to "rid the world of evil."
The security issues before our nation allow no easy solutions. No one has a monopoly on the truth. But a policy that rejects the wisdom of international consultation should not be baptized by religiosity. The danger today is political idolatry exacerbated by the politics of fear.

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[168.1] THE BBC AND BRITISH MUSLIMS: BRIDGES & WALLS

One of the most reliable sources of comment and perspective on religious issues in the news comes from Bartholemew's Notes on Religion. The latest entry (permalink here) concerns John Ware's BBC documentary on the Muslim Council of Britain and reactions to it, most notably Madeleine Bunting's in The Guardian, which I commented on earlier. Overall, and upon further reflection, I think Bartholemew has this right. However, if "McCarthyite" means, in general terms, hectoring and accusatory, I don't believe Bunting was "unbalanced" to raise it in the context of other things she says. Indeed, part of that context, I would argue, has to be awareness of the unprecedented levels of media attention the MCB and Sir Iqbal Sacranie have been subject to.

This isn't to excuse particular views (like those on suicide bombings in Israel and the Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie, with which I profoundly disagree). But it is to require realism about what it must be like for a tiny and previously little-known organisation suddenly to find its every breath attended to. This is something media professionals and commentators find it hard to come to terms with from the other side of the probing camera/microphone.

Moreover, as Bunting said (and as even some of the stauncher MCB critics admit), while the virtue of a broad umbrella group like MCB is that it is able to relate something of the breadth of opinion among different sections of its constituency, the corresponding disadvantage is that it can only really do this by being a ring-holder rather than an arbiter.

Having worked for Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, I have some experience in this delicate area. And from that vantage point, I also had occasional opportunity to see that the MCB (coming from a particular background, and without any equivalent of the lengthy history of Christian ecumenism) was genuinely trying to do discharge the resulting tension honourably. That doesn't mean, as Bunting pointed out, that it hasn't or won't make mistakes. Or that we are obliged to agree with it.

It is, of course, necessary and desirable in a plural society that religiously constructed opinions, especially those which turn out to be a matter of life and death for people they affect, should be open to careful scrutiny in media both internal and external to the community/tradition from which they arise. In that sense Panorama was quite justified in its enquiries. But I still believe that a greater degree of care, respect and circumspection should have been demonstrated - not least because building bridges rather than walls between Muslims and non-Muslims is especially important right now.... and because good journalism is compromised by media hype.

Meanwhile, here are some Bartholemew favourites. Wry, angular and informative. After all, being properly worthy doesn't mean being inexcusably dull.

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[167.1] LEARNING TO FOLLOW MY LEADER?

I have been wondering for some time about what it might mean for there to be a correlative to ‘leadership’ called ‘followership’, and if so how the former might be rescued from the unwanted imposition of individuated power and the latter from the mere self-encoding of patterns of domination.

This is a matter of importance to me for two reasons. First, because most of the time in life we are, whether we reflexively know it or not, followers; but sometimes we become leaders. And in both instances we are ill-equipped by the dominant discourses of our age to discharge these functions in ways which could be genuinely described as hopeful and liberative. Second, because, as a Christian, I am caught up in the multiple meanings of Jesus’ “follow me”, since I have discovered in the Way of Jesus a subversive authenticity which makes the path of discipleship (well realised by someone like Bonhoeffer, poorly realised by someone like me) a necessity for re-understanding and re-engaging the world in which I find myself. (Questions surrounding Pope Benedict XVI and the assumptions of Christendom are not irrelevant here, either.)

To put it differently, in seeking ways of following Jesus as Christ today, what I experience is not capitulation to ‘foreign occupation’ or the reduction of myself to some sheep-like docility, but rather a re-awakening, a disturbance and an (often painful) opening. But why is this so? And what could it mean for (say) the re-consideration of ‘religion’, the re-description of ‘secularity’, the re-expression of church and the re-doing of institutional life in a complex, urban culture?

For these and many other reasons, I have on my ‘must read’ list Robert P. Scharlemann’s The Reason of Following: Christology and the ecstatic I (University of Chicago, 1991), of which there is a small preview here. I have recently been reading the same author’s Inscriptions and Reflections: Essays in Philosophical Theology (University Press of Virginia, 1989), which I picked up at Unsworths Bookshop earlier in the summer during a sojourn in London. It’s fantastic. Scharlemann opens up new possibilities for understanding Christian formulae in the contemporary by re-understanding theology as what he calls an “afterthinking” (metanoiesis) based on the inversion of traditional ontology.

Anyway, in The Reason of Following, Scharlemann suggests that Christology represents a form of reason and an understanding of selfhood. To quote the blurb, he traces “the connections between the ‘I am’ of the God who spoke to Moses, the ‘I am’ of Christ, and the ‘I am’ of autonomous self-identification. How, he asks, can the self that spontaneously responds to Jesus’ ‘Follow me!’ be compared with the everyday, autonomous self? What is the nature of ‘following’ on the part of those who answer the summons of one whose name is ‘I am’?

“Pursuing these questions, Scharlemann develops a Christological phenomenology of the self – an account in which following means not the expression of the self in action or reflection but rather self-discovery in another person [emphasis added].”

“With a deep sense of both culture and philosophy, Scharlemann [also] distinguishes the forms of reason involved in ‘following’ from those in ethics, aesthetics, and other modes of religious philosophic thought. His … readings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German theological and philosophical traditions provide an introduction to lesser-known thinkers such as Hermann and Picht as well as a profound critique of major figures such as Descartes, Heidegger, Fichte, and Kant.”

“Finally Robert Scharlemann outlines a program for a more systematic and rounded presentation of what Christian doctrine might mean in the contemporary world.”

Sounds fascinating, and an important preparation for immersion in management speak, organisational theory, leadership studies, change agency, and all the other disciplines that presuppose those patterns which theology properly seeks to unpick and re-weave – theology being, as Charles E. Winquist once put it, a “nomad discipline” which is a work against “the disappointment of thinking.”

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[166.1] BEING RE-ORIENTED BY THE PAIN OF GOD

The other day I chanced upon an interview with the Catholic theologian and sociologist Gregory Baum on the online journal Philosophy and Scripture, which examines the multiple relationships between the disciplines of critical reflection and communally authoritative textual traditions. What particularly attracted me was Baum's comment about the tension between esse and agape at the end of the excerpt below (see italicised section).

Here is more than a routine rehearsal of the theodicy conundrum. Baum points, whether consciously or not, to the genuine contradiction between the god of onto-theology and metaphysics, rightly critiqued by Heidegger, and the biblical God's character as pain-bearing love, affirmed by Bonhoeffer from his prison cell. To embrace the latter is necessarily to deconstruct the former, and to begin to speak of God 'beyond being'.

This takes us further along the road opened up by Kazoh Kitamori in his Theology of the Pain of God (John Knox Press, 1965) and subsequently by Douglas John Hall Hall -- a step beyond both the modified Hegelianism (though see Gillian Rose) and the separation of ethics and theoria to which Surjit Singh points.

[Incidentally, I note that Radical Philosophy didn't think that Rose's death-bed baptism was worth mentioning in its obituary; whereas arguably, and certainly for her, it was a singular event that made sense of her life's work. Agapic love is both the source and resource for our existence and for our capacities to give.]

OK, here's Baum:

"The mystics claim that in the process of opening themselves to God, there comes a time—sometimes a long time—when they are so much aware of the obstacles to God in their heart, so much aware of their inner fragmentation and outer superficiality, that God seems to disappeared altogether for them, so much so that they wondered if they had become atheists. They called this the dark night of the soul. But they also say that you have to wait patiently in the night, for it will end through the opening of a new and surprising window. Today, I have the impression, many Christians pass through a different dark night of the soul. They are deeply disturbed by the suffering in the world, the cruelly unjust maldistribution of wealth and power, and the indifference of the official churches to this scandalous situation that they find it increasingly difficult to believe in divine providence. They feel that they are becoming atheists. Some Christians—friends of mine among them—have never left the dark night. They became non-believers because they were inconsolable. They became agnostics for theological reasons—for which God will reward them. Yet other Christians pass through this night and eventually come out of it. They learn that God is in solidarity with the victims of history. A Jewish rabbi once wrote that the Holocaust has brought the end of “untroubled theism.” The more we believe that God is love, the more difficult it is to believe that God exists. We don’t want a faith that does not raise uncomfortable questions. We long for a faith that is both serene and troubled."

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[165.1] SPEAKING THE LANGUAGE OF LOVE

A comment from the late philosopher Paul Ricoeur: "We are overwhelmed by a flood of words, by polemics, by the assault of the virtual, which today create a kind of opaque zone. But goodness is deeper than the deepest evil. We have to liberate that certainty, give it a language. And the language given here in Taize is not the language of philosophy, not even of theology, but the language of the liturgy. And for me, the liturgy is not simply action; it is a form of thought. There is a hidden, discreet theology in the liturgy that can be summed up in the idea that 'the law of prayer is the law of faith'."

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[164.1] MAKING MURDER MUNDANE

In a manner that can only be described as reluctant, US right-wing televangelist Pat Robertson has been forced to apologise for comments that he made on Monday calling for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. This isn't the first time that Robertson has advocated the use of political violence while exercising his ministry as a Christian preacher, either. And two days after the 9/11 attacks in New York, he concurred with Jerry Falwell that the American Civil Liberties Union, abortionists, feminists, gays, pagans and the liberal pressure group People For the American Way should "share blame" for the terrorist outrage, because they had "caused God to lift the veil of protection which has allowed no one to attack America on our soil since 1812." This too elicited what turned out to be a partial retraction.

Though the religious right is brimming with denunciations of "evil" and "violent" Muslims at the moment (making few if any distinctions between different strains of Islam), it seems that its chief spokespeople have a permanent beam in their own eye concerning what can only be called "redemptive murder". What is really shocking about this is how casual, ill-thought-out and immune to criticism it is. Tragically, some who use the name of Christ do so primarily as a cipher for their own nationalistic prejudices, co-opting misconstruals of Christian doctrine into a Manichean worldview that legitimates all kinds of abuse in the name of faith.

It is surely the duty of Christian leaders to speak and teach against the demonising theology and the religious roots of violence, every bit as much as it is the responsibility of those in Muslim communities to confront the legitimation of violent extremism among those who make dangerous use of Islam. The whole question of Christian Zionism is among the specific concerns involved in this.

A good source of general information on the US situation is TheocracyWatch, a project of the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy (CRESP) at Cornell University.

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[163.1] THE TRICKY ART OF DISPOSSESSION

From Nicholas Lash's Three Ways of Believing in One God, SCM 1992/2002 (which I'm re-reading at the moment)...

"All prayer, all worship, all life lived in the discipline of discipleship, is, at heart and centre, dispossessive. We need continual and exacting schooling because, at every level of behaviour, language and imagination - from politics to private life, from business to religion - we seek some safety, some security through ownership and power. And yet, however much we kick against the pricks, we do not own the words we say, the things we do, ourselves, our friends, our circumstances (and, when we try to do so, there are always forces outside our control which mock all such Promethean ambition). In liturgy and attentive contemplation, praise and prayer, we may learn to give back our language and our understanding, and ourselves; [to] learn patience, the surrender of security, sometimes in darkness not unlike Gethsemane."

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[162.3] REFLECTING ON 'GOD'S ROTTWEILER?'

For those more familiar with Vatican politics, Channel 4’s hour-long documentary last night about the new pope, ‘God’s Rottweiler?’, (3BM TV, produced by David Wilson and Grace Chapman) contained precious little by way of fresh insight into what kind of leader Benedict XVI is set to become. But it echoed a host of questions which continue to resonate in the struggle for authentic, outward-looking church in the twenty-first century.
Accompanied by a melodramatic orchestral backbeat and a somewhat incriminating, tabloid-style commentary, the programme charted the profound impact of both Nazism and the upheaval of 1968’s revolutionary stirrings on Josef Ratzinger, turning him from a relative moderate at the Vatican II Council to a convinced conservative on the Throne of St Peter.

I have written a longer, more discursive review / appraisal based on the programme, called After absolutism: the world, the church and the papacy. It has extensive internal weblinks and also looks critically at Philip Blond and Adrian Pabst's International Herald Tribune piece (19 August 2005), entitled 'Pope Benedict's Challenge to the Status Quo'. See also the earlier FinS piece, Why the Pope's Christendom Alternative Will Not Do.

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[162.2] SEARCHING FOR ALTERNATIVES IN IRAQ

The tragedy of post-invasion Iraq is highlighted once again by a truly harrowing covert report from Haditha which "exposes the limitations of the Iraqi state and US power on the day when the political process is supposed to make a great leap -- a draft constitution finalised and approved by midnight tonight."

It ill-behoves those of us who always thought the war was a wrong-headed way of wrestling democracy from dictatorship to engage in any kind of "told you so" over such terrible events. Likewise, the importance of the current constitutional bartering, supremely difficult though it is, should not be dismissed. We must continue to hope and pray that politics can triumph over terror. But it is nevertheless grossly irresponsible for the Western coalition to go on pretending that it is "business as usual" in "the new, democratic Iraq".

Barring a miraculous result this evening, a radical re-think is needed about international involvement in the change process. And it has to go much further than simply following occupation with abandonment. The advocacy delegation report (*.PDF file) on Iraq from Mennonite Central Commitee is frank and concise. However, what is being discussed in alternative forums at present is, it has to be said, still piecemeal.

Meanwhile, Paul Rogers' weekly OpenDemocracy columns on 'the war on terror' remain among the best summaries of what is at stake globally. He is now an international security correspondent, having formerly been Chair of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford -- where Philip Lewis (a vital commentator on Islam in Britain) is also based. In addition, see the Oxford Research Group and the Global Policy Forum's Iraq crisis page.

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[162.1] THROWING MUD AT MUSLIMS DOESN'T HELP

Media pundits and politicians are putting British Muslims under intense scrutiny in the wake of the London bombings in July. Every move they make seems only a breath away from the approbation of a commentator whose knowledge of Islam in Britain was probably next-to-nothing a few weeks ago. In a well-balanced article in today's Guardian, the paper's former religious affairs correspondent Madeleine Bunting examine's last night's BBC Panorama programme ('A Question Of Leadership') criticising the Muslim Council of Britain, which has been accompanied by some strongly-worded articles in The Observer.

The problem with this stuff is that in a drive to "uncover the truth" it falls prey to the kind of cartoon-style analysis which we ought to expect the BBC and broadsheet newspapers to resist. It is also counter-productive, perversely encouraging those who have an interest in portraying British society as "anti-Muslim", and disempowering followers of Islam who are genuinely trying to come to terms with the challenge in their midst and to develop effective responses from within their own tradition. In this context, the problem is not criticism per se, but ill-formed or sensationalist criticism. Panorama's centrepiece technique of "guilt by association" has unfortunate parallels with those used to discredit Professor Tariq Ramadan. As Bunting writes:

The tiny, volunteer-run MCB doesn't have the power to police the views of its disparate membership. [Sir Iqbal] Sacranie and the MCB have a tightrope to walk. On the one hand, the government and non-Muslim Britain are piling on the pressure that they deliver a law-abiding, loyal ethnic minority. On the other, an increasingly restless younger generation of Muslims criticise the MCB as far too moderate, a sell-out establishment stooge cosying up to Tony Blair.

There are plenty of legitimate criticisms to make of the MCB and Sacranie - and [Panorama presenter John] Ware details some of them - such as Sacranie's reprehensible refusal to attend the Holocaust memorial service last January and his decision to attend a memorial service for the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Yassin. The MCB bears all the characteristics of a diverse migrant community's struggle to develop a common voice - and it makes plenty of mistakes. But Ware has thrown so much mud around in the course of his programme that much more of it will stick than is deserved.

What is deeply troubling is how exacting British society is becoming of its Muslims. A new set of 'cricket tests' are being imposed on British Muslims - they are expected to sign up enthusiastically to every aspect of western secular society and to jettison any part of their intellectual heritage that is critical of the west. They are expected to keep their faith entirely out of politics (yet faith plays a crucial role in US politics). Set the bar high enough and all will fail - the consequences of that on the streets of Luton and Bradford will be disastrous, and not just for Britain's 1.6 million Muslims.

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[161.1] CROSSING OUT SACRIFICIAL SYSTEMS

Having just co-edited a book, Consuming Passion, which explores different aspects of the meaning of the death of Christ in a violent world, I'm struck by the anger with which critiques of 'penal substitution' doctrine are met in some church circles. The reductive power of this imagery, incomprehensible to many in a post-Christendom and secular context, is such that it makes reading biblical texts in a different way almost impossible for some Christians. This is because, I think, it rests on endemic but elusive necrophilia within human culture -- something that is particularly vulnerable to 'religious' construals of the kind that legitimate the capital punishment to which Jesus was subjected.

The outstanding Catholic theologian James Alison (who has a chapter in Consuming Passion on 'the intelligence of the victim') provides a useful counterpoint to all this in his Thoughts on Atonement, derived from a talk in Brisbane, Australia, this time last year. Here he defends the thesis "that Christianity is a priestly religion which understands that it is God’s overcoming of our violence by substituting [Godself] for the victim of our typical sacrifices that opens up our being able to enjoy the fullness of creation as if death were not." The whole piece is well worth scanning, especially for those who have been raised to think of Christ's killing as the ultimate endorsement of a vengeful God who demands blood for honour.

Alison retorts: "All sacrificial systems are substitutionary; but what we have with Jesus is an exact inversion of the sacrificial system: him going backwards and occupying the space so as to make it clear that this is simply murder. And it needn’t be. That is what we begin to get in St John’s Gospel: a realisation that what Jesus was doing was actually revealing the mendacious principle of the world. The way human structure is kept going is by us killing each other, convincing ourselves of our right to do it, and therefore building ourselves us up over and against our victims. What Jesus understands himself as doing in St John’s Gospel is revealing the way that mechanism works. And by revealing it, depriving it of all power by seeing it as a lie."

Incidentally, I'm chuffed to see that Consuming Passion is in the Church Times Top 10 this week (well, it is August...) and that it has its first Amazon review in the US.

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[160.1] CIVIL PARTNERSHIPS ARE A BLESSING

At last a senior figure in the Church of England has had the courage to speak out affirmatively on the matter of civil partnerships, and to criticize the mean-spirited and fearful response of the House of Bishops on the UK legislation, which comes into effect in December 2005. The person prepared to stick his head over the parapet (not for the first time) is Peter Selby, the Anglican Bishop of Worcester, with whom I had the pleasure of working in Southwark Diocese in 1991-2. His full statement can be seen on the Worcester Diocese site.

Back in 1999 I wrote a small booklet called Towards Communion: Recovering Human Sexuality as an Ecumenical Concern (Coleman Press) which offered a reframing of some of the core theological issues, and included reference to ways that Peter has also courageously sought to do that over the years. He is often characterized by the media as "a liberal", but for anyone familiar with his work, that is a vast oversimplification. His liberality arises from a deep intellectual and spiritual engagement with the Christian tradition and the demands of biblical interpretation -- in much the same way as Rowan Williams in The Body's Grace (slightly curiously reproduced by iConservatives!) and elsewhere. Its concern is not cultural accommodation, but the radical nature of the Gospel.

Incidentally, in addition to his Guardian column which I referenced earlier on FinS, Giles Fraser wrote a very good Church Times piece on civil partnerships, called "Why you need love and more". Thanks to David Wood for reminding me about it. The excellent Thinking Anglicans website has also been following the saga bit-by-bit, for those who want the whole scoop.

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[159.1] DIFFERENT WAYS OF MOVING THE CENTRE TO THE EDGES?

Several obituaries for Brother Roger Schutz have pointed out, inter alia, that as well as being forward-looking in many respects, leading (male) members of the Taize community have also been generally uncritical towards inherited church structures - not least the Roman magisterium - on controversial issues like gender and sexuality. This is true, and indicates just how unadaptive our dominant labels are for handling the inevitable contradictions of actual religious life. Is Taize 'liberal' or 'conservative'? Well, yes and no and both...

When Taize began, it broke many of the accepted rules and was greeted with suspicion by both Protestants and Catholics. However, over the years it grew considerably in recognition and 'respectability', occupying a creative-but-loyal position on the shifting edges of the Church. This is a different location and role to that of prophetic counter-testimony or campaigning, to be sure. But both can be aspects of the movement needed to enable the tradition to recognise its vocation to be open and faithful.

As I suggested yesterday, in the ecumenical arena and in terms of prayer and peacemaking Taize has sponsored some giant steps forward. This should be celebrated. But of course it has its limits, and it is those that make InclusiveChurch, Catholic Womens Ordination, the Anabaptist Network and other more 'subversive' initiatives equally vital. It's not a zero-sum game.

Back in 1984, during a visit to base ecclesial communities in Italy (all of them living in the shadow of the Vatican), I remember somone from our British visitors' group asking a community member whether they saw themselves as being 'inside' or 'outside' the Church. The reply has stayed with me ever since, and went something like this: "We see ourselves as an element of the church, but oriented to the margins, like Jesus. As such, the institution needs us, whether it knows it or not. Without prophecy it will ossify and turn in on itself even more. On the other hand, our community needs the institution too, otherwise we risk losing our biblical and liturgical roots. And it's also important that we don't allow those who run the structures to substitute power for charism without noticing it."

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[158.1] TAIZE MOURNS THE LOSS OF BROTHER ROGER


It was only in the early hours of this morning, in the middle of a sleepless night, that I heard the appalling news on the radio of the murder of Brother Roger Schutz at the Taize community on Tuesday. I have never visited the community myself, but like millions of people across the world, I am familiar with its music, its liturgy, its place in ecumenical Christian hope, and its example of peacemaking in an era of continuing violence and revenge.

At a stage in history when religion is again in the news for most of the wrong reasons, many of those associated with Taize model the possibility of a Christian conviction which is at one-and-the-same-time rooted in the tradition, contemporary, thoroughly outward looking, and focussed on the alternative way of Christ for a troubled world.

As far as I can recall, my first contact with the work of the communitywas through a Good Friday liturgy about twenty years ago, as we sung the invocation of the crucified rebel, "Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom." No doubt that will be the prayer of many for Brother Roger right now.

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[157.1] SEEKING LIFE BEYOND OUR PADDED CELLS

"Our technological civilization has cushioned life on all sides, yet more than ever before, people helplessly succumb to the blows of life. This is very simply because a merely technological culture cannot give any help in the face of life’s eternal tragedy; here only an inward foundation can help. Externalized as they are, too many people today have no ideas, no strength, nothing that might enable them to master their restlessness and dividedness. They do not know what to make of trials, obstacles, or suffering—how to make something constructive of them—and perceive them only as things that oppress and irritate them and interfere with life."

Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster (courtesy of The Daily Dig)

Foerster was an eminent German astronomer, Christian philosopher and pacifist (1869 - 1966). His work was ostracized and banned during the Nazi era. The agony of which he wrote was not just others', but his. And bizarre though it may seem, his is precisely the quotation that came to mind for me during the denouement of the latest Channel 4 Big Brother 'reality' series.

Yup, I know, 'enlightened' people are supposed to sneer at BB, or at least recoil in horror at the cruel, facile and venal nature of it all. It can indeed be sad, depressing, boring and annoying, as well as exhilerating and astonishing. It connects with the emotional lives of a huge number of people, and to understand nothing about why this may be is simply to choose one kind of padded cell over another.

Besides, people-watching is endlessly fascinating and illuminating. And as Germaine Greer famously commented, the point about the show isn't that it's "the end of civilization", but that it is civilization -- or a sizeable chunk of it.

In which case, you can't help noticing that the kind of reflectiveness and interiority that helps people to know themselves in relation to others, and as part of a larger pattern, is substantially absent. Not just in the BB house, but in our culture... perhaps even in ourselves, if we are courageous enough to consider it. (Much easier to condemn the BB housemates as 'vacuous', huh?)

On the positive side, even in this televised human jungle people can still recognise innate decency (Eugene) in the face of someone deemed 'criminally uncool' by the lifestyle police. On the negative side, there is no identifiable basis for forming community, little to sustain the see-saw of feelings or the bottomless quest for 'recognition', no way out of the hall of mirrors. Welcome to modern western culture, 2005.

But is the average church much better? More 'worthy', perhaps. Rooted in a (contested) tradition, for sure -- though not one that is much understood or explored, in many cases. Less frank about its own reservoir of darkness, pain, pride and passion, almost certainly...

And more of a zone of prayer? I wonder. Not prayer as in the superficial attempt to wrestle favour or meaning from a tribal god; but prayer as in "living life as gifted", abandoning the struggle for manipulation that finds its apotheosis in technological mediation and its nadir in the debasement of ourselves and fellow human beings.

For as Rowan Williams has suggested, prayer is the antithesis of grasping. It is a radical reordering which does not depend on performance, status, success or failure. And in that sense it addresses precisely the restlessness and dividedness which Foerster sees eating away at us, personally and collectively.

RW: "What a lot of the literature talks about is a sort of gathering in of awareness into yourself, which sounds a strange way of putting it but it simply means our thoughts and fantasies are usually all over the place and running off after this, that and the other, and part of the process that is going on is the sort of steady and quiet drawing in and settling of all these tentacles that are wriggling out to lay hold of the world - you gather them back in and that's a gathering into the heart which the Orthodox writers talk about, and what Western writers mean by the simplification of the heart in prayer. By this we simply become what we are and just sit there being a creature in the hand of God."

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[156.1] WHY THE POPE'S CHRISTENDOM ALTERNATIVE WILL NOT DO

In his first full-length broadcast interview over the weekend, Pope Benedict XVI called for a renewal of Europe's Christian roots - in a way that contained some echoes of the "Christendom awake" tendency in the Catholic Church, and beyond.

In an exchange which might be regarded as rather deferential in the more robust interview culture of the British media, the pontiff said some interesting and worthy things. But equating the Gospel message with "Christian society" and "Christian culture", which is his natural philosophical and practical tendency, is something I find profoundly worrying. (That's why I'm an Anabaptist kind of catholic Anglican, I guess!)

Referring to global challenges facing the West, the pontiff declared: "I believe civilization,with all its dangers and hopes, can only be tamed and led back to greatness if it recognises again the sources of its power" [emphasis added]. The Pope has a long-standing interest in Europe.

Although he has talked about the incompatibility of Christian faith with power and wealth, Benedict's latest comments will be seen by many as a reassertion of the Church's traditional commitment to Christendom, with its belief in the pre-eminence of Christianity in public institutions. His predecessor, John Paul II, similarly argued for a strong affirmation of God and faith in the now sidelined European Constitution.

But like many other Christians, Catholic and Protestant, I believe that an 'establishment' role for faith in England, as in Europe as a whole, weakens the subversive energy of the Gospel by privileging the church and compromising the plurality of public life - which is important not just to democracy, but to the integrity of Christian witness.

More encouragingly, the Pope also said to Eberhard von Gemmingen that it was a mistake to think of Christianity as "composed of laws and bans" and as "something toilsome and burdensome". Instead, it should be "like having wings", he declared. But Benedict's critics point out that the negative image is one he has himself strengthened through his resolute opposition to birth control, liberation theology, and open debate about gender and sexuality issues.

World Catholic News noted yesterday that an interview with a pope is a rare event. Pope John Paul II, during the 26 years of his pontificate, only gave a few media interviews. The most famous was the extended 1994 exchange with Italian journalist Vittorio Messori, which became the book 'Crossing the Threshold of Hope'.

Benedict XVI's Vatican Radio interview this weekend took place at the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo.

[adapted from Ekklesia: full article here].

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[155.2] RESIST THE OVERWORK ETHIC (4)

In my experience, most cartoons in Christian publications are, to use a technical theological term, rubbish. An exception is the post-St Gargoyles Church Times strip by Dave Walker, whose po-mo irony may well be lost on some of its more staid readership. But not on you, I'm sure. Try his fabulous satire on the Windsor Report, for a start. Then immerse yourself in the wibsite.


Another long-standing (and widely syndicated) favourite of mine is Pontius' Puddle, by Mennonite artist and humourist Joel Kaufman. It's mainstream enough to connect with regular churchgoing audiences, and subsversive enough to get under their skin without overwhelming them with irritation. The tiny example on the left is for promotional purposes only... for as Joel himself says:

Notice! all the cartoons in this web site are copyrighted (though some shouldn't be) and may not be reproduced by any means, electronic or mechanical (memorizing and shouting the captions from a soapbox, however, is encouraged) without permission. Failure to heed this warning could invite legal action and a case of unsightly warts.

(And, as a footnote for the literally minded, I should add that God is not, contrary to popular rumour, a big bloke in the sky.)

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[155.1] RESIST THE OVERWORK ETHIC (3)

Since I'm about to hit FaithInSociety with some more "heavy stuff" (as one recent correspondent put it) on biblical interpretation, Bonhoeffer, post-metaphysics, apocalyptic terrorism and, er, Big Brother, I thought a relaxing smile might come in handy first. And where better to start than with Ship of Fools' lip-smackin' competition for the most off-colour religious joke?

In announcing the competition, the good Ship declared: "Ridiculing religious beliefs, criticising religious practices and offending religious people is surely a mission from God." Certainly much better than blowing people up or bombing their countries, I would have thought. But I'm not overwhelmingly confident that all of the Christian media will quite see it that way. Not if the Jerry Springer operatic fiasco is anything to go by.

There's serious point in all this, of course. It concerns, on the one hand, the division between religious offence and religious hatred; and on the other, the boundary between bad taste and bad faith. (I have written about the latter at greater length in a chapter called 'The cross, salvation and the politics of satire', in Consuming Passion.)

At the moment the jury is out at SoF, so you'll just have to weigh the merits of the 951 entries and wait with bated breath like the rest of us. Meanwhile, Steve Goddard, a Ship of Fools founder and commissioning editor, said he "wanted to get away from the stained glass Jesus who can't be laughed at or with ... The whole thing is a voyage of discovery for us. We are a conversation, not a campaign." He hopes the Christian church can learn from the Jewish tradition of humorous self-deprecation. Amen to that.

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[154.2] RESIST THE OVERWORK ETHIC (2)

"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They do not toil, neither do they spin. And yet I declare to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." (Jesus, according to St Matthew). Interestingly this features on a Leeds Postcard, of which I have a few. Wonderful stuff - a king unfavourably compared with a humble plant.

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[154.1] ECUMENICAL ACCOMPANIMENT FOR PEACE & JUSTICE

In yesterday's piece about the occupied territories and the land, I should of course have mentioned the vital Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine-Israel, which I was privileged to have some links with through my last job. The Middle East Forum of the Churches' Commission on Mission is the body within Churches Together in Britain and Ireland which has helped widen the base of support for EAPPI in these islands. Anyway, the encouraging news is that, for the first time, a Muslim woman from South Africa has joined the programme as part of the latest batch of mainly Christian workers to go out for a minimum of three months. The picture shows Huwara checkpoint near Nablus, by the way.

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