[247.1] PLAIN LANGUAGE, AWKWARD TRUTHS

The weekly reflections of Johan Maurer, a US Quaker writer and academic, are always worth reading. This one links the depth of tradition with something very topical, reminding us that it is action and character which gives the lie to, or supplies the truth of, what comes out of our mouths and keyboards...

The first time I wrote about plain language, it was a reflection on the meaning of plain language in Quaker culture. Now I'm writing on plain language as exemplified by the word "torture."

These are not unrelated themes. Early Friends wanted to be plain in the sense of "transparent"—for the ego and its external vanities to get out of the way so the Holy Spirit could shine through. Similarly, words were to be vehicles for truth, not for lies (hence no double standards for public speech, no oaths in the courtroom) nor for idolatries (hence no days and months named for pretender-gods). Even some of our humour is based on this "plain" concept of bald truth. "A flock of white sheep," says one Quaker passenger on a train to the other, pointing out the window. "Yes, they're white ... at least on this side," responds the other.

The word "torture" has been a fine example of plain language. Now, thanks to our nation's administration, even the word is being tortured, and I have lost my sense of humour. In the service of the latest imperial presidential philosophy, the White House spokesman is put into the impossible position of denying the plain and obvious facts: his bosses want the freedom to go beyond the boundary that the Geneva Conventions have set. [Continued here]

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[246.2] THE REAL CHOICE BEFORE US

If you haven't yet discovered the world of Australian cartoonist and poet Michael Leunig, it's worth checking him out on curly flat and elsewhere on the web. What I like about him, apart from his often dry humour, is that he manages to puncture the self-regard of human beings (especially in their 'religious' mode) with knowing gentleness, and to point towards a depth of experience which is fully funded by a Christian perspective but able to speak well beyond those bounds -- because it is about life, not loyalism.

So I was delighted and a little surprised to see that Rowan Williams, in his wise presidential address to the General Synod of the Church of England (an occasion more likely to induce depression than hope for many of us, but well documented by Thinking Anglicans) decided to quote a typical prayer from Leunig at the end of his peroration:

There are only two feelings.
Love and fear.
There are only two languages.
Love and fear.
There are only two activities.
Love and fear.
There are only two motives,
two procedures, two frameworks,
two results.
Love and fear.
Love and fear.

God help us to find our confession;
The truth within us which is hidden from our mind;
The beauty or ugliness we see elsewhere
But never in ourselves;
The stowaway which has been smuggled
Into the dark side of the heart,
Which puts the heart off balance and causes it pain,
Which wearies and confuses us,
Which tips us in false directions and inclines us to destruction,
The load which is not carried squarely
Because it is carried in ignorance.

God help us to find our confession.
Help us across the boundary of our understanding.
Lead us into the darkness that we may find what lies concealed;
That we may confess it towards the light;
That we may carry our truth in the centre of our heart;
That we may carry our cross wisely
And bring harmony into our life and our world.
Amen.

[Sample cartoon (c) Michael Leunig]

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[246.1] THE CHANGING FACE OF BELIEF

A new opinion poll conducted by the BBC suggests a persistence of religious belief in the UK, a growth in outright secularism, and widespread ignorance of other people’s convictions among different faith communities.

It also indicates that while a fifth of people in the UK feel less positive about Islam since the London bombings in July 2005, the view of the majority is unaffected.

Commissioned for BBC News 24’s Faith Day, the poll of a representative sample of adults across the country examines how religious belief is continuing to impact British identity. (Continued on Ekklesia)

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[245.1] LOOK IN THE LIGHT OF WHAT YOU'RE SEARCHING FOR

... so that the truth will out, though not if you force its meaning or try to possess or twist it to your own ends. It's manna, after all. As Simone Weil suggests, in an exposition that becomes slowly more meaningful to me:

We do not have to understand 'new things', but by dint of patience, effort and [proper] method to come to understand with our whole self those truths which are evident.

The most commonplace truth, when it floods the whole being, is [therefore] like a revelation.

We [also] have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will. The will only controls a few movements of a few muscles... What could be more stupid than to tighten up our muscles and set our jaws about virtue, or poetry or the solution of a problem?...

Inner supplication is the only way, for it avoids stiffening muscles which have nothing to do with the matter [in hand]...

Attention [to reality], taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. (Adapted from Gravity and Grace)

As for the methodological part - well, broadly speaking, epistemology models ontology. Or to put it another way, the true nature of something, in both its apparent availability and non-availability to us, conditions the appropriate means by which we might patiently, experimentally, gradually get to 'know' it.

In the case of an object or the relation of objects this is relatively straightforward. In the case of persons, not at all straightforward. And in the case off God, strictly speaking, it is impossible. For as Weil also explains:

We have to believe in a God who is like the true God in every respect, except that [this God we believe in] does not exist, [because] we have not yet reached the point where God exists.

How we 'know God', then, the true God who is beyond our capacity to exist, is by learning deeds of love, companionship, justice, peace and compassion -- not by metaphysical speculation or by seeking to exercise demonstrative power. This is so because God is love rather than will, excess rather than essence, gift rather than possession, act rather than being, possibility rather than prescription.

This is also why 'killing for God' (the most ancient and modern religious disease) is in fact the ultimate act of non-belief, against which atheism is the highest, most Christlike virtue.

Jesus was 'killed for God'. That is, he was killed by the religion of power, and in this event the lie at the heart of religion was exposed -- the lie which keeps us from the true God who awaits us as love beyond vengeance.

Waiting for the 'more' that is God is essential if we are not to foreclose truth in our procedures. In this way 'faith' (loving expectation) is not an antonym to reason, but a condition of its very reasonableness.

This, I think, is why St Paul and those around him needed to speak of the indivisibility of knowledge and love in the transforming economy of divine communion (Colossians 2.2, Ephesians 3.19, etc.).

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[244.1] MOVING BEYOND RELIGIOUS SECTARIANISM

Among the many good things in the Community Relations Council (CRC) evaluation of the role of church-based peacemaking initiatives in Ireland (Beyond Sectarianism - The Churches and Ten Years of the Peace Process - *.PDF download) is the contribution [excerpt below] from Geraldine Smyth OP, a lecturer at the Irish School of Ecumenics. I first spotted this in the recently revamped Corrymeela magazine - the journal of the extremely worthwhile Corrymeela Community - which now definitely ranks alongside Fortnight and Shared Space as a 'must read'. See also this article, A Time To Heal (faith and politics), and the Centre for Contemporary Christianity in Ireland.

"Violence cannot deliver peace, and the self-defeating mechanisms of the sacral power of cultural religion which keeps sectarianism in place need to be exposed and repudiated. Churches in Ireland must keep scrutinizing their own life... It is imperative that we all discover how we collude in tolerating violence - through segregated religious and social practice, and through clinging to identity-forming symbol structures which feed ancient rivalries through appeals to distorted memories of biblical chosenness as the basis of exclusion of others... Surely the churches have a vital role in shaping alternative, open spaces where ideas are never beyond question and the fresh air of dialogue can circulate, where experimental moves are envisaged and pilot projects undertaken - whether in secular life, through the arts, civic politics, education or community development - or within and between religious communities."

Incidentally, David Stevens, leader of the Corrymeela Community (and before that long-term general secretary of the Irish Council of Churches) has made a comment about religious hatred legislation, which has a particular history in Northern Ireland.

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[243.1] THE FRENCH UPRISINGS IN CONTEXT

In a different tenor to Gary Younge's necessarily provocative perspective, there's a thoughtful article (France and the Muslim myth) from the Observer's European editor, Jason Burke, looks at the fears and half-truths surrounding the more than two weeks' worth of rioting that began in the smouldering ghettos of Paris. As he points out, the underlying issues are global. But to complete the picture he needs to say more about the travails of an economically reductionist globalisation, and the aspirations of traditional societies faced by change. Some of the latter issues are mentioned in Rowan Williams' interesting new piece on 'respect', probing behind the latest buzz-word. The coverage and discussion on Pickled Politics has been helpful, as ever.

Meanwhile, this from a briefing on religion and state in France, on the BBC Religion and Ethics site: Many people believe that the French model of a secular state is not working. French ethnic minorities are very much aware of the disparity between them and white-French citizens. The riots of October 2005 reflect how aggrieved minorities feel. They feel victimised because of their culture, because of their colour and because of their religious orientation. For these minority groups, there is no space for a dual-identity that incorporates French-ness and religion.

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[242.1] LEST WE FORGET

"Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy." Wendell Berry

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[241.1] EMBARKING ON A DIFFERENT WAY

Armistice Day 2005

T]he ending of sacrifice [through Christ's death] means that we [Christians] don't continue to sacrifice other people to make the world come out all right... We've been given all the time in the world to announce that God would not have God's kingdom wrought through violence. That's good news. It's hard news, but it's good news. Stanley Hauerwas

Some further references: WCC Decade to Overcome Violence and build a culture of peace; White Poppies and the controversy over them; Jim Wallis interviews Hauerwas on Christian nonviolence; Christians explore links between doctrine and violence; advocates: Pax Christi and Fellowship of Reconciliation.

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[240.1] OUR LADY OF SILENCE

"Just up the road from Verdun, where military incompetence and slaughter almost literally bled the French army dry [in the First World War], is the Douamont Ossuary. Here the bones of 130,000 unknown young men gather dust and an occasional glance from a passing tourist. Above them the marbled hall, which echoes even to the footfall of trainers, is bathed with blood-red light from the stained-glass window. Here, in a dark alcove ignored by most, is the statue of Silence which in 1919 stood plainly outside the front door of the provisional ossuary. Slightly bigger than life-size, the figure of a woman with a shawl over her head holds a silencing finger to her lips. The message – that the truth about the futility of the war is best not uttered – is hard to miss. Now, lost in its alcove’s shadows, even this 84-year-old injunction is fading from sight."
(from Reclaiming the Silence)

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[239.1] DISCERNING THE CHARACTER OF HOPE

No religion [or ideology] which is narrow and which cannot satisfy the test of reason will survive [a] coming reconstruction of society in which the values will have changed and in which character, not possession of wealth, title or birth, will be the test of merit. Mohandas Gandhi.

This is true. Except that the current revaluation we are undergoing -- through forms of globalism and localism over-determined by economic competitiveness -- may in fact be elevating riches, celebrity and power over all other posibilities of human becoming. In which case the character we need to have modelled for us also has to be one which can 'keep faith', remain patient, and recognise hope beyond neurosis. This is the calling of common, as opposed to sentimental, 'sainthood': if by the word 'saint' we mean a person (like Dorothy Day, say) who might simply help us to become clearer-sighted about what it means to be a companion of Jesus in the saeculum. On which see also Vitor Westhelle, 'Crises of Society, Crises of the Church: Toward an Eschatological Reading of the Saeculum,' in Communion, Community and Society: The Relevance of the Church, Wolfgang Greive, ed., (Geneva: Lutheran World Federation), pp. 97-109, 1998.

Nb. The CTBI booklet, in print but hard to obtain, is a local church resource I contributed to in 2001-2. Not much else around on that theme, sadly.

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[238.1] CONSENSUS AS PEACABLE CONFLICT

Perhaps the most alarming feature of contemporary social, cultural and religious debate – in a world marked by the reduction of politics towards competing certainties – is that it continually confounds our attempts to construct, or believe in, the possibility of workable consensus. Maybe the problem, however is that we are conceiving of consensus as the displacement of conflict rather than its refiguration. Danah Zohar, in The Quantum Society (1994) offers as alternative account:

Inside me, inside each of us, there is an infinite range of potential selves waiting to be evoked through relationship to others. The other is my opportunity, my necessity for growth. The otherness of the other, his or her difference, is a possibility sleeping within myself. I need the Muslim to be a Muslim the Christian to be a Christian, the Jew to be a Jew (1) . I need to be me, to hold to my values, and I need you to hold to yours… [A]greeing to disagree is something very fundamental indeed. That is the agreement upon which we can build our pluralistic consensus.” (1) And equally needs humanists to be humanists, and so on.

Or, to put it another way, it is the basis upon which we can construct a usefully difficult politics based on honest contention rather than war or terror. But it still requires a prior agreement that human beings are valuable above and beyond any ideology which demands them to be a disposable asset – something which can be affirmed through a wide range of traditions, and which therefore has to be argued persuasively and loudly by those who otherwise disagree.

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[237.1] WHY ‘SPIRITUALITY’ IS A MATERIAL CONCERN

Leo Tolstoy once observed that “food for myself is a material issue, but food for my neighbour is a spiritual issue.” In the deeper regions of Christian practice, ‘spirituality’ is not about forsaking the material world, it is about working for its transformation through communal transparency to the love of God. Far from legitimating escape into a private realm of piety, this means breaking down the (often distinctly ‘material’) barriers between persons, which in biblical terms are seen as making us resistant to the divine invitation to “life in all its fullness”. That is also a challenge to the Christian church, which has often employed ‘the sacred’ to escape from, or demonize, ‘the secular’.

Tom Best is a US Disciples of Christ minister who has worked on ‘faith and order’ issues for the World Council of Churches for many years, and is involved in preparations for the next WCC Assembly in Brazil, February 2006. In a recent circular, he tells a story that makes it plain why ecclesiology - how each church understands itself and its relation to other churches - is crucial for the life and integrity of the Gospel in the world.

“It [concerns] an elderly parishioner in Ghana, whose village was fed by the priest of a neighbouring village during a famine. When the famine was over, she went to the neighbouring village to thank the people there for what they had done.

“But when she attended the priest's church to greet and thank him personally, she was unable to take communion because their respective churches did not agree on some points. So the woman went to her bishop and asked the following question:

“‘How can we share the material food which keeps us from starving, and not share the spiritual food which Christ himself offers us? I think when Christ comes again, he will feed us himself - and then we will do what is right!’”

In a disarmingly simple way, she had identified the flaw in church practices which ‘disincarnate’ their religious actions and symbols, rendering them contradictory and impotent as vehicles of transformation.

To put it Tolstoy’s way: what breaks down the wall between liturgy and life, and what makes an everyday piece of bread ‘spiritual food’, is that it is used to generate life for all and to show us that true sustenance is indivisible - rather than simply satisfying some private, self-enclosed desire.

By those standards, what passes for ‘spiritual’ in the religious realm is often nothing of the sort, while what passes for irreligion elsewhere may tell us more about the life of God than endless pieties. This is what comes through with life-changing force is Jesus’ ‘Samaritan moment’, his famous story of an outsider who turns the tables on those using religion to bolster a false understanding of their own goodness, while wholly failing to recognise God in the material shape of their neighbour.

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[236.1] MOVING BEYOND MONOLOGIC

"To pray, I think, does not mean to think about God in contrast to thinking about other things, or to spend time with God instead of spending time with other people. Rather, it means to think and live in the presence of God. As soon as we begin to divide our thoughts about God and thoughts about people and events, we remove God from our daily life and put [God] into a pious little niche where we can think pious thoughts and experience pious feelings... [C]onverting our unceasing thinking into unceasing prayer moves us from a self-centred monologue to a God-centred dialogue." (Henri Nouwen, Clowning in Rome)

"If you want to know whether someone is truly religious, don't listen to what they say about God. Listen to what they say about the world." (Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace)

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[235.1] THE PERFECT EXCUSE NOT TO TAKE LIFE TOO SERIOUSLY

I don't know if I've ever mentioned this before on FinS. Given its apparent remoteness from what this blog is supposed to be about, I probably haven't. Anyway, I'll say it, and you can make the connection or not. Charlie Brooker is a quintessential evil genius. By which I mean someone who affectionately traduces the insanity of media-driven culture with his vicious-but-fair sense of humour, not the kind of person who goes around invading countries or stringing people up by their genitals. Important to clear that one up.

Now Brooker's weekly Screen Burn column ("television with its face torn off" -- collected into a fab book last Christmas) is being supplemented in the Berliner-format Guardian by a weekly column called 'Supposing', where his gloriously odd mind is given the freedom to roam over life's manifold peculiarities. What makes it work is a unique combination of genuine empathy, unrestrained scorn and sheer dadaism - a real antidote to things that, er, need a real antidote. Friday's piece was about the search for the perfect excuse.

Q: When is a lie not a lie? A: When it's an excuse. I love excuses. They represent the human imagination at its finest. A good excuse hovers somewhere between plausible and absurd - credible enough to be thoroughly believable, daft enough to sound like it couldn't possibly have been invented. It's important to choose your excuse carefully. [cont'd...]

See? Evil genius. And so much better than bombing people to make them good, without any obvious sense of irony. (On a related issue, see Giles Fraser on Blessed Are The Jokers.)

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[234.1] A RITUAL CELEBRATION OF HATRED?

A couple of years ago there was a small burst of (rightful) outrage when some burghers of Lewes in East Sussex, a historic site of several waves of religious persecution, hit upon the vile idea that Guy Fawkes Night might be a good occasion to burn an effigy of a Romany camp. And this at a time when nasty propaganda against travellers and asylum seekers was being whipped up again in the media. What shocked me at the time was how few people took this seriously -- or recognised that the 5 November is a 'celebration' which readily lends itself to such malevolent purposes. So it was entirely appropriate for Justin Champion, Professor of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway, University of London, to rehearse the ghastly 1605 saga in the Guardian on Friday ('The flames of hate'). This has produced a strong reaction from some correspondents ('No faith left in the Guy'), including an accusation of historical inaccuracy from one person apparently unfamiliar with the Act of Uniformity and the scale of anti-Catholic repression at the time of the gunpowder plot. Slightly dubious parallels with modern terrorism are also being drawn all round. Tomorrow's Observer, in timely fashion, reviews a clutch of relevant popular histories of the period. The contemporary point, it seems to me, is not to overdose on hindsight or to spoil a good bit of firework fun. But recognising the pain of the story we inherit, and determining not to repeat it by unveiling its uncomfortable echoes in later modern Europe, is surely a good thing. This is Champion's point, even if he has over-dramatized it. We should not avoid or sanitise the past, but reshape it in the present. Given the proximity of the not-so-glorious fifth to Diwali, a celebration of life and light over death and evil, maybe we could begin to do away with 'guys' and see in the festival and ritual a fresh blaze of humanitarian hope.

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[233.1] THE INCALCULABILITY OF SUFFERING

I was reminded by something I was reading on the web the other day about the disturbing concurrence of some militantly recidivist Christians and Muslims that the suffering incurred in recent earthquakes is 'divine punishment'. This is about as obscenely wrong as you can get, theologically. The modern sensibility is, of course the reverse - to ask how love-made-flesh can be accounted for in terms of of such events. This from Rowan Williams' Writing in the Dust (Hodder, 2001), in the aftermath of 9/11.

Once the concreteness of another’s suffering has registered, you cannot simply use them to think with. You have to be patient with the meanings that the other is struggling to find or form for themselves. Acknowledging the experience you share is the only thing that opens up the possibility of finding a meaning that can be shared, a language to speak together.

[P]erhaps this is something of what some of our familiar Christian texts and stories point us towards. In the ninth chapter of the Gospel of John [9. 1-16], Jesus encounters a man blind from birth, and his disciples encourage him to speculate on why he should suffer in this way. Who is being punished, the man or his parents? They are inviting Jesus to impose a meaning on someone’s suffering within a calculus that assumes a neat relation between suffering and guilt.

Jesus declines; guilt is irrelevant, and all that can be said is that this blindness is an opportunity for God’s glory to become manifest. The meaning is not in the system operated by the disciples, but in the unknown future where healing will occur. As the story proceeds, we see how the fact of healing becomes a problem in turn, because it does not fit the available categories; an outsider, a suspected heretic, has performed it. The blind man is again faced with people, this time the religious authorities, who want him to accept a meaning imposed by others, and he resists. It is this resistance, which proves costly for him, that brings him finally to faith.What should strike us is Jesus’ initial refusal to make the blind man’s condition a proof of anything – divine justice or injustice, human sin or innocence.

We who call ourselves Christian have every reason to say no to any system at all that uses suffering to prove things: to prove the sufferer’s guilt as a sinner being punished, or – perhaps more frequently in our world – to prove the sufferer’s innocence as a martyr whose heroism must never be forgotten or betrayed. If this man’s condition is to have a symbolic value – and in some sense it clearly does in the text – it is as the place where a communication from God occurs – the opening up of something that is not part of the competing systems operated by human beings.

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[232.1] EXPLORING FUTURE CHURCH

Building Bridges of Hope - a 'living laboratory for changing churches' - brings together an extraordinary assortment of people from a wide variety of Christian traditions. It is supported by Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, and aims to research and support fresh pathways for church vitality in a post-Christendom setting -- not least through personal accompaniment. Yesterday and the day before I was blogging live from the fourth BBH 'Future Church' gathering. More material will go up over the weekend. This was a return o my former stomping ground (I worked for CTBI for nine years, and was involved in the development of this project).

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[231.1] THE SHARED LANGUAGE OF WOUNDS

There's no denying that the Church of England can put on a good show, as we saw at St Paul's yesterday. But to what ends and for whom? The occasion was dignified, as it should be, but it is still painful that in a ceremony to commemorate the lives of those killed in the 7/7 London bombings, people of a number of faiths and none, so many voices were passed over by the particular form of 'inclusiveness' which the Established Church chooses -- a walk-on role for other faith communities, and none for those of non-religious or humanist convictions. Our gaff, our rules. The way of Jesus? You'd have a hard time convincing me. The subversive goodness of the Samaritan was barely acknowledged.

Even so, Rowan Williams has a genuine humility and a way with words which often communicates beyond the limits of a 'grand occasion'. His address was spoken out of deep Christian convictions (it is vital that we speak as who we are), while also evoking space for others in a way that was more than token politeness -- as he showed by his opening remarks, and in a variety of references which demonstrated, as one mourner put it, "genuine empathy" for those who might be seeing and experiencing things rather differently in their moment of anguish. The full text is here. I've chosen the following excerpt:

"If it were true that one victim would be as good as any other, which is what the terrorist believes, the human world would be a completely different place, unrecognisable to most of us. We are here grieving, after all, because those who so pointlessly and terribly died were, each one of them, precious, non-replaceable. And those who suffered injury and deep trauma and loss are likewise unique, their minds and hearts scarred by this suffering. Time gives perspective and may bring healing; but the trauma of violence, and even more the death of someone we love makes a difference that nothing will ever completely unmake. The poet W.H. Auden captures this sense of injuries that never really heal as he writes of the biblical story of the Massacre of the Innocents –

Somewhere in these unending wastes of delirium is a lost child, speaking of Long Ago in the language of wounds.

Tomorrow, perhaps, he will come to himself in Heaven.

But here Grief turns her silence, neither in this direction, nor in that, nor for any reason.
And her coldness now is on the earth forever.

"The loss by violence of a loved person leaves always that chill, that silence. We know there really is a tomorrow; religious believers are confident that there is a ‘last awakening’ to the face of God. But how very weak and trivial a thing our human love would be if the ‘language of wounds’ did not haunt us, speaking of a unique face and voice and personality.

"But that is why even our grief on an occasion like today becomes an action that is prophetic, challenging, an action that resists terror. To those who proclaim by their actions that it doesn’t matter who suffers, who dies, we say in our mourning, ‘No. There are no generalities for us, no anonymous and interchangeable people. We live by loving what’s special, unique in each person. Everyone matters.’ "

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[230.1] THE DETAIL IS IN THE DEVIL

I must confess to being a Hallowe’en curmudgeon. Not, I hasten to add, one of those antsy Christians who get steamed up about festive naughtiness corrupting our children into the devil’s ways… more someone who’s fed up enough with consumeritis to think that training kids to go and get money off strangers through petty menace isn’t a great idea – I mean, we have professional advertisers for that, don’t we? Not that the two are linked only by dubious sales techniques. Hallowe’en is now big business, a kind of neo-religious version of well-established tinsel-fests like Christmas. What will they think of next?

So this year, once again, our household battened down the trick-or-treat hatches, raised a glass to one of the real All Saints, smiled at the agenda-grabbing ‘toxics are the new dark forces’ World Wildlife Fund initiative, and took to the alternative of a good book. A volume I’d recommend right now is also, as it happens, about spooks and devilish details – but in this case those surrounding MI5 and MI6. Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers (The Book Guild, 2005) is Annie Machon’s account of the trials and tribulations which she and her partner David Shayler endured in the wake of his being jailed for breaches of the Official Secrets Act over issues surrounding the British bombing of Libya in 1986. It contains disturbing allegations about the security forces and raises important broader issues of public interest. But it has largely been ignored by the mainstream media. I’m pleased to be a member of the same union as Annie and David (the National Union of Journalists), and enjoyed a chat with them after a public meeting in Brighton a year or so ago. They are brave and tenacious people. Alan slingsby has an article about the book ('Secrets no-one wants') in the latest issue of The Journalist. [Machon radio interview]

As for All Hallows, more on that to follow...

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[229.1] THINK LOCALLY, ACT GLOBALLY

Yup, that way round. There’s now no local situation which doesn’t generate neighbourhood-sized choices with global implications – about what we buy, what we throw away, who and what we support, and so on. Realising this is part of the genius of One World Week, the UK-wide global education programme which networks together a variety of church, faith and community groups around a galvanising theme and gives them the opportunity to let rip with the imagination on everything from festivals and services to lunches and lobbies. Of course I should have been going on about this last week, as OWW was actually 23-30 October 2005… but this year’s theme (‘Promises, promises…’) inspired by the pledges of the G8, the Africa Commission and Britain’s EU presidency has no real time-tag on it. And while One World Week thinks big (hunger, debt, peace and so on), its strength is precisely in its ability to localise the global. A good example is this practical Promise List of 40 simple actions aimed at putting our domestic choices into a wider perspective. OWW has been running for 27 years and involves tens of thousands of people. It’s one of the country’s best kept tots-to-pensioners educational secrets. But I must confess a vested interest; I worked part-time for the Week (then sponsored jointly by the World Development Movement and the churches) back in 1990-1991, when I was also on the staff of the Institute of Spirituality at Heythrop College. I should also point out that OWW has helped generate many spin-offs, including a global education month in Japan. Now there’s ambition. [Nb. OWW had a server problem today. Try later if the links don't work]

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[228.1] CONVERSING IN THE KEY OF LIFE

"The mark of solitude is silence, as speech is the mark of community. Silence and speech have the same inner correspondence and difference as do solitude and community. One does not exist without the other. Right speech comes out of silence, and right silence comes out of speech." Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"To become educated is to be freed to enter the conversation of all the living and the dead; to enter that conversation independently and critically, to be sure, but nonetheless to enter." ... "We know Christ Jesus because long-extinct communities and too easily forgotten generations have allowed us to hear this judging and healing Word." David Tracy

"The unreflected life is not worth living" Socrates

"The unlived life is not worth reflecting upon" Buddha (or a close associate)

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[227.1] TACKLING LIES ABOUT DISPLACED PEOPLE

One of the most repugnant trends in contemporary European politics is that towards victimizing migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. In a decisively unequal world where capital can move in an instant to make someone richer, people who try to move to make life sustainable and bearable (sometimes just liveable) are ironically treated as - or forced into being - criminals and pariahs. In macro terms this is neither moral nor rational, and leads to the absurdity of western governments encouraging immigration to solve their labour market problems while simultaneously detaining, jailing and deporting others at vast public expense. We want the luxury of cheap imports, but we do not want to face the consequences of a global economy which makes them possible. Something has to give, and it is our common humanity, it seems.

Part of what discourages sane political debate about alternative policy trajectories, of course, is the regular recycling of misinformation in the media, and not just the tabloids. This process is assisted by peddlers of paranoia like the distasteful MigrationWatchUK. Amusingly, the immigration minister, Tony McNulty, of all people, has now complained about the famously toothless Press Complaints Commission’s failure to get to grips with this. He declares: “If PCC guidance worked then we would not have all the rubbish we see in the media regarding refugees and asylum seekers.” For examples, go to the article by Roy Greenslade in The Guardian recently (hat tip to Pickled Politics, which highlights a few choice ones.)

The Christian and Jewish scriptural traditions, in particular, are based on exodus, exile, diaspora, sojourning and settlement. They therefore have strong ethical commitments towards ‘the stranger in the land’, as my good friend Vaughan Jones (from Praxis) pointed out earlier this year in his radical and agenda-shifting paper on immigration to the Westminster Forum. Also worth reading is Nick Sagovsky’s Faith in Asylum, the 2005 Gore Lecture at Westminster Abbey – a historic site of sanctuary. The World Council of Churches made an important recent statement on the detention aspect of the global mistreatment of migrants and asylum seekers. And the Churches’ Commission on Racial Justice (part of CTBI) has produced guidelines on sanctuary, as well as supporting the excellent Bail for Immigration Detainees / Bail Circle initiatives.

Last word to Vaughan, who is also minister at Bethnal Green Meeting House: "It seems to me that it is impossible to commit yourself to the narrative of the faith of, and in, Jesus the Christ, and not see the perversity of separating human beings along ethnic lines and of drawing lines across the map of God’s creation and calling them borders. Immigration controls are not realistic, expedient, practical, necessary, victimless or wise. It is not unreasonable to seek for morality in this aspect of public affairs and for our political leaders to demonstrate leadership, as opposed to playing on fears for electoral advantage." [The logo is Praxis's]

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[226.1] KEEPING IT REAL(ATIONAL)

Amidst all the weal and woe, this reminder about personalness and human community comes from one of the most compelling exponents of the Eastern Orthodox spiritual tradition:

The isolated individual is not a real person. A real person is one who lives in and for others. And the more personal relationships we form with others, the more we truly realize ourselves as persons. ... This idea of openness to others could be summed up under the word love. By love, I don’t mean merely an emotional feeling, but a fundamental attitude. In its deepest sense, love is the life, the energy, of God in us. We are not truly personal as long as we are turned in on ourselves, isolated from others. We only become personal if we face other persons, and relate to them.

Kallistos Ware, courtesy of the Daily Dig.

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[225.1] BLOG QUAKE DAY... LET IT ROLL

I'm one day late with this, but Blog quake day is an imaginative initiative to enlist the scope of the blogoverse to solicit an increasing wave of donations for the South Asian earthquake victims. As the UN general secretary and the relief agencies have been saying today, the situation is beyond critical with the cold closing in and governments way behind their aid pledges and targets. Well done to Desipundit (best of the Indian blogosphere) for getting this moving - let's make it a week. At least. Hat tip to Pickled Politics for the nod. All the major agencies are listed.

See also: British groups unite on earthquake relief appeal; Faith groups respond rapidly to South Asia quake tragedy; Kashmir quake aid crosses communal and belief boundaries; Fears for aid workers as Kashmiri violence festers. There are links in there to Christian Aid, CAFOD and Tearfund.

UK donations have been flooding in via the Disasters Emergency Committee website – http://www.dec.org.uk/, via the 24-hour automated donations phone line – 0870 60 60 900 – and by cheques to PO Box 999, London EC3A 3AA. Contributions can also be made at high street banks and post offices or through PayPoint.

The thirteen DEC member agencies are Action Aid, British Red Cross, CAFOD, CARE International UK, Christian Aid, Concern, Help the Aged, Islamic Relief, Merlin, Oxfam, Save the Children, Tearfund and World Vision. Some of these well-established groups are secular and some are rooted in religious – specifically Christian and Muslim – agencies. Together they are committed to providing assistance to all, without regard to creed, race, gender or ability.

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[224.1] FREEING SPEECH FROM HATRED AND DESPAIR

The interconnected matters of religious and ethnic identity, social solidarity (or lack of it), freedom of expression and hate speech are universal. But they manifest themselves in a variety of ways in different contexts. The issues are being tested in UK public debate at the moment through a piece of legislation aimed at outlawing incitement to religious hatred. The aim is to protect vulnerable groups, but the effect may be to stifle criticism of religion and civil liberties. The quality of argument is pretty low outside (and sometimes inside) parliament, but the subject is vital. Ekklesia has just issued a response to the bill, which received a mauling in the House of Lords yesterday. At the end of the document, which is critical of the proposed legislation, are positive wider reflections on underlying - in some cases overlaying - issues.

It is now a commonplace view in liberal society that religious identity is (or ought to be) secondary and subservient to ethnicity or nationality because, unlike these, it can be changed.

But this is simplistic and unhelpful. Religion is not just about private opinion; it is also about belonging to a community of tradition and (for some) obligation. As with conscientious objection, a free choice may also be a fundamental one that exceeds other loyalties.

The inability of a secular culture to comprehend the depth of such commitment (and, correspondingly, to take seriously religion’s capacity for reason and intellectual depth) will only strengthen the trend toward fundamentalism and inhibit moves toward genuine inclusion and participation.

This does not mean that religious and ethnic communities are the same and can be treated as legally equivalent (another problem with the bill). Rather it points to an issue of social solidarity which cannot simply be reduced to statutes, but is a political and interpersonal reality.

Similarly, we would all benefit from an approach to public conversation which, while rooted in strong legal protection for liberty of expression, goes beyond an adolescent delight in causing offence – ironically, one of the sure by-products of attempts to outlaw it.

It is not true that only sticks and stones can break our bones. Words can wound and intimidate too. Flawed though it is, the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill at least recognises this, in a way which its detractors sometimes fail to.

The best response to puerile, insulting, cruel or victimising talk is not censorship, however. It is the responsive language of truthfulness, honesty and compassion.

For, as the message of the Word made Flesh proposes, speech really worth having is much more than ‘free’ – it is costly, demanding, challenging and life-giving.

[See also: Afghan sentenced for blasphemy over women's rights, and humanist calls for renewed cooperation with believers]

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[223.1] REMEMBERING RISK-TAKING ROSA

I woke up this morning to the sad news that Rosa Parks of US civil rights fame (the 1951 Alabama bus boycott) has died, aged 92. She was, and will remain, an incredible inspiration to Christians and to many others committed to social justice - and to those risky acts of non-violent resistance whereby the truthful power of love subverts and overcomes the oppressive love of power (and its hatred of 'the other').

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[222.1] A CITY OF TWO TALES, AT LEAST

There were many fascinating moments in tonight’s Channel 4 (UK) documentary, ‘Young, Muslim and Angry’. For those who missed it, or who live elsewhere in the world, there was a good article by its writer and producer, Navid Akhtar (left), in Sunday’s Observer newspaper. He cogently illustrated how the British government’s ‘community leader’ strategy, which ignores the grassroots and fails to address the advocates of Islamic radicalism, is compounding rather than reducing the drift to extremism among an alienated minority.

At the heart of Akhtar’s own story is his wrestling with Pakistani roots and British routes, one might say. He ends on a hopeful note about the possibility of genuine convergence (rather than top-down ‘integration’). But the complexities and wounds he shines the briefest camera light on are clearly not susceptible to ready solutions. This is not least because the ‘quick fixes’ that are on offer come with a high price attached. Enter stage right the telegenic communications officer of one of the groups Tony Blair wants to ban, the none-too-savoury Hizb ut-Tahrir.

Taji Mustapha speaks proudly of reforming dealers. ‘Some of our activists got about four of the top drug dealers and got them into the study circle to think about Islam ... When these guys became in tune with Islam and changed their ways, demand has fallen, supply has fallen, so there has been a drop in the problem’.

It reminds me somewhat of the hard-line evangelical Christian groups who also have the capacity to offer certainty and vision to broken lives, including those who President Bush’s ‘compassionate conservatism’ has put in charge of some US penal institutions. Mustapha even had something of the born-again gleam as he spoke. Not that the film-maker made this analogy, and not that most American religious right philanthropists are quite advocating the equivalent of a global caliphate (although the ‘reconstructionists’ at their tail may be). Anyway, back to Navid Akhtar:

The terrorists who emerged from my community followed this pattern of youthful excess to radical religion. Amar Omar Saeed Sheikh, born down the road from me, got into trouble for drinking and flings with older girls before discovering radical Islam, helping the 9/11 bombers and being sentenced to death for his part in the beheading of the American journalist, Daniel Pearl. The Derby-born Hamas suicide bomber, Omar Khan Sharif, was expelled from his school for disciplinary problems; Hasib Mir Hussein was known for drinking and shoplifting before becoming the man who blew up the bus in Tavistock Square.

As an indigenous Pakistani commentator more-or-less said, head inclined to his overseas audience, “Don’t blame us, these are British lads.” Listening, Tony?

(Addendum: fine, forthright, painful coverage of the Birmingham disturbances over on Pickled Politics. And on Ekklesia we have offered this response to the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill.)

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[221.1] HEALING FROM A WOUNDED IMAGINATION

Jeanette Winterson is an extraordinary, elusive, evocative and - in the most productive sense - an infuriating writer. Perhaps most widely known for Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, which unveils her own experience of a suffocating Christian fundamentalist upbringing, her new novel Weight (Canongate) weaves its unlikely web of influences from the Bible, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, TS Eliot's Four Quartets, the Moomintroll children's books by Tove Jansen and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. In spite of all that organised religion has thrown at her, Winterson also retains a powerful un-theorised sense of transcendence. She writes: "There is a moment when you realise that the energy you're using is not your energy. When you're in that moment of absolute concentration, you feel that it's not you any more ... but something more impersonal, even spiritual, though I wouldn't call it God. All creative people recognise this. Where it comes from I don't know. But I know its there and not in the control of the individual."

See also Tim Conley on the JW muse in the The Modern Word's Scriptorium, including this full-frontal Sapphic jibe from Art and Lies (1994): "The spirit has gone out of the world. I fear the dead bodies settling around me, the corpses of humanity, fly-blown and ragged. I fear the executive zombies, the shop zombies, the Church zombies, the writerly zombies, all mouthing platitudes, the language of the dead, all mistaking hobbies for passions, the folly of the dead." [The official Winterson site is here. Image with thanks to The Modern Word]

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[220.1] TURNING LOSS INTO HOPEFUL MEMORY

A powerful reflection from Walter Brueggemann, concerning the historical imagination of two communal traditions which have both known great loss; which have been (and are) tempted to translate that into revenge; and which, in spite of this, retain the capacity for a larger, hopeful memory that neither can exhaust. At the heart of this is surely the ability to move beyond the dominating politics of victim-hood and its correlative separation of a global sense of God from a global sense of neighbour – a difficulty felt especially within the third ‘religion of the book’, Islam, right now.

“For Jews and Christians, loss evokes memory. For the society around us, loss evokes amnesia – and the outcome is a society without reference, without buoyancy, without staying power for things human. The temptation to amnesia is broad and deep and complex among us. Its great lever is the homogenization of television consumerism, in which everything is reduced to the now, to commodity, to private gain and individual comfort, to thin humanness, while all the density of communal miracles and communal particularity is lost. It is not my purpose to offer a cultural critique of society, except to note the seductive temptation that this culture of amnesia is… If we lose our vivid, concrete, nameable memories … our communities of faith are out of business. But the truth – which both Jews and Christians share in common, though they carry it out in very different ways – is this: We are communities of memory, who experience seasons of loss as seasons of passionate remembering. Bound together in loss, we are also bound together in the memory [of hope] that the loss evokes…We now live in a society that wants to separate God and neighbour, to keep something of God without the neighbour who comes with God. But that is futile. God's coming shalom, which is sure for the world, is a gift of neighbourliness. Widow, orphan, illegal immigrant, poor, homeless, disabled, homosexual – all count, all are citizens of God's shalom. Faced, then, with a crushing loss – the destruction of Jerusalem or the death of Jesus, the defeat of goodness or the defiance of decency – Jews and Christians respond by doggedly recalling the enduring evidence of God's love, compassion, and faithfulness… [as it] winds its way through the neighbourhood we call the world.”

See also my review of Texts Under Negotiation: The Bible and Postmodern Imagination.

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[219.1] NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

I don’t find myself regularly in agreement with former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey (his successor, though horridly trapped by the role, is a different matter). But I was definitely grateful for his comments this week on the need to do away with Britain’s archaic blasphemy laws. Mind you, the incitement to religious hatred bill could well see them in through the back door again; though there are now signs, hopefully, of some serious legislative attenuation.

As an aperitif to this news story, The Guardian suggested, inter alia, that Lord Carey “loves” Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’. To which I say a wholehearted ‘Amen’. It’s possibly the best theological satire in movie history. Unfortunately, when it was released in 1979, Mary Whitehouse and assorted church dignitaries didn’t see it that way. They wanted it banned for blasphemy – even though the whole point of the film is that Brian isn’t Jesus… he’s yet another fall guy for the easy religious delirium which has been with us throughout history, and which is as damaging of healthy religion as anything possibly could be.

There are more laugh-out-loud moments in LoB than I care to recall. Perhaps my favourite is when the anti-hero, caught like a rabbit in the headlights, tries to stop the rootless rabble from turning him into the imagined strongman they can never be. “Look”, he pleads, “you don’t have to follow me. You’re all individuals.” There is a moment of quiet. Then they shout back in shattering unanimity, “Yes! We’re all individuals!” Except a solitary man, who protests, “I’m not!”

At the time, this kind of humour was lost completely on former Lord Bishop of Southwark Mervyn Stockwood and dear old Malcolm Muggeridge, as they slugged it out in an excruciating TV studio debate with the Python team, seemingly missing every point with effortless aplomb. I well recall cringing behind our metaphor of a sofa. All of which goes to show that the professionally sanctimonious make poor arbiters of taste, and (as I pointed out in relation to Jerry Springer – The Opera) the religiously offended make even worse readers of texts.

As it happens, I ended up working as an education and lay training adviser for another Bishop of Southwark twelve years after that infamous TV encounter. On the day I left the diocese, in 1996, my official 'do' was followed by an informal drink in the local. A couple of hours on, a film started on the pub screen. It was ‘Life of Brian’. The landlord knew we were from the church offices, and quickly hastened to turn it off. We begged him not to. “We adore this film!” we cried. I like to think Mervyn was grinning too.

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[218.1] THE FIRST STONE, UNCAST...














Well, Connecticut is a Republican state, and the official road signs are green, not blue. But it's the thought that counts. (With a hat-tip to Mike Power... although possibly not the same one who succeded me at Changes all those years ago.)

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[217.1] EFFECTIVE ARE THE PEACEMAKERS

Given the endless stream of conflict-related headlines in the daily news, it is perhaps surprising (and hopeful) to discover that, statistically, war and violence is actually decreasing worldwide. This is the conclusion of a survey carried out by the Human Security Center at the University of British Columbia. Says its CEO, Andrew Mack: "We knew the number of wars was coming down...but particularly surprising is how the decline in wars is reflected right across the board in all forms of political conflict and violence." The Centre credits greatly increased efforts in conflict prevention and peacebuilding through United Nations missions and government-based 'contact groups.' The report is available online at www.humansecurityreport.info. Thanks to SojoNet for the link.

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[216.1] ABSORBING RATHER THAN INFLICTING

Though the aphorism that follows is profoundly true, I still feel an urge to change the final word to 'endurance' in order to avoid the danger of it slipping perilously into the sanctification of suffering... which was perhaps the danger its author dallied with in her own torment. A quite fascinating and rewardingly disturbing woman...

"The false god changes suffering into violence. The true God changes violence into suffering."

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace.

Stephanie Strickland observes: "Weil, our shrewdest political observer since Machiavelli, was never deceived by the glamor of power, and she committed herself to resisting force in whatever guise. More 'prophet' than 'saint,' more 'wise woman' than either, she bore a particular kind of bodily knowledge that the Western tradition cannot absorb. Simone Weil belongs to a world culture, still to be formed, where the voices of multiple classes, castes, races, genders, ethnicities, nationalities, and religions, can be respected. To achieve this culture is an impossible task, but, as Weil would remind us, not on that account to be forsaken. Today we look to Weil for hope, for meditation, for the bridge a body makes. She knew that the truth had been 'taken captive,' and that we must 'seek at greater depth our own source,' because power destroys the past, the past with its treasures of alternative ideals that stand in judgment on the present."

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[215.1] FACE-TO-FACE WITH THE CULTURE OF RACISM

A number of commentators and webloggers have reacted with understandable distress to the news about the racist abuse which greeted the appointment of Britain’s first black archbishop, Dr John Sentamu (left). As Maggi Dawn said: "not unprecedented, but still disgraceful." The UK may be a broad society, but it is also stalked by what social psychologists call heterophobia – fear of 'otherness'. That, at root, is what racism, in both its personal and institutional guises, is about.

So how can it be challenged? Back in 1997 I was co-organising an ecumenical conference in Scotland, for which the main speaker was the extraordinary Vincent Donovan, the pioneering Catholic priest and author of Christianity Rediscovered: An Epistle from the Masai. At that time Donovan, getting on in life and physically very vulnerable, was still working part-time as a chaplain to university students in North Carolina. As he commented, many of the whites there had imbibed the entrenched racial attitudes of the Deep South rather thoroughly.

Donovan went on to tell the story of how he passed a group of white, male youngsters cursing and bad-mouthing black people. He stopped and asked them why. “Because they're all filthy, stinkin’ thieves”, they replied. Donovan asked: “Who told you to think like that?” They looked offended. “No-one. That’s what we know for ourselves”. Evidently oblivious to his own safety (in a way that becomes quite believable if you meet him in the flesh) Donovan declared: “Nonsense! You're basically decent kids, and you're coming out with this garbage. I don’t think you came to the conclusion that 'black people are bad' all by yourselves, with no encouragement. I bet that's exactly how your families and friends think, too. What you’re doing is just following their lead and fitting in with those you hang out with. So why don’t you become real men by starting to think for yourselves? Look, there’s a group of black people… let’s go find out what they’re really like and what they think of you.” They white youngsters were, by all accounts, a bit astonished to be challenged in this way, and a robust but friendly dialogue ensued.

It’s a wonderful example of what you might call holy foolishness, and a reminder not just about the significance of having the courage of our convictions, but also about the crucial fact that racism and xenophobia, in common with all alienations, is a matter both of cultural production and of inter-personal formation. Like me you may doubt whether you have bravery to face it out in the same way as Vincent. I recall reasoning at the time (in a self-serving and not entirely rational way) that a quirky, feisty old geezer would surely be much less vulnerable to assault than those of us who might make better sport. Maybe, maybe not. But what we (I) can’t avoid is the reality that cultures of exclusion and hate (including the church's fashionable homophobia) are fed by collusion and can only be changed by hopeful realism, both personal and political.

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[214.1] AND THE WORD BECAME LIBERATING

Fairly recently I mentioned (and quoted) a thoughtful article by Giles Fraser which contributes constructively to the conversation opened up by Salman Rushdie about how religion gets ‘reformed’ or ‘enlightened’. Theo Hobson then added an important qualification, viz. Elsewhere the Reformation may have produced ‘theocratic fascism’, but in England it enabled the emergence of the first truly modern culture. Our tradition of political and intellectual freedom is rooted in our distinctive version of the Reformation. Today like never before we must show how our secularism comes out of our distinctive religious tradition. Our history is not irrelevant to hopes of an Islamic reformation.

But Giles’ central point still stands – which is that, as Milan Kundera also illustrates, literary imagination is a practice and a perspective which depends inherently upon the fecundity rather than the fixity of the word. Part of the vocation of the writer is to preserve this freedom. And it is with this consciousness of narrativity and intertextuality that thoughtful Christians, in dialogue with a diverse interpretative community, find their formative texts to be revelatory ... in a way which constantly thwarts those who want to ‘close the book’ (in this case the Bible) to buttress their knock-down, bullying arguments.

I remarked at the time that Giles’ piece had been misleadingly headlined by The Guardian’s features section (‘Rushdie should swap his crusading for novel writing’). And, sure enough, some duly read it as what one weblog characterised as a ‘sneaky and disguised’ attack on Rushdie, and what Jonathan Heawood of the Fabian Society – in a depressing example of satire defeating thought – laughingly called 'an Anglican fatawa’. On the contrary: Fraser was clearly affirming the central importance of what Rushdie is really effective at (in Midnight’s Children, Shalimar the Clown and elsewhere), as distinct from his recognisably less useful programmatic views on religion. The latter are made entirely understandable by the appalling threats against him, but this does not, of itself, make them adequate.

Six years ago I wrote a short response in The Guardian to an article on religion by a literary critic and novelist. It elaborates a similar point about emancipating narrative, so forgive me if I quote it here, with one editorial clarification: James Wood's brilliant article on how fiction killed faith (Beyond Belief, January 1) is mistaken in only one respect. The 'victim' is not free faith but authoritarian doctrine, and the 'perpetrator' is not the novelist but organised religion itself. Christian theologians have argued for many years that the core of Scripture is liberating narrative not totalitarian religion. [But] many churches eschew serious theological thought, and many theologians [therefore] take refuge in secularity. Meanwhile, faith of all sorts not only persists today, it flourishes. However, divorced from both spiritually nourishing narrative and intellectually cleansing critical thought it is often ugly and diseased.

Incidentally, and with reference to fictive realism, Theo Hobson’s piece on The Sound of Music (‘Hegel with Songs’) is also definitely worth reading.

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[213.1] GETTING THINGS INTO PERSPECTIVE

A couple of Dietrich Bonhoeffer quotations which seem pertinent to the times we live in.

"It is very easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements in comparison with what we owe others. "

"To understand reality is not the same as to know about external events. It is to perceive the essential nature of things. The best-informed person is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of knowledge [s]he will lose sight of what is essential. But on the other hand, knowledge of an apparently trivial detail quite often makes it possible to see into the depth of things. And so the wise person will seek to acquire the best possible knowledge about events, but always without becoming dependent upon this knowledge. To recognize the significant in the factual is wisdom."

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[212.1] BEYOND THE DEITY OF DOMINATION

Though I think it’s a poor and corrosive piece of legislation, the demonstration outside parliament against the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill on Tuesday left me feeling very queasy indeed. Most of the time I was on a patch of green behind the lobby, trying to make my voice heard (along with several others) for a TV interviewer. It felt like being shouted down. And what’s more, many of the demonstrators I spoke to had little idea about what they were objecting to. I felt genuine sympathy for the dignified group from the National Secular Society who looked rather besieged by religious zeal. And I found it more than ironic that Christians who called for a ban on Jerry Springer – The Opera were now singing the praises of ‘free speech’. If this is what public debate has come to, we are all in real trouble.

Of course I recognise the twist in this. As a think-tank wonk and (aggh!) pundit, I too am in the persuasion business. I value tough thinking, honesty, intellectual imagination and self-criticism, but I recognise that there is a place in this for vigorous argument. That’s one of the things that makes for a healthy society. But when rhetoric is overwhelmed by conviction, civility is erased by scorn, and the lust for polemic silences the intractability of judgement and the reality of ambiguity, we have a right to be alarmed. The religious hatred ‘discussion’ among urbane non-religionists on More4 later in the evening was no more encouraging, with participants under no apparent constraint to back up opinion with fact or to temper caricature with subtle observation.

In its response to David Aaronovitch’s polemical (but still thoughtful) BBC2 critique of ‘God and the politicians’, Ekklesia said: “There is a need for faith communities to convince the sceptics that they want to be partners [in debate] not theocrats. And there is likewise a need for the sceptics to engage in a constructive dialogue with faith communities about how to keep the square we share public… We need a way of enabling particular communities of [competing] conviction to develop distinctive roles and perspectives within a plural society; a public space which they can affirm, shape, contest and support.”

Rowan Williams has been helpfully tackling questions related to this of late, and though I disagree with him on publicly funded faith-based schools (which he favours and I'm concerned about), his exploration of pluralist political options in his recent memorial lecture for the late David Nicholls (author of the stimulating ‘Deity and Domination : Images of God and the State in 19th and 20th Centuries’) is important stuff. It’s called Law, Power and Peace: Christian Perspectives on Sovereignty.

Dr Williams aspires to the view that the Body of Christ ought not to be “a political order on the same level as others, competing for control, but a community that signifies, that points to, a possible healed human world. Thus its effect on the political communities of its environment is bound to be, sooner or later, sceptical and demystifying.” I’d endorse something along the same lines. But it needs to be observed that for most Christian communities most of the time, this is not an accurate description – and that the impact of church engagement in politics is all-too-often corrupted by manipulation. I say that as an invitation to honesty and commitment, not as a counsel of despair. So what are we going to do about it?

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[211.1] ARTESANS OF A PEACEFUL HUMANITY

On a slightly more cheerful note (the world has been remoselessly gloomful and doomful recently, huh?), I note that the British section of the international Catholic peace movement, Pax Christi, has proffered a nifty *.PDF file of its new icon -- depicted in mini-version on the left. The 'Icon of peace' was unveiled over the summer as part of Pax Christi's sixtieth anniversary celebrations.

Back in November 2004 PX sent journalist Paul Donovan to be an observer at the US election process in Florida, the state at the centre of bitter disputes in the 2000 elections. He was also a witness to the last Palestinian Authority poll. Pax Christ's hard-working general secretary Pat Gaffney, who I have been privileged to know and work with over the years, together with Kathy Galloway of the ecumenical Iona Community (ditto), were among one thousand women from more than 150 countries jointly nominated for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

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[210.1] IN GOD WE DON'T QUITE TRUST

In a recent Guardian column, Stuart Jeffries regretted that in the wake of the summer London bombings, Tate Britain had decided against showing artist John Latham's challenging work, God is Great #2, produced in 1991. The work incorporates copies of the Qur'an, the Bible and the Talmud, cut and pierced by glass (In the wake of 7/7, London does not need art to tiptoe around the sensibilities of those who could possibly be affronted, 26 September 2005). Now Tate Britain director Stephen Deuchar has responded in print, declaring that the decision was taken on security grounds alone, and does not constitute censorship. However, this is a very fine line indeed. For the risk arose directly from a belief that religiously offended vandals might attempt to deface or attack the work. Inter alia, Deuchar says: "the purpose of the work lay not in politics but in its commentary on the evolution of religious thought - represented by the books - from an original state of nothingness, represented by a large sheet of plate glass."

While one has every sympathy for both the director and the gallery in this situation, it is surely a little disingenuous not to admit that its decision is, at least, an act of self-censorship -- and, moreover, one that risks further feeding the climate of over-sensitivity we now seem to be inhabiting. Mainstream faith community leaders should be concerned about these developments. An open society is one in which people are able to explain, proclaim and live out their differing convictions. This entails being able to cope maturely with the fact that others will critique and even deride them. Healthy religion is significantly defined by its ability to tap those sources of self-awareness, pluralism and self-criticism within its own traditions which make this maturity both possible and necessary. This is not the imposition of some alien 'secular' or 'liberal' agenda (to face the accusation made by religious absolutists), but an inherent part of any rational faith's capacity for critical self-renewal. Without it there will be hell to pay for all of us.

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[209.2] KASHMIR EARTHQUAKE LATEST

The fine UK-based Asian news blog Pickled Politics is a good hub of news and comment on the unfolding tragedy in Pakistan, India and Afghanistan. The BBC has in-depth background, of course. Unofficial estimates now say that 40,000 people are likely to have died. With sad predictability, US 'theocrat' Pat Robertson (of Chavez assassination recent fame) has leapt in on the act. The amount of non-sense out there on God and disaster is monumental at the moment. I'm about to update and substantially revise my Is God a disaster area? piece for Ekklesia.

[Donations can be made directly to Christian Aid for Kashmiri earthquake relief and regular contributions are welcome to its emergencies and disasters fund. Tearfund donations can be made here. See Catholic Fund for Overseas Development on Asian tsunami rebuilding.]

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