[14.22 GMT] School student interest in religion raises problem of complusion (Ekklesia, 28/08/06) - including my comments on the situation of Religious Education in schools. Once again, the policy debate is unhelpfully fixed by those who want to push a particular religious or anti-religious line in public education. Or those who confuse the role of educational institutions in a plural society (which is to provide a phenomenological understanding of the belief systems that shape and influence us) with the role of faith communities (which promote formation in, and communication of, specific traditions). We all need some better ways forward.

[12.16 GMT] Liberation after Christendom October 13-15, 2006 - A d-i-y style weekend on subversion, spirituality and struggle. All welcome. Email me for more details.

[12.18 GMT] Life in the political twighlight zone. The UK parliamentary recess is often used to allow policy to go under the radar, as with the current war on terror and Middle East questions. What's more, the notion of 'a break' rarely extends to more than a brief respite in the debilitating round of backbiting politics-as-usual. The recess, whch now runs from July to October, could be developed in a much more radical way, this article argues ... by reflecting on the now-hidden meaning of the Jewish and Christian Sabbath tradition. And by thinking about civic, not just parliamentary, forums.

[11.00 GMT] Snakes on a plane, flies on a plain... a small contribution to what, in Britain, is called 'the silly season' for journalism. Hopefully the long-suffering residents of Wiltshire will not feel too cheaply dealt with.

[324.1] TELLING IT LIKE IT IS

Rowan Williams identifies 'the religious issue' with typical clarity and vigour in a review article in The Tablet, 10 November 2001: “Freud was wrong. The fundamental problem we human beings face is not how to negotiate with the voice and image of the Father, but how to stop ourselves regarding our brothers and sisters as displaced 'fathers'. We have one real Father, the transcendent source of our identity: a father who is not part of the competitive world in which the power of one means the weakness of another. What we must learn is how to live fraternally with human beings. The chief task of human maturing, therefore, is to get beyond ascribing sacred authority to other human beings, with all the rebellion and resentment, the longing to invert existing power relations rather than transform them that this involves, and rediscover the inclusive and hospitably eucharistic love – fraternity, in other words – that allows us to live together without murder. This is precisely what Jesus once and for all makes possible by his teaching, his death and his resurrection. This is the Gospel; this is what the sacraments enact.”

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[05.34 GMT] I may have quoted this before, but it bears repetition - and reminds me that I must go and see the new(ish) movie Silent Voices about the tragedy of El Salvador in the 1980s and the extraordinary resilience of the human spirit. "Even when they call us mad, when they call us subversives and communists and all the epithets they put on us, we know we only preach the subversive witness of the Beatitudes, which have turned everything upside down"— the late Archbishop Oscar Romero

[21.18 GMT] ON LETTING GO... "Our invitation as we go out into the world, is to lay down our fear and love the world. Lay down our sword and shield, and seek out the image of God's beloved in the people we find it hardest to love. Lay down our narrow self-interest, and heal the hurting and fill the hungry and set the prisoners free. Lay down our need for power and control, and bow to the image of God's beloved in the weakest, the poorest, and the most excluded."
Presiding Bishop-elect of the Episcopal Church, USA, Katharine Jefferts Schori

Christian Peacemaker Teams activists face court charge for Israel military aid vigil and protest (Ekklesia).

[323.1] TALKING SENSE ON ASYLUM

Following on from yesterday's post... the "asylum debate" in the UK rumbles on ominously: the latest instalment being new Home Secretary John Reid's hectoring stance towards those (a minority, so it's good to see they have some impact in Daily Mail-land) who believe that many of the assumptions of the "debate" are brutal, ignorant and racist -- which, frankly, they are.

One of the many disturbing features of the news coverage about migration, refugees and asylum in the papers that shape governing opinion on the subject in Britain (the tabloids and the conservative broadsheets) is the extent to which they overlook both global trends and the particular stories and experiences of people at the sharp end.

For the stories behind the news, you need to see publications like CTBI's Asylum Voices (by Andrew Bradstock and Arlington Trotman)... or go to the website of the aforementioned Praxis, the admirable multi-agency centre for displaced people in East London - the location, by history and tradition, of those placed 'outside the gate' by kings and rulers in the capital.

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[322.1] GETTING THE WIDER PICTURE

The London agency Praxis, which is inclusive of people of all faiths and none in its way of working, runs a series of stats and facts on refugees and asylum seekers across the banner on its site. They are very apposite and read as follows:

* 95 per cent of refugees worldwide never reach wealthy nations like Britain.
* Refugee population of Middle East and North Africa – 43 per cent. Sub-Saharan Africa – 22 per cent. South Asia – 18 per cent. And Europe? … 8 per cent.
* Of the 12 million refugees in the world, 7 million have been confined to camps or segregated settlements.
* In 2001, Canada granted protection to 97 per cent of Afghan asylum seekers. Britain granted protection to 19 per cent.
* Under the 1951 United Nations Convention on Refugees, anyone has the right to apply for asylum and remain until a decision has been made.
* There is no such thing as an ‘illegal asylum seeker’.

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[10.47 GMT] Christian think tank says government should stop propping up religion (Ekklesia). Yes, I know that sounds negative. But the sad fact is that if we headlined it "think tank calls for revolution in Christian thought and practice", the secular media would yawn and the religious media would ignore it. Well, they'll probably ignore this, too, but it's worth a go. It is curious that genuine nonconformity is so rare and exotic these days - either that or largely sectarian. OK, let's see what happens next...

[09.53 GMT] Redeeming Religion in the Public Square - a discussion paper on the issue of faith and politics, especially in relation to the campaigning stance of churches and the issue of governance - has finally gone up on the Ekklesia site. This has been a major focus of mt work over the past week or so. A news release will be going out fairly soon. Comment welcome. It follows on, and devlopes some thought beyond, Jonathan Bartley's Faith and Politics After Christendom.

[09.54 GMT] Norman Kember urges the churches to embrace non-violence (Ekklesia, UK). Encouraged by the way that campaigning for his release had brought together peace movements and faith groups, [Kember]called on the Churches to continue to speak up for non-violence. “The churches praise Martin Luther King, but they don’t put what he said into practice,” he reflected.

[08.44 GMT] London launch for controversial faith and politics agenda - tomorrow (13 June, 2006 - 6.30pm at St Mathhew's Church House, Westminster, near the Houses of Parliament. If you want an invitation, please use the email detailed in this Ekklesia story - not the Yahoo one that links from this blog.

[321.1] GOD OUTSIDE OUR CHURCH BOX (OR ANY BOX).

Someone cautioned me the other day about post-Christendom (as distinct from post-Christianity, note) being "a new-fangled concept". I don't think they meant that in a positive sense! Actually, however, the consciousness of an ending of the Christendom era -- the one in which the church sought its identity and security in symbiotic relationship with government and the dominant culture -- is one that has been around for a long time. Consider, for example, the amazing quotation (from 1968) in an essay by David E. Jenkins which is the penultimate paragraph in this post.

Of course my friend was right in his suspicion of the automatic self-sufficiency of "the new", the zeitgeist. Or of "the old", for that matter (though we might not see eye-to-eye on that). In fact we are always tempted, as human beings, to seek refuge is some unattainable future-ness and/or past-ness to give comfort or authority to our struggles in the present. Either that or we give the contingency of the present absolute authority, perhaps thinking that "what we make with our own hands, now" will somehow be sufficient to ensure that we are not deluded. If only.

Constructed nowness as the only viable path is the conviction of many good humanists, who have (rightly) rejected the god of human creation, yet wrongly deduce that this is "all there is to it" and hope that "we have the power in ourselves" to make it all right. If only. The evidence around and before us, when considered without romanticism, is not encouraging, however. Which is why it may be good news that God is not the 'God' we developed through our infancy and continue to project in our adolescence - and is therefore not, in fact, "ruled out" by the rejection of religion or the gods or metaphysics.

For as David Jenkins has also pointed out, the God who we meet in both the promise and perversion of the biblical world is not a prisoner to that world - but challenges it (and us) from within and beyond... subverting (especially) those who thought they had "pinned down" the divine in a text or a dogma. This is the truth the text demonstrates and yields to, at every turn. In fact, therefore, the "real" traditionalist is the person who recognises the dynamic movement and un-fixability of the God who refuses to be our possession or creation. And in the Christian experience, God is known decisively in a fleeting person not an immovable text -- flesh that is vulnerable, killable and abusable... but which we discover, by experience, to be joined to the uncapturable divine life in a way that defies description and reverses the domain of death. (That, not zombie ideology or mere narratology, is what is "meant" by resurrection).

Likewise, this God who is, by definition, ahead of us and all our schemes and ideologies will not, by definition, be captured by our projections and fantasies about the future - especially if they involve our own elevation and quest for domination. The kingdom (or kin-dom) of God's uncontainable love is neither built by us nor established by force against us. It is sheer gift, touched and tasted (but never fully realised) in temporal moments and events where we sense a love and grace beyond all reasoning - but which truly is "the heart of things", in spite of the mess and brokenness of a radically free universe.

This, for me, is why believing in (or in-to) the God who is beyond the world of mere gods is mostly antagonistic to human efforts to capture it as religion. And why it is the only unharnessing way to gain the perspective and gentle persuasion precisely to dis-believe all the claims to power and authority (whether religious, political or secular in guise) which demand to be treated as "absolute truth" or "sole worth".

Atheism is a good stab at this dis-believing business. But it won't do, because it can only reject what we make ourselves, and refuses any possibility of an unconditioned life-giving within what it touches, sees and feels. That's OK for recognising things as things (say), but not much good for receiving them as possibly more than thingness. Because what it kills is not God (who is immune to our attempts at deicide through religion, and other means) but the possibility of that which is beyond our human capacity to define possibility. This is a terrible loss. And it is as unwarranted by "the evidence" as any creation of a god-for-us is.

The alternative to this atheism of overbelief (based on the false idea that we know who and what God is, and are thus able to dispose of 'him') is not abandoning hope or setting up another god in our own image (whatever image that may be). Rather, it is entertaining a subversive hope that comes from the realisation that neither theology nor humanism, neither politics nor economics, can abolish the daily tragedy that blights our joy at being alive. That is, strictly speaking, an impossibility, and therefore the work of what Merlod Westphal calls 'Divine Excess: The God Who Comes After' (in John D. Caputo, The Religious). Phenomenologically, Caputo relates this excess, named in relation to God, to what he terms the axiology of the impossible - something explored further in his new book [of which more anon].

But under the conditions of Christendom, the kind of faith* (trust) that is willing to see people, events and even things as gifts-of-unfathomable-love (and therefore refuses to manipulate or be manipulated by them) is very, very difficult - because Christians have been offered (and have taken) "the kingdom, the power and the glory" for themselves -- in exchange for Jesus' way of freedom which is so threatening to the powers-that-be that it ends in the confrontation of the cross. Or so the Empire would like you to think.

See also blogs on: God is not a convenient commodity; Derrida Among the Theologians, and Derrida, Caputo and the weakness of God.

*Note: 'Faith' is commonly used these days to mean "an antonym of reason". For me it is the embracing of reason as love beyond reasoning. That is why 'trust' is a slightly better rendition.

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[320.1] CHANGING THE 'RELIGIOUS' AGENDA

See: Change faith versus politics standoff, says Christian think tank (Ekklesia, 04/07/06), which is based around the launch of the new book Faith and Politics After Christendom - officially published on Saturday 1 July at Selly Oak in Birmingham, with a conference coordinated by the Anabaptist Network. Speakers included Jonathan Bartley, myself, Stuart Murray and Andrew Bradstock of CSM. Alan Storkey was stuck in the Netherlands, sadly. There is a notice about the book in The Economist already, I'm told. I also did a BBC interview in Scotland and another in West Midlands.

Pleasing that we have avoided London (the imperial capital) so far... though not for long. The next leg of the launch is at the Westminster Forum on 13 July 2006. Less pleasing was the lack of gender balance on the platform n Birmingham - not usually an issue for AN, but something that raises interesting questions about who engages with "this sort of thing", and why. Christendom is, of course, thoroughly patriarchal. The move away from it cannot and should not be... but epochal transitions are rarely uncomplicated or logical.

For more information about ‘post-Christendom’ see Postchristendom.com and After Christendom - The Series. For new perspectives on religion and is relation to politics see God and the Politicians and Subverting the Manifestos on Ekklesia. And, I guess, my own Does Christianity kill or cure? and Keeping the wrong kind of religion out of politics.

Of course, 'faith' and 'religion' are, in reality, inchoate concepts which are used far too broadly to make much sense. Which is part of the reason why media debate about 'religion' is so stuck between warring factions who are not able to question the linear assumptions of their standoff. But that's part of the next wave of the discussion. In the meantime, we will be launching a policy-shift document on 'redeeming religion in the public sphere' as a practical follow up.

Oh, yes... The picture captures the brief appearance of Mark Wallinger's subversively simple Ecce Homo statue in Trafalgar Square. The church it faces (in an askance kind of way) is St Martin's-in-the-Field, a rather good example of transforming part of the Christendom legacy while embodying and emblemising it. The encounter between Jesus, whose sheer humanity takes us to the heart of God-beyond-'gods', and a building whose architectural freezing of divinity has become a service point for humanity, constitutes a visual parable with multiple meanings and no easy 'resolution'. Just as it should be.

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[17.31 GMT] Thanks to Ed Metzler for this: "I arise in the morning torn between the desire to save the world and the desire to savour the world. That makes it very difficult to plan out the day." ~ E.B. White

[00.33 GMT] It's been a long fortnight, and I'm too tired to write very much about the good news of the election by the Episcopal Church USA of the Rt Rev Katharine Jefferts Schori, the Bishop of Nevada, as its next presiding bishop. Forget, for a moment, all the frantic media scribbling about divisions, plots, conservatives and liberals. Here is a person of substance - a scientist married to a mathematican, a thinking Christian, a reconciler, a woman of conviction and prayer. In the short run she is probably destined to be referred to as a 'spoke in the wheel' by those who seemingly cannot accept a Gospel that breaks down the barriers that divide us - at least when it comes to the potent mixture of gender, priesthood and sexuality. In forty or fifty years time we will look back on these arguments in a rather different way, I suspect; though the churches have a long history of struggling to get the point of their calling - mistaking for orthodoxy (a right disposition of praise towards God's freeing of the world, ortho-doxology) a rather leaden institutionalisation of selected elements of the Christian tradition. In truth this has little to do with the labels that get thrown around, or even theology, and much more to do with the uneasy psychology of adapting to a world where Christian people are increasingly vulnerable rather than powerful, in the Way of Christ. To understand this, and to embrace each other and dis/agree without fear, we need guidance. And that requires Spirit-motivated people like Katharine... and, though he increasingly seems a prisoner of a dysfunctional institution, Rowan Williams. It may seem feeble to say 'bless them', but nothing greater could be asked right now. Apart from not forgetting to laugh, too. (I enjoyed penning that one).

[319.1] POLITICAL LIFE AFTER CHRISTENDOM

The long-awaited third book in the 'After-Christendom' series from Paternoster Press is about to be published, and is already receiving vigorous commendations from academics, politicians, journalists and religious leaders. Love it or loathe it (and people will do both), it raises some key issues.

Faith and Politics After Christendom: The Church as a Movement for Anarchy by Ekklesia's co-director (and my good friend and colleague) Jonathan Bartley comes out later this month, and is launched at a conference in Birmingham on July 2006. Addressing diverse issues from blasphemy to religious violence, the Iraq invasion, church schools and the establishment of the Church of England, it invites a realistic and hopeful response to challenges and opportunities awaiting the church in twenty-first century politics.

In particular, the book suggests that where it has previously defended the social order, the church now has a brand new opportunity to exercise its prophetic role, challenging injustice, shaking institutions and undermining some of the central values and norms on which society is built.

"With his background as a former political adviser at Westminster and now director of the Ekklesia thinktank, Jonathan Bartley, one of the smartest young evangelicals around, offers compelling insights and suggestions, based on deep thought and clear-headed research." - Stephen Bates, Religious Affairs Correspondent, The Guardian

That 'evangelical' label is interesting. Ekklesia is also accused of being 'liberal'. It prefers to try to change the terms of the debate and be radical - in the seense of being rooted in order to venture towards the frontiers.

"At a time when the whole relationship between faith, government and public policy is undergoing a historic change in every part of the world, Jonathan Bartley has made a highly intelligent contribution to a debate which citizens of all creeds, and of none, ought to be following" - Bruce Clark, The Economist

"In a ‘post Christian age’, Jonathan Bartley questions the role of institutions both political and ecclesial. He bids us consider what it is to live in a multi cultural , even secular society, where Christianity is stripped of its traditional protections of both establishment and its attendant political authority. This is not so much a book of answers but of pertinent questions. It deserves a wide reading." - Rt Rev Peter Price, Anglican Bishop of Bath and Wells

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[10.56 GMT] Christian think-tank raises radical questions about marriage Ekklesia, 17/06/06. This will certainly test whether the 'post-Christendom' notion is getting through. Difficult stuff to communicate, given dominant assumptions, but worth a try, we think. The fragile fabric of our social order and the messy state of the church makes it an important issue, certainly. Hopefully it will attract serious reflection, not just knee-jerk responses. There's a discussion area on the BBC's story here. And here is the Google News trail on the story.