MAKING PEACE IN DANGEROUS SITUATIONS

118 Days: Christian Peacemaker Team Held Hostage in Iraq, edited by Tricia Gates Brown, is a new book that I have contributed a chapter to (on media reporting) with US Ekklesia consult Tim Nafziger. It is available in the UK through Metanoia Book Service. On November 26, 2005, Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) members Tom Fox and Jim Loney along with delegation members Norman Kember and Harmeet Sooden were kidnapped in Iraq. Tom Fox was killed on March 9, 2006. Jim, Norman and Harmeet were freed two weeks later on March 23 after 118 days of captivity. The kidnapping of these four peacemakers was like a rock thrown into a pond. This collection describes the ripples on the water, the impact and results of that rock, in stories characterized by hope, courage, friendship, and forgiveness. 118 Days bears witness to vital peacemaking being done around the world in these times. Available from 5 June 2008. See also www.118days.org

THE VISION THING

I am speaking at a policy discussion on 'Renewing the Vision' in Exeter on 7 June, 2pm - with Ben Bradshaw MP, theologian Professor Tim Gorringe from the University of Exeter and Sue Errington from the Global Centre. It is organised by the Christian Socialist Movement (CSM). Further details: http://www.thecsm.org.uk/policydiscussion.html

FEAR IS NO BASIS FOR PROGRESS

The Guardian 's Comment-is-Free has carried a thoughtful response from Inayat Bunglawala (pictured) of the Muslim Council of Britain to Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali's Standpoint article on the disintegration of 'Christian Britain' -- which is now available online here incidentally. (And I mention that not just because Inayat has been kind enough to quote me approvingly.) There's also a trenchant editorial calling on Rowan Williams to speak out in the The Guardian today.

CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM ON FILM

I have a new column up for the Wardman Wire Thinking Aloud series, examining some background to the recent Channel 4 TV 'Dispatches' programme - which looks at the views and tactics of extreme Christian groups in Britain. See: A fundamental problem?

LONGING FOR A LOST PAST

Bishop Michael Nazir Ali - who is all over the media this morning - seems to have become spokesperson-in-chief for a Christendom vision of society. His main article appears in a new monthly called Standpoint. I fear that it is an essentially backward looking approach, and will succeed mainly in alienating more people from Christianity, ironically. There's an overview here, and I have made my own brief comment on behalf of Ekklesia, as follows: "It is misguided to try to defend the myth of a ‘Christian nation’ rather than looking at how Christianity has often historically lost its way by becoming a cosy part of a withering social, political and cultural order.

“There are indeed serious issues about moral cohesion in modern, plural societies. But diversity and disagreement cannot be wished away, and a vision of social justice and responsibility will not be created by lecturing people, seeking to restore Christian privilege, portraying Islam as the new threat, or bemoaning the loss of a monoculture."

"The churches need to be seen as small-scale communities of positive hope, not wounded dinosaurs complaining that people do not take them seriously any more and that the country is going to the dogs.”

When I worked for Churches Together in Britain and Ireland I sat alongside Bishop Michael on a theological commission for a couple of years. I also interviewed him not long after he came here from Pakistan to take up the general secretaryship of CMS. I've always had high personal regard for him, but I confess that I'm surprised and disappointed by how far he seems to have lurched to the right in recent months and years. His views always used to be on the conservative side, but thoughtfully so. Since the Canterbury debacle, however, he appears to have been increasingly marooned, and the outcome is not a happy one, unless you share a rather paranoid Daily Mail view of the world.

I have written more about this for The Guardian's Comment-is-Free. My piece should appear between 9-10am tomorrow.

SPEECH ACTS

Here's a revised and re-published version of the reflection I referred to on 18 May: Hearing hope through the babble. Ekklesia, 27 May 08. Globalisation constructed as top-down control and the triumph of the powerful needs to be disrupted by a different and gentler logic, says Simon Barrow. But will we choose Pentecost or Babel?

WRITE OUT LOUD

"Myth does not mean something untrue, but a concentration of truth."

"If you travel with us, you will have to learn things you do not want to learn, in ways you do not want to learn them."

"I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common ... this is a disease of the mind, the way I see it."

"All kinds of thing go on in life that are not permitted in our philosophies."

"That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way."

"What matters most is that we learn from living." -- Doris Lessing.

EXTRA ORDINARINESS

"These signs we call sacraments say to us that the power of the Holy is available to us not by way of magical rites but through the natural channels along which our energy flows for daily living; profound truths mediated through everyday deeds - taking, breaking, eating, drinking, washing and spilling." (Colin M. Morris)

WHEN CONVICTIONS COLLIDE

Here's a very good article by Stephen Heap, who coordinates chaplaincy services at the University of Bedfordshire, on how we negotiate uneven and sometimes deeply antagonistic base-level convictions in a plural society. The answer, he suggests, is to create the space to face one another, rather than to try to write 'the other' out of the script. The term he uses for this, with an awareness of its richness which is wholly lacking among many who merely use it as an anti-religious slogan (including some respondents to this article), is 'secular' -- which, as he points out, "does not mean a space where there are no claims to absolutes, but one where together we learn to face the undoubtedly real and disturbing conflicts our opposing claims create."

"It means a level of public discourse in which truth and truth claims are dealt with without ridicule but with a deep acknowledgment that we disagree, at times profoundly so, and yet somehow have to survive together on the same plot of land. Creating such properly secular spaces is a major challenge to which we must rise if our conflicting allegiances are not to tear us apart."

This is no woolly liberalism, though. Heap gives some concrete examples of ways in which Christians and others may find themselves strongly at odds with the social or legal consensus on issues like war and civil rights. The idea that religious convictions must always be discounted or subsumed to the interests of the state is as dangerous and unhelpful (to all concerned) as the idea that they can or should claim dominance or special privileges. Rightly handled, our disagreements keep us moving forward together. Wrongly handled, there is hell to pay.

SHEEP AND GOATS

A stand-out exchange (rendered from memory) in the moving Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, which received its UK network premier on Channel 4 this evening.

Record company executive: “Listen, your audience are Christians. They don’t want to see you dressed in black and hear you singing for criminals, pimps, rapists and thieves in prison, trying to cheer them up.”

Cash: “They ’aint Christians, then.”

HEALTH AND HOPE

The World Council of Churches' communications staff have put Desmond Tutu's recent speech to staff on the occasion of the anniversaries of the WCC and the World Health Organisation (WHO) online as a podcast. It is also embedded in this Ecumenical News International story. Hat-tip to Jane Stranz.

FOR A HOLIDAY WEEKEND

"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."

"Precisely because resignation is antecedent, faith is no aesthetic emotion but something far higher; it is not the spontaneous inclination of the heart, but the paradox of existence."

(Søren Kierkegaard)

A WARNING FROM HISTORY

"I know a great deal more about the world today than I ever did in government" -- former British prime minister John Major, illustrating why an over-slavish devotion to the realpolitik of high office may not always be as wise as it seems to those schooled in power.

CHINA, CRIES US

"Google [has been] coming under fire for operating a version of its search engine that complies with China's censorship rules. Google argues that it's better for it to have a presence in the country and to offer people some information, rather than for it not to be active in China at all... [S]hareholders and rights groups including Amnesty International... continue to push Google to improve its policies in countries known for human rights abuses and limits on freedom of speech... Sergey Brin, cofounder and president of technology for Google, abstained from voting on either of the proposals. 'I agreed with the spirit of these proposals,' Brin said. But he said he didn't fully support them as they were written, and so did not want to vote for them." More here, courtsey of NewsCloud.

DISTURBING THE PIECES

"Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations." -- Rollo May

"The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit." -- John 3. 8

NEGOTIATING STRANGE SPEECH

Well, Trinity Sunday is upon us. I was thinking I'd be preaching at St Stephen's again. My offering last year, Three Ways to Make Sense of One God, is up on Ekklesia. But due to a bit of a communications confusion, that privilege has now fallen to Bob Burn, and I have been freed to sneak off to Wembley and, um, wave my arms around.

Talking of which (dubious link, this) I have shamefully omitted to offer any reflections on Pentecost this year. I see that some biblical studies I delivered at an ecumenical conference in 2002 are still up on the web, the first of which is entitled, Other Languages: The global connectivity of the Spirit. Here's an excerpt:

"[Some] clues about .. very different ‘global futures’ leap out at us from the old politics of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 and the new economy of the Holy Spirit made visible in its unexpected nemesis, the Day of Pentecost recorded in Acts 2.

"First Babel: ‘And the Lord said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose will now be impossible for them…’ (NRSV). And, so the story goes, God confounded the designs of those who wished to rule everything through the architecture of power and its corollary, a universal scientific language. ‘Come, let us go down and confuse their speech there, so that they will not understand one another.’

"Of course this mythic reversal has its price. Confusion and dispersal leads to continued division and enmity among peoples, as we know from the promise/judgement dynamic of the Hebrew Scriptures. So what does the typology of Pentecost generate by way of an alternative? Well, contrary to what techno-logic might assume, its new solution is not a super-language, what post-modern philosophers now call a 'meta-narrative'. No, it is a proliferation of tongues once more – but this time with the extraordinary added gift of mutuality, communicability, the ability to live with and even ‘in’ each other’s speech worlds: ‘they began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.’

"At Pentecost the outcome of diversification is not hopeless confusion. Rather, with no diminution of difference, indeed a huge multiplication of it, the various peoples each have the wholly unexpected, fulfilling experience of hearing their own speech picked up, recognised and honoured by the stranger. ‘Each one heard them speaking in the native language of each’.

"This interplay of mutuality based on difference is immensely significant. According to the politics of worldly power difference needs to be contained and restrained. Allowing ‘other languages’ means risking ‘other meanings’. Translation is never exact because the patterns of thinking that accompany distinct speech forms are also different. For those who wish to centralise, to lord it over others, this is disastrous. If you would rule the world you must first rule its meanings. That is true whether you are an ardent secularist or a religious ideologue.

"Systems of domination [Walter Wink] say that only one speech is fully legitimate. Yours. Conflict becomes necessary to subdue the potential for linguistic and political chaos. With a bit of civility mixed in you might just achieve similar control via a contract (a legal arrangement) or a democratic settlement, of course. The assumption in this instance is that the meaning of the ‘acceptable’ rules is determined in the same ways as the meaning of language. Indeed rules are language, to a large extent. But instead of trust and relationship it is hegemony and enforcement that ‘call the shots’.

"Chaos, conflict, contract, control. That is perhaps all that difference can lead to when it is bereft of genuinely loving connectivity. In the taxonomy of the Holy Spirit, however, there is a new possibility abroad. Our differences need not cancel each other out. Instead they hold the potential to become part of that endless interplay of voluntary, proximate relationship we call communion. Freedom thus proves the condition for love (attention to the other, as to ourselves) and vice versa." Full text here.

[Pic: (c) Julees stained glass]

SHOPPING AND FLOPPING

"Today we are more wealthy and less happy. I don't really know why, but I think it is to do with the loss of optimism. We no longer believe that things can change... What we have seen is... the defeat of politics by shopping." -- Andrew Marr, talking about the post-war years, in relation to his A History of Modern Britain.

"All we ever want is more,
A lot more than we had before.
So take me to the nearest store." -- Shania Twain, Ker-Ching

Two thousand years ago, in Palestine, a rich young man, was invited by an itinerant preacher to sell all his possessions, give the money to the poor and to seek the kingdom of heaven. He chose not to and we are told he 'went away sad, for he had many possessions'. So the burden of riches is not new. It is James’ contention that this 'sadness', fostered by rampant capitalism, is no longer the privilege of a few but can grip whole societies." -- Francis Philips on Oliver James' Affluenza.

BETTER THAN OPTIMISM

"Try again. Fail again. Fail better." -- Samuel Beckett

WRONG MESSAGE SENT OUT BY DISCRIMINATION

A Christian charity which works with people with learning difficulties, as well as supporting church ministries, has today been found guilty of acting illegally when in 2004 it began recruiting only practising Christians for almost all posts, and told existing non-Christian staff that they were no longer eligible for promotion. A former employee, himself a Christian, resigned over the policy and claimed constructive dismissal. An Employment Tribunal in Abergele upheld his case unanimously. See my comment on behalf of Ekklesia: Faith bodies should end discriminatory practices.

This is not, it seems, an exceptional case. As a Christian, I would want church and para-church groups to behave with greater not less courtesy, justice and love than is commonly required. But the habit in some quarters is often to complain that "we" are hard done by, to promote discontent, and to seek to get around anti-discrimination requirements, rather than to exhibit the kind of positive transformation the Gospel is supposed to be about. It's very sad indeed.

TRUTH TO TELL

Trawling through media comment and reportage on a regular basis can sometimes be a depressing experience. At times it feels like mainstream journalism has lost its primary interest in conveying what others are actually saying and meaning, and has become over embroiled in the 'rush to judgement'. My latest Wardman Wire 'Thinking Aloud' column is on The struggle to be truthful (in at least the minimal sense of that term), and as examples looks at how both the latest Religious Trends survey and an article by Rowan Williams on embryo research got covered by the papers.