SPEAKING UP FOR CHANGE

MORE THAN REALPOLITIK

"Expediency asks the question: Is it politic? Vanity asks the question: Is it popular? But conscience asks the question: Is it right? And there comes a time when you must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular - but you must take it simply because conscience tells you it is right." - Martin Luther King Jr., 'To Chart Our Course for the Future' (1968)

MY BUS SAYS...

Why spend money dissing other people's beliefs / non-beliefs on public transport, when you can subvertise with the free bus slogan generator and give the money to something useful?

HARVESTING DARWIN

Over on Ekklesia we've published a number of pieces to mark the 200th and 150th anniversaries (of Charles Darwin's birth and the publication of On the Origin of Species, respectively). There's Dr Denis Alexander's Why Christians should celebrate Darwin and Professor John Hedley Brooke's Darwin and Religion. The latter has quite a few additional links appended. There's also a summary of responses from the British churches and related academics or agencies, and an education angle from America.

As my comment indicates, I really don't buy into the 'rescuing Darwin' schtick, as it seems to me to feed that which it contends, and to distract attention from the common purpose of harnessing good science to meeting needs and enhancing understanding. Also, interactions between science and theology premised on trying to redress, reassert or reassess the conflicts of the past are in danger of being over-determined by what they should be letting go of or transcending. Oh, and the ComRes survey was rather counterproductive. It generated a problem through flawed questioning, and possibly inadequate attention to sampling errors.

Meanwhile, here's a relevant anniversary / bicentenary blog swarm. And an interesting post on, er, post-Darwin from Bob Cornwall.

ROLLING NEWS

For those of you who use Twitter, and for those who might want to try it, Ekklesia has just started tweeting here. We'll be running links to our content as it goes up, through RSS, and adding one or two extras as well. My own Twitter is scrolled on the right-hand column here.

UP AGAINST IT

"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. " - James Baldwin, writer and civil rights leader

CHRISTIANITY REDISCOVERED?

My experience of being a Christian is that of a surprising, continual and contested process of reformation and rediscovery - personal, intellectual, spiritual and political. It feels far removed from the kind of faith that many zealous believers and non-believers seem attached to. This essay on Being Christian in a sceptical climate draws on previously published material, but I've prefaced it (substantially) and modified it in the light of an interesting exchange as part of a meeting I spoke at recently, organised by the Central London Humanist Group. I've also included some links below to related articles on the theme of 'believing in God in post/modernity' which I have written in the last 18 months or so. There are overlaps, of course. But hopefully they can be viewed as looking at the same tantalising mystery from slightly different angles.

* What difference does God make today?
* Three ways to make sense of one God
* Rescuing God from our attempts at belief
* Which Jesus are we expecting?
* The God elusion
* Theology, science and the problem of ID
* Facing up to fundamentalism
* Turning God into a disaster area
* Re-thinking Christianity
* Why we need to rid ourselves of 'the god of the slots'
* Resurrection is no Easter conjuring trick
* Coming under liberating judgement

CORPORATE CULTURE

"[We need] to embrace a "new bottom line" in which corporations, social practices, government policies and individual behaviours are judged rational, efficient or productive not only if they maximize money or power, but also to the extent that they maximize love and caring, kindness and generosity, ethical and ecological sensitivity, enhance our capacity to treat others as embodiments of the sacred and to respond with awe, wonder, and radical amazement at the grandeur of the universe." - Rabbi Michael Lerner

CONVICTIONS NOT TAKEN ON TRUST

Oh dear. It's not hard to imagine the depressing forward trajectory of the story that broke this morning about a nurse in Somerset who was suspended on a disciplinary charge after she offered to pray for somebody she was caring for who took exception and reported her. The context was a publicly-funded nursing role. I've tried to respond on behalf of Ekklesia by calling for a non-confrontational approach to resolving this, and trying to look at the wider changes which are bringing about more of these situations. My media comment was:

"One hopes that an issue like this might be resolved in the joint interests of patients, carers, institution and staff without turning it into a huge legal and political issue. But this incident clearly illustrates the 'culture clash' that can emerge in our public institutions as the Christian faith loses its predominance within a society that has previously been shaped by its story.

"With the demise of Christendom, people who do not believe in a particular way often find the presumption that they should or might do so troublesome. On the other hand, Christians who have been used to different implicit 'ground rules' feel that their identity is being eroded by the requirement to maintain a clearer boundary between what they might do in a voluntary capacity (including praying for people), and the culture of restraint being developed in publicly-funded bodies where people of no faith and other faith may see things very differently.

"This is something that needs much more debate and constructive discussion. There is a tendency for disputes of this kind fairly rapidly to descend into confrontation. One can almost predict that some campaigners will try to turn this into another case of 'Christians being persecuted', while others will say it is about 'Christians trying to force their beliefs on people at the taxpayers' expense'.

"That kind of row gets nowhere. Instead we need to look at adjusting to change and redefining roles."

CONTRASTING CHURCH ATTITUDES TO HUMAN RIGHTS

Savi Hensman has produced another very useful research essay for Ekklesia on different church attititudes and stances towards human rights for all. Since 1948 Christians have played a significant role in extending personal and societal respect for human dignity, including promotion of the UN Declaration. At the same time, church leaders have also questioned and denied rights-based precepts and practices in a number of instances. In this paper, Savi traces these discontinuities while pointing to the substantial traditional theological and spiritual resources that can be deployed in producing and developing shared commitments to freedom and justice.

The publication of this document coincides with the Primates of the Anglican Communion meeting in Egypt from 1-4 February 2009, the upcoming Church of England General Synod discussion on the Human Rights Act, the Convention on Modern Liberty in the UK, and recent comments on human rights from the Vatican, from Evangelicals and from the new Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Kyrill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad.

See also from the same author:
* Being on the side of the crucified
* Developing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
* Human rights are not just for individuals
* The Christ child, the vulnerable and human rights
* Tradition, change and the new Anglicanism
* Prayerfully seeking justice and mercy

Click here.

HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2009

THE DEC GAZA APPEAL

BISHOP GENE ROBINSON'S INVOCATION

It didn't make it to live television, but Bishop Gene Robinson's powerful invocation on Sunday has been put up on YouTube by the evangelical magazine Christianity Today - to its credit, since many of its readers probably do not share its strong convictions (full text here). It appears to be a 'home video'. Some of the comments underneath are abusive and unpleasant, you should be warned.

ON THE TELLY

If you are in Britain and near a television on Sunday 18 January you can catch my Ekklesia co-director Jonathan Bartley on BBC1's Big Questions at 10.00am discussing, among other things the inauguration of Barack Obama, and on Michael Portillo's Christianity: A History on Channel 4 at 7.00pm, looking at the impact of Constantine. To support Ekklesia's work with the media you can donate through PayPal here, by the way.

GIVING PEACE A HEARING

A leading advocate of practical non-violence begins a two-week, 20 meeting tour of Britain from Friday 16 January through to 1 February 2009, offering case studies of achieving peace without guns in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Gene Stoltzfus, US founder and director emeritus of the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), will be on tour in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland to share his field experience in global peacemaking.

The visit is organised by Christian Peacemakers Teams UK and is backed by the religion and society think-tank Ekklesia. CPT came to global prominence in 2006 during the Iraq hostage crisis. More information here and here.

EYELESS IN GAZA

I have now listened to many, many media interviews about the Gaza tragedy in which dropping bombs, sending in tanks (Israel) or launching rockets (Hamas) has been justified "as a legitimate response" to "what the other side is doing". On some occasions the "eye for an eye" aphorism has been directly used - or, rather, abused. One should not forget the key questions about occupation, dispossession and disproportion, of course. The futile politics of what is going on is frightening - and rather well summarised by Peter Beaumont. But the issues of the destructiveness inherent in endemic revenge go deep into the human psyche and point us toward a root sickness. This is an issue I have tackled in a short Ekklesia piece, On not being left eyeless in Gaza. It also provides an opportunity to begin to plug the forthcoming Gene Stolzfus visit.

STARTING OUT AGAIN

It may be hard to feel a great sense of natural optimism about 2009 given the war in Gaza, the global economic crunch, environmental degradation and much more. But... we can still celebrate human community and possibility, wage peace, and resolve to encourage and transform. New Year greetings to one and all, with the assistance of the fireworks from central London!

NOT BY MIGHT

A short Christmastide reflection on the God who defies our expectations of 'godness' in the vulnerability of the Christ child.

A DIFFERENT REGIME

A very happy Christmas to one and all. I hope I'll be able to get up to speed with FaithInSociety by the New Year. In the meantime, here's an Advent/Christmastide reflection ('Which Jesus are we expecting?') and an excerpt from a poem...

"In the days of Caesar, when his subjects went to be reckoned,
there was a poem made, too dark for him (naive with power) to read.
It was a bunch of shepherds who discovered
in Bethlehem of Judah, the great music beyond reason and reckoning:
shepherds, the sort of folk who leave the ninety-nine behind
so as to bring the stray back home, they heard it clear..."

From 'In the Days of Caesar', The Poems of Rowan Williams (The Perpetua Press, Oxford, 2002)