Review: Coffee Shop Conversations

This book is one that I now seriously consider recommending to the student Christian groups I'm in touch with whose basis is Evangelical. That's the constituency Jonalyn and Dale Fincher are chiefly writing for and from. The reason I would recommend it is that I think that it starts in the right place with the right attitudes.

Let me backtrack briefly to say what the book is about. It is a book to help Christians think about how they/we share our faith and encourage others to follow Jesus. It aims to help develop confidence in handling bits of conversation that take a spiritual turn. One of the refreshing things about this book is that the authors are aware that there is a great deal of bad practice which has gone on and that it has brought Christian faith into disrepute. Sometimes explicitly and often implicitly, the reasons for bad practice are gently but firmly challenged and a better way is pointed up.

Dale and Jonalyn do a good job of rooting the whole endeavour in loving neighbour, and this is indeed the right place to start. They encourage and model by the examples they give, genuine friendship which is respectful, gracious, committed to relationship and the good of the other person. They are able to write of friends who have come to faith and friends who have not and the way they write shows a genuine love of those who fall into both categories.

Where I have slight hesitations it would be that sometimes I felt they offered examples or approaches that felt a little too bold for me. I can't work out whether that is something to do with the differences between USA and GB in cultural terms or whether at times the boldness seemed to slide into inappropriate challenge. I'd also have to say that the hedging about creation and evolution was not to my taste but reflects the USAmerican scene. Though I'd want to say that, given their obvious ecclesial context in this regard, the approach they outline is good: they model and enjoin that we keep the main thing the main thing and don't dump our in-house arguments on people for whom it means nothing and who will run a mile if we insist on conformity to our pet hobbyhorses. Of course, that may not work with some who seem to have worked themselves up into a lather about it and can scarcely recognise those of us who differ as Christians. At least they are aware of the serious difficulty 6-day-creationism presents for apologetics and that there are many Christians who don't think like that.

I was interested in their approach to the issue of homophile relationships too. I think that this is, in our culture, a defining issue and so it is helpful to note their approach. If I read them aright, they tend to the inherited view that sex outside of marriage in wrong and that marriage is between a man and a woman. However they clearly hold this view with graciousness and with room between their understanding of the matter and the issue of following Jesus.  Jonalyn tells of one of her friends who is Christian and in a committed relationship with another woman, she tells it in a positive way and with a humble attitude.  They tell stories touching on this issue which show that they are most keen to invite people to consider Christ and then (and only then) to work out what it might mean for their relationships. I think that approach has integrity and is helpful. It is miles away from the hatefulness of Westboro Baptist Church and represents a way ahead for those who don't accept the rightfulness of committed gay relationships.

Coffee Shop Conversations on Amazon.co.uk -just change the "co.uk" into "com" for the US version.

Millennials leave church because

This resonated with me:

Having been advertised to our whole lives, we millennials have highly sensitive BS meters, and we’re not easily impressed with consumerism or performances.In fact, I would argue that church-as-performance is just one more thing driving us away from the church, and evangelicalism in particular.Why millennials are leaving the church – CNN Belief Blog - CNN.com Blogs

I'm not a millenial but my kids are and actually I feel these ways too. To me it suggests that we need to be careful about the 'presentational bent' of a lot of contemporary forms of church. It suggests to me that highly relational forms of church are to be commended.

But beyoond that it suggests that liturgies (and by that I mean ways of ordering our time together before God) would do well to take issue with consumerism implicitly and sometimes explicitly. Liturgies should perhaps subvert and poke fun at 'selling' and identity-formation-through-buying. They should celebrate and affirm people for being people not consumers and root that celebration and affirmation in the love of God.

Trusts not learning -how are they supposed to learn?

This caught my eye because it attributes 'learning' to a corporisation and it does so matter-of-factly.

NHS trusts are failing to learn properly from patient complaints, with most needing to make significant improvements on how they learn from mistakes, according to researcher. NHS trusts not learning from their mistakes, report says | Society | theguardian.com 

Admittedly this is echoing the way that many of us talk routinely about corporisations. We speak of them knowing, learning, willing and even deciding. My question is whether this is a mere figure of speech or whether there is a significant level of truth to it. Now, it should be noted the same article also quotes a more 'nuanced' telling of the tale and it may give a way into answering my question:

"too many boards are not considering the kind of analysis they need in order to understand patient experience and use information from patient complaints to improve safety and care. From ward to board level, learning from complaints needs to improve."

In this we catch a glimpse of what learning by a corporisation involves at least in the minds of one set of researchers and their interlocutors. It involves people processing information in groups which have places in structures. Those structures convene the groups and (implicitly, given that the learning is related to improving care) take the product of the group deliberations into changed systems. This seems to parallel definitions of learning which talk about processing information into changed behaviour or structure.

learning may be viewed as a process, rather than a collection of factual and procedural knowledge. Learning produces changes in the organism and the changes produced are relatively permanent    
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning> 

Since a corporisation is, by definition, made up of individual humans (plus some other 'ingredients') part of what we need to pay attention to is how the move is made from individual learning to the corporate level.

There are many methods for capturing knowledge and experience, such as publications, activity reports, lessons learned, interviews, and presentations. Capturing includes organizing knowledge in ways that people can find it; multiple structures facilitate searches regardless of the user’s perspective (e.g., who, what, when, where, why,and how). Capturing also includes storage in repositories, databases, or libraries to ensure that the knowledge will be available when and as needed. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisational_learning>

And learning takes the knowledge captured and turns it into not just stored information but policies, proceedures, training, slogans, iconography, architecture and accountability structures.

Did my moral compass just become demagnetised?

 I've been watching Continuum and finding it fascinating. The brain-bending to do with whether the future can be changed, the sci-fi fun with tech. But the more I watch, the more it seems I gain sympathy with those who are being presented as the 'baddies' and feel that the character presented as the heroine (Keira) may not be a goody. One of the viewer comments says it well:

 Should the viewers really like Kiera and what she stands for ? Do you honestly have no problems with the future she comes from and which she uncompromisingly defends ? She reminds me of Gestapo officer. They also had families they loved, feelings like Kiera, friends/family members who got killed by rebels (Kiera mentioned this as a justification) but they stand for something utterly wrong like Kiera does. And until now I have not seen Kiera doubt that fascist dictatorship, she defends so much, one little bit. .... Liber8 stands for the right cause but they try to achieve their goals with the wrong means.Kiera and her background does not get m... - IMDb:

 From about episond two or three I've been thinking that the ideals of the group Liber8 seem more aligned with mine -apart from blowing people up: undermining and working against corporate interests that seem to be content, over the arc of the future we catch glimpses of, to trample on people's rights and to exploit people unmercifully. The more it goes on, the more it looks like Keira is simply defending her chance to get back to the life she once knew. We have been taken through the story in such a way as to be sympathetic to that. But what of those for whom the future seems to be one of brutality and tyranny where a corporate-led big-brother society dominates. Keira seems to have been 'fortunate' to have been able to be on the side of money which gives her a personal and family stake in the system as it is/will be but what I'm seeing suggests that perhaps there's a further development perhaps as we realise that the comment above likening Keira to a Gestapo officer may be on the mark. But we'll see.

We've just been seeing an episode where debt is used to enslave people who are set to work on production lines having had their minds removed in effect by the implantation of a sub-dermal chip. Somehow the 'baddies' don't look so bad and the 'goody' seems to be defending the real baddies.

Research shows Humans aren't natural-born war-mongers

This study is not doubt going to come under attack, but I think it has resonance with our experience. In brief, the article  Humans Not Predisposed to War, New Study Finds | Common Dreams points up:

Countering the prevailing notion that humankind is naturally predisposed to war, new research suggests that primitive humans existed mostly peacefully, with war developing much later than previously thought.

Now, as to why I'm disposed to take this seriously, leaving aside my commitemnt to taking seriously Christ's teaching. I think that the activity of warfare seems to require a certain amount of 'psyching up' rather than being something we 'naturally' slip into. As the study seems to show, murder is more likely -crimes of passion, resentment etc. Organising a unmber of people to warfare is a very different league and requires organising, arguing for etc -a far more expensive endeavour in terms of psychic and physical resources. Then consider that to get people to fight wars takes quite a bit of training -including desensitisation to killing and cuing aggressive responses (and even then typical soldiers tend to suffer fear reactions more than 'bravery').

 As an expression of that expense can be seen in the mythically-enshrined ideologies of ANE; the Babylonian and Sumerian creation myths which 'justify' organised violence. So the Genesis 1 account which reads to me like a counter-story is significant because it pictures a peaceable creation process presumably deliberately telling a different tale to warring god-factions and thereby giving a different vision of human purpose and dignity which is presumably the theological point. So I would see this as providing a pre-historical evidence that the theological assertion I'm seeing in Genesis 1 is mirrored by human development in history, And that the development of warfare is a later cultural development which required, among other things, ideological underpinnings which Genesis is resisting and countering.

That's not to say that a rosy view of early humanity is propogated by the Bible -far from it. However, in line with this interpretation of evidence, violence in scripture is seen more as interpersonal (Cain and Abel) first of all.

Spiritual but not religious in Britain

This article The Brains Behind Spirituality : RSA blogs makes some good observations. First, the big picture:

Post-Religious Britain: The Faith of the Faithless, a 2012 meta-analysis of attitude surveys by the thinktank Theos, revealed that about 70% of the British population is neither strictly religious nor strictly non-religious, but rather moving in and out of the undesignated spaces in between. While the power of organised Christian religion may be in decline, only about 9% are resolutely atheistic, and it is more accurate to think of an amorphous spiritual pluralism that needs our help to find its form.

In a sense nothing surprising there. What is interesting about that quote is the thought about the amorphousness needing to be given form. That becomes a reflection on the role of (organised) religion. The point being that religion  could have an important role to play:

we are relatively starved for forms of practice or experience that might help to clarify our priorities and uncover what Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan calls our immunity to change

 This is religion in the sense of something that gives form to spirituality in entities that have legal status and the ability to make collective action efficient and effective and which can help direct effort and educate participants and draw them into practices and perspectives that have proved helpful and healthy in the past. Of course that is religion at its best. Part of the problem is that many people in the early C21 are more aware of the negatives relating to religion: its vulnerability to capture by vested interests and misuse by office holders, its tendencies to bearing down on people in a life-diminishing way and its failures to help people to understand in terms relevant to their lives how spirituality can contribute to their flourshing. I myself tend to be suspicious of 'religion' for just these reasons. But I do balance my skeptical tendency in this with an awareness that corporisations do have a potential to marshal human collective efforts for the general good and well-being. Churches are, whatever else they may be, corporisations.
The article captures the situation thus:

those who value spiritual experience and practice are often suspiciously quick to disassociate themselves from belief in God and religion, as if such things were unbearably unfashionable and awkward, rather than perhaps the richest place to understand the nature of spiritual need

 The RSA article offers us an interesting foil to think about this:

is it not the sign of a spiritually degenerate society that many feel obliged to define their fundamental outlook on the world in such relativist and defensive terms? Compare the designations: ‘educated, but not due to schooling’ or ‘healthy, but not because of medicine’.

 Which helps us to note that the place for religious expressions in our kind of society has to be in relation to a bottom-up rather than hierarchical practice of religious spirituality. Hierarchy worked in a context where deference to perceived and institutionally-honoured expertise was normal. That's no longer our context.

Jonathan Rowson, the author of the linked to article, suggests that the fundamental issue of spirituality to which religion needs to address itself is

to know oneself as fully as possible. For many, that means beginning to see beyond the ego and recognise oneself as being part of a totality, or at least something bigger than oneself.

 I think that's probably right as far as it goes. It's a project that will seem too minimalist for many with more definite spiritualities and/or expressing their spirituality reasonably happily in the context of a religious corporisation. And part of the critique might be to ask why on earth we might want to start with that issue as the way into spirituality. The argument would presumably be that this is where, existentially, most people start. I wonder whether that is right. I suspect we might actually want to start with meaning-making in relation to our place in the universe with a view to supporting good, healthy and convivial living. In fact, putting it that way ties into the calling, as I see it, of corporisations in general to serve the individual and common good. And this in turn may relate necessarily to the shared noetic space that humans collectively generate which is is big part (I hypothesise) of the make-up of corporisations. That shared noetic space is what enables us to share our thoughts and to collectivise our acting in the world..

On this account, another function of 'religion' at its best would be to enable us to think ethically about our participation in corporisations and give us support to challenge and change them when they fall short of their purpose.

Can the Church compete Wonga out of business

Leaving aside the interesting use of 'compete' as a transitive verb (an evolution I'm perfectly happy with, but I know people whom I imagine will be frothing at the gills). I have two or three reactions to this. The first is that it is great that the church is being led from the front into something that aims to tackle a manifest evil. Another reaction of alarm because my other reaction is to doubt that it is possible (I'm not sure that I'm supposed to admit to doubt -but there it is ;) ). Here's what's going on:

 The Archbishop of Canterbury has warned the online lender Wonga that the Church of England plans to force it out of business - by competing against it.The Most Rev Justin Welby told Wonga boss Errol Damelin the Church planned to do this by expanding credit unions as an alternative to payday lenders.The plan is to create "credit unions that are... engaged in their communities", he said. BBC News - Church plans to 'compete' Wonga out of business:

So, can it be done? and why would I doubt it?
I'll start with the cause of my alarm. You see, I have experience of credit unions. I support them and would encourage the initiatives to make them a fuller part of the fabric of our collective life. They are a good thing. But (you knew there was a 'but' coming, right?) there is a sense in which it isn't competition. The credit unions I know about -and I think it's standard practice- need for their members to have deposited money with them and to have waited for a few months before they can apply for a loan. By my reading of the matter, this won't help a lot of people for whom saving will be an issue and it won't help in the matter of crisis loans which I suspect are the big issue precipitating a slide into chronic debilitating indebtedness.

So my alarm is that I'm not sure that CUs can help many of the people that need the help. That said, it may be that they can begin to do two things: one would be to mop up people who aren't in the direst of straights but are aware of their precarity and can begin to invest; the other would be to be helping to create a culture which supports more prudence and greater solidarity.

So can it be done? I'm not (yet) convinced. But what gives me pause is that Justin is a finance guy; he probably knows something I don't. I hope to see more detail in time. I've not yet seen anything about the clergy Credit Union which I think he's counting on to help kick-start things.

We really should keep journals

At the moment I'm working on a couple of projects at work involving putting together learning materials for people to help them to be better resourced at work. In one of them, I'm proposing to encourage participants to practice, at least from time to time, journalling and other self-reflective disciplines. Some of it is emboldened by knowing that research in psychology etc seems to show that they help well-being in various ways. For me the sweet-spot is that they are also involved in spiritual disciplines helping us to relate positively to God. 
I'm amused/bemused by this bit:

... you shouldn't view journalling as an attempt to formulate solutions to your problems; the real benefit comes from the third-person perspective that's attained when you externalise your thoughts. It's interesting to speculate whether the effect may be similar to that of meditation: not changing your thoughts and feelings so much as changing your relationship to them – so that you no longer take them to be an unquestionable, intractable, non-negotiable reality. Why you really should keep a journal, no matter how cheesy that sounds

The reason is not because of the starting advice: I think it's vital that we find ways not to approach problem-solving directly at times. No, I'm convinced that finding the third-person reframing is vital and is part of cultivating a proper obliquity. The reason for my a/bemusement is that it seems that prayer is clearly going to perform this function (obliquely to relating to God, naturally). I guess that it's the relatively large amount of research on mindfulness meditation that pushes the mention of meditation to the fore, but really the way that this is being explained does seem to indicate that prayer can function in this way. In fact, I think it is time to look more carefully at the 'fashionable' mindfulness/meditation research and consider how the various aspects uncovered are represented in Christian spiriutal practice. I do this in an earlier blog post albeit in a very outliney sort of way which references an article which actually prefigures some of the Guardian article's references.

I'm also interested to note that the advice is to not do it daily but less frequently. That'll go well with some of the people I'm wanting to work with on this. Check out this article for a bit more thinking and advice on the topic.

Coming Interspiritual Age. A review

I was intrigued by this book for two main reasons, I think: one was that, as someone working with different expressions of faith, I am finding myself a little weary of 'interreligious' and 'multifaith' as labels; the other is that the blurb told of an 'integral' worrld view.

The 'multifaith' and 'religions' issue is that I have a suspicion of 'religion'. I'm only too aware that institutional forms and 'brand loyalties' can obscure what might actually be going on with people. So 'inerspirituality' seemed to hold out the promise that there might be ways to address that.

I've enjoyed the attempt to situate spirituality in a "big history" of the scientific understanding of origins -both cosmological and anthropological and it is certainly important to do this and to co-ordinate this with the various spiritual traditions. There's a fascinating engagement with the idea of the bicameral mind, though I'm not convinced by the thesis and so the account of human cognitive-cultural development which is developed and relies on the thesis seems, therefore, less strong than the author might hope.

In fact, this seems to point to a weakness in the book more generally. At various points where the ambitiously wide-ranging account touched on areas about which I know a reasonable amount (eg areas to do with linguistics), I found the account sometimes inaccurate in ways that did not instill confidence in the overall argument. In fact, quite a lot of the time this read as a kind of updating of New Age thinking and approaches to spirituality, so I became increasingly concerned as I read that there is a particular politico-spiritual agenda at work which was not entirely 'respectful' of those of us who baulk at certain dimensions of syncretism.

My hope was that this book would give ways to handle spiritual dialogue and inter-religious encounter creatively and respectfully and there are insights in it to help this. However, it does have it's own spiritual agenda and is, in effect, arguing for a particular way of reading the world which could actually not convince many of the people whom it would include. I fear that the mistake is to offer a meta-narrative for a task where learning to sit light to meta-narratives for the sake of dialogue is required. We need a practical wisdom to handle plurality and this is not served well by trying to replace viewpoints with ones own.

Coming Interspiritual Age: Amazon.co.uk: Johnson, Ord: Books: Coming Interspiritual Age

Corporations are not people, money is not speech -or maybe not

I've recently come across a campaign in the USA about corporate rights. I gather from various things that I've read that Mitt Romney produced a soundbite which appeared to say that corporations are people -which seemed to support the idea that they should have the same constitutional rights as actual flesh-and-blood individual humans. In actual fact, the quote with context was actually saying in a sense that corporates don't exist except as instantiated in the human being that make them up. However, the soundbite is being used as a jumping-off point in a campaign to move ...

an amendment to the US Constitution to make it clear that corporations do NOT have the same rights as people and that money  is NOT speech for purposes of election-related spending (see here)

I was taken by one of the campaign images featuring the words I chose for the title of this post.

But I am intrigued. On the one hand, knowing the context I agree with its aims: speaking from a theological perspective we need to be clear that these entities are not to overmaster human beings, they are supposed to serve human welfare and promote human flourishing rather than extract value from the many for the advantage of a small few (for example, though are other malfeasances they could enact). And freedom of speech should not be be interpreted as freedom to spend money into political process and so distort it to the detriment of ordinary human agents.

However, I've been struck by contrarian reading which is actually a way of characterising what I'm coming to believe about 'corporisations'. And in this way of looking at them corporations need to be recognised as person-like in some respects: they have a degree of agency which supervenes that of the human agents that compose them. They are people, in a way (though not one that should give them human rights): they can be held responsible for things and suffer social, financial and legal penalties for wrongdoing.

And there is a sense in which money is speech, or at least communication. These entities are constituted in such a way that financial flows send them messages in ways analogous to chemicals in the environment do with various organisims (ourselves included) and/or in analogous ways to hormones within a body. Financial flows can encourage development of structures or behaviours or discourage them. Finance is sometimes how we get their attention.

Drunken words and false consciousness about alcohol

A year or so back I suggested that we need to tackle binge-drinking as a cultural intervention; that we should be aware of how drinking is construed in the stories we tell and are told about nights out and what happens or is supposed to happen in them.

"Essentially, in an instance like this, intoxication provides a 'cultural timeout' from regulating one's behavior."' Wasted' and 'hammered' versus 'buzzed' and 'tipsy' is more than just semantics

This pretty much backs up my thesis, I think. Though I'd go further and want to situate these words within a narrative ecology which talks about the expected behaviours and perspectives around drinking alcohol with friends on a night out: the constructions of 'manhood' in relation to what quantity of what kind of drink, the supposed memory-lapsing properties of drink to give alibis for not regulating behaviour, the reframing of vomiting as amusing and so on.

We need counter stories and effective ways to puncture the bubbles providing the reframing and the alibis. 'We' all know in reality that it is fairly rare for most of us to not remember, but as long as we continue to collude in this false-non-memory syndrome, for example, we collude in the bad behaviours that can be carried out under its banner because the non-remembrance acts as a get out of jail free card whereby we aren't responsible (a) because we were drunk and (b) because we don't remember and so can't be held responsible. Of course, if we can't remember, then how do we know we've had a good time? Conveniently the social group holds the memory for us and retells us in such a way as we can laugh at our own stupidity without taking it personally because in a way it wasn't us in our right mind. In reality, of course, most people in this position remember well-enough but their friends collude in the memory loss. After all, one day it'll be their turn to have a convenient amnesia and they're counting on reprocation in collusion.

Evil is suffering passed along

In the series of posts the lattermost of which is on forgiveness-centred atonement, I propose that we understand forgiveness in terms of "to refuse counter-mimesis, to deny the recirculation of detriment into human affairs". And I'm interested to note that in a Quora piece by Diane Meriwether, Why do certain people derive pleasure from doing cruel things...- Quora:  there is, by implication, a congruent proposal about suffering and human response to it.

 When suffering is upon us we have two options. We can process and digest it or we can pass it on. Processing emotional pain can be as silent as pressing our hands to our chest and rocking back and forth, or it can be as loud as a scream that starts in your throat and tunnels down through your gut, through your knees, and tears a channel into the earth. Working through pain can happen in an instant, when you finally stop running, drop your hands and invite what's been chasing you to kill you if it must. Or the process can last years, playing hide and seek with the sweetness of a memory. In time, the processed suffering may transform into wisdom or compassion. My definition of evil is suffering passed along to someone else. In the process, whatever started the pain is lost and the energy moves as revenge or cruelty until someone else can bring it to ground.

For me, the thing to take away is is explitising the corollary of the proposition tha forgiveness is forbearing to pass on suffering, that is that to pass on suffering is a definition of evil. Now it's not all you would want to say and it leaves unexplored what internal mechanisms might be involved (which I try to do in the earlier posts to the one I link to), but it is a helpful starting point, not least because  it gives a way into consideration of forgiveness and therefore of God and atonement. interestingly, of course, it also relates to the idea of karma in south Asian thinking and perhaps the intriguing thought here is that speaking of karma and speaking of atonement become plausibly compatible language games.