Departures

On a recommendation from one of our students, I've -just yesterday- watched the Japanese film Departures (2008) this description only just does it justice "A newly unemployed cellist takes a job preparing the dead for funerals". It was an emotional experience for me not because it was sad (though it is at points) but because it was beautiful: seeing the comfort that could be brought by caringly performed ritual actions. It is also a story of reconciliations and of growth, of the breakdown of prejudices and a film that reminds us of the humanity that actually reminds us of the image of God, I think. It's long, but I didn't actually feel it to be long; the pace seems about right for the content and the dignity of the film.

For me it was a reminder of the value of the simple ministries of being there, doing things with simple dignity and acting with compassion. It was also a reminder of the value of ritual acts in giving a framework for important human transitions to be begun, continued or brought to a close. It made me aware how impoverished our cultural and ritual language has become particularly in relation to death and dying. Though perhaps it should be a case of looking carefully enough to see what people are pressing into service in actuality ... and what priorities and thinking is revealed, but that's another posting or several ...

Two-tribe politics is over -or it can be

What I liked about this article Two-tribe politics is over. But the likes of John Prescott can't see it is the brief rehearsal of the pros and cons of AV:

Proponents of change will contend that first past the post awards parliamentary seats in a way which is wildly out of proportion with votes cast and that weakness has become so pronounced in recent years that MPs can now get elected with the support of fewer than three out of 10 voters. (They will be right.) Opponents of reform will say that AV can also distort the will of the electorate. (They will be right too.) Supporters of the status quo will insist that the current voting system has the great merit of producing reliable parliamentary majorities for single party governments. (That it does – except on those quite frequent occasions when it doesn't, as it didn't at the last election.)
Campaigners for change will say that AV gets rid of tactical voting, forces candidates to seek support from at least half their electorate and gives everyone the chance of their vote counting for something. (That it does.) Those hostile to AV will say that preferential voting privileges the supporters of smaller and fringe parties over mainstream parties. (This may be their best argument.)

So how would we decide in the referendum? Well, we really do have to recognise that any voting system is a judgement of balance between competing desirable characteristics. But what we have to bear in mind, I believe, is that our political culture has decisively changed and is now ill-served by a two-party system:

The alternative vote is not a perfect adjustment to this transformation, but it does at least recognise that, for millions of voters, their first choice is neither Conservative nor Labour. AV also has the merit of tending to reward politicians who try to reach out to as many of their constituents as possible. It better aligns how we vote with how most of us now think about politics. A declining minority of people identify wholly with one party. For the majority, any choice is a compromise, there are more colours in the rainbow than just red and blue, and cave-dwelling tribesmen belong in TV documentaries not modern British politics.

And the point therefore is to start moving our political system to a less-adversarial more plural-recognising one. AV isn't the best solution, but it is a step in the right direction especially of a system that encourages politicians to seek to work with a range of people and constituencies (note small 'c': I'm not meaning simply parliamentary constituencies here). That is so much better, surely, than knowing that the governing party is enjoying an absolute and terrifying majority with less than 40% of the popular vote: that scarcely counts as democratic.

Resist the argument to vote as if this is a referendum on how you're feeling about the coalition policies at the moment. Something much more important in the long-term is at stake. Tactical voting is less than transparent in conveying intentions -as we already know because for so many of us elections have been an invidious choice between two or more 'evils' and the unelectable.

Hitch, Blair, and the non-event debate on “religion”

A hat-tip to Doug in a comment in his post: Hitch, Blair, and the non-event debate on “religion”. The hats-off-in-respect is for this paragraph:

“Religion” is not only a slippery concept, but in this particular modern use is fundamentally also a secular one that assumes “religion” is one of a variety of activities or behaviours that humans can choose to engage in. That definition begs the question of the presumption of a neutral place to stand, it flattens to the point of absurdity the differences, say, between Islam and Buddhism, and it ignores the long-standing traditions of polemic against false “religion” in many major “religious” traditions

I've been trying to express all of that succinctly in a variety of fora for a good while, so I wanted to make sure I could find that bit again for future use. The only thing I'd want to do with it as of this moment is perhaps to expand a tad the 'neutral place to stand' bit to make explicit that the secular standpoints are themselves philosophical actors on a par with 'religion' in the public space.

Christening the dog means ...

There are two or three issues here but I'm only really interested in one, but it's hard not to note the other. The one I'm least interested in, for the moment, is that a dog should get a service in church or possibly that the owner should have spent a thousand quid on the occasion. They are both 'commentable' topics but I don't really want to say much about them.

What I found intriguing is the evident meaning -even in the Torygraph- of the word 'Christening'. See here: "The local vicar, the Reverend David Fowler, blessed the dog in church but refused to actually christen the animal there. Instead the dog, its owner, vicar and guests retreated to a local hotel where the vicar placed his hands on the dog's head and declared the puppy be called Sheridan Smith."
It does seem to me that it seems to focus on 'naming'. I had been wondering whether this could turn out to be a story about 'animal baptism', but clearly not: so, next time someone rings asking for a Christening, perhaps one need not be so quick to assume that a baptism is called for ...

Dog gets elaborate church blessing - Telegraph

Scenius: genius made corporate

I hadn't come across the word 'scenius' before but I definitely recognised the concept. See here: FT.com / Life & Arts - Lightning in a bottle. And here's the definition: "Eno coined the odd but apt word “scenius” to describe the unusual pockets of group creativity and invention that emerge in certain intellectual or artistic scenes: philosophers in 18th-century Scotland; Parisian artists and intellectuals in the 1920s. In Eno’s words, scenius is “the communal form of the concept of the genius.”". It's a concept related to something I've been advocating for a good while; that we need to have zones and times when diverse people can meet and exchange ideas and insights in a relaxed atmosphere. An apparently unproductive space can give rise to very productive outcomes; but you can't predict what they would be or when they would emerge. It's about obliquity, and I have been noticing and saying how some good stuff occurs when it's not on the agenda, it's an oblique outcome and as such you can't aim at it, you can only create the conditions for it to emerge (whatever it would be) if/when it might emerge. However, the point is that it almost certainly won't if you try to force 'it'.

My interest was given a practical bent by noticing how current university pursuit of efficiency and maximising 'productivity' means that people no longer have time (or feel they have the time, more to the point) to turn up at meeting places (common rooms, for example) and linger for 20 minutes and just 'share' with others. And yet it is those times that can be, in my observation, extraordinarily productive of new ideas, cross-pollination of ideas and insights. In our own college, one of the most interesting assessments we have recently come up with was born in a moment of free-wheeling idea exchange between various of us who don't teach in the the same streams of theology. Of course there needed to be some careful thinking and work to make it into a properly defined assessment, but the idea would not have occured without a moment of free association without a defined 'productive' agenda.

The article I referenced at the start is arguing that cities are mavens of creativity because they bring people together and create 'unproductive' spaces of intellectual and creative exchange.

In this light, perhaps we could see the problem with the Tower of Babylon (Gen 11) as the idea of setting up an artefact with a monomaniacal agenda which would exclude diversity and 'freewheeling' (and we know historically that the Mesopotamian civilisations did have mythical ideologies which emphasised the idea of 'work' (well, slavery, really) -contrariwise Genesis writes leisure -sabbath- into the picture, for example). That may be the point of the 'punishment': forced diversity and diaspora (echoing 'go forth and multiply; fill the earth ...'). Given that my reading of Genesis 2 would tend to indicate that God has an interest in cultural diversity and human freedom, it would seem to run with a theme going through Genesis 1-12: God wants humans all over the place being creative and diverse.

How to become a real Muslim

This article sets out helpfully a basic set of issues around the presence of Islam in Europe: Eurozine - How to become a real Muslim - Kenan Malik:

Among the things that I though helpful was this reminder of how lumping people together under one label can be really misleading:

"If there is no such thing as a set of 'European values' that transcend time, the same is true of 'Islamic values'."

The point being that cultural change means that to keep things the same, you have to change and as change takes place in relation to various changes in life, history, technology etc different responses emphasise different aspects and understandings of the received tradition as the best resources to guide responses. The article before this point notes how 'European' values as we tend now to think of them are actually likely to have been unrecognisable, even shocking, to some of the 'founding fathers' of European Enlightenment who may well have found many 'Islamic values' more familiar and understandable.

And so this applies to Islam:

Islam, like all religions, comprises both a set of beliefs and a complex of social institutions, traditions and cultures that bind people in a special relationship to a particular conception of the sacred. Over the centuries, those institutions and cultures have transformed the reading of the Qur'an and the practice of Islam. Religions, like all social forms, cannot stand still. Islam today can no more be like the Islam of the seventh century than Mecca today can look like the city of Mohammed's time

And by the way, that's a pretty neat definition of religion back there: I like the way that belief and institutions (plural) are held together in it and the idea of binding people in relation to their shared understanding of 'the sacred'. I'm also interested in the way that particular readings of certain texts in the Qur'an have become de rigueur and unchallengeable through dint of historical developments when in fact they do seem tenuous and even unhelpful. For example, the now traditional interpretation of the verse that is taken to deny the crucifixion would, most naturally (as Kenneth Cragg argues, I believe) be interpreted in tandem with similar phrases elsewhere describing, eg, the outcome of the battle of Badr as denying decisive human agency in such events rather than that they happened. But the perceived necessity to differentiate from Christians was more important than historical defensibility and now Islam has a tremendous apologetic hurdle to get over; denying the crucifixion of Jesus is pretty tough to maintain and the Qur'an probably doesn't maintain it.

And so while this is true

"The key question", the French sociologist Olivier Roy points out, "is not what the Koran actually says, but what Muslims say the Qur'an says." Muslims continually disagree on what the Qur'an says, he adds dryly, "while all stressing that the Koran is unambiguous and clear-cut."

The interpretation of the crucifixion seems to be a no-go area for reinterpretation. Even secular Muslims seem reluctant to go there speculatively.

But then the next bit reminded me of RE lessons I used to take on Islam where I would show a Muslim graphic depiction of Muhammed and point out that the supposed prohibition had not always and everywhere been true in Islam.

The prohibition against such depictions only emerged in the 17th century. Even over the past 400 years, a number of Islamic, especially Shiite, traditions have accepted the pictorial representation of Muhammed..

The article then goes on to dig out the context behind the Danish cartoon furore, and it turns out that Muslims of the more radical drift needed some prodding and encouragement to get with the plot of controversy. And this produces a media product: a definition of Islam for western liberal consumption.

In liberal eyes, in other words, to be a real Muslim is to find the cartoons offensive. Once Muslim authenticity is so defined, then only a figure such as Abu Laban can be seen as a true Muslim voice. The Danish cartoons, as Jytte Klausen observed, "have become not just a tool for extremism but also created a soap opera in the West about what Muslims 'do' with respect to pictures'. Or, as Naser Khader has put it, "What I find really offensive is that journalists and politicians see the fundamentalists as the real Muslims."

The liberal west has helped to create and foster the monster it decries. It has given an appearance of legitimacy to the more extreme voices and portrayed them as if they are most authentic. Interestingly, I think, the same may now be happening with Christianity whereas previously less extreme versions tended to be seen as more authentic. I think that a big part of the problem in this respect is the 'need' in popular media to create clear dramatic stories and to do that extreme positions produce conflictual situations or at least the possibility of portraying them and these make for stories that are easy to follow and promote.

on worshipping celebrities -or not

This is worth considering, not least because the 'meme' about idolising and worshipping stars and the media-touched is such a common-place that it is about time we looked at it again. And that's what this article does:
The Other Journal at Mars Hill Graduate School.

"The perplexing thing is that while commentators and the media talk about celebrity worship as a kind of religion, interviews with fans and indeed mourners generally reveal that most have no sense that what they are engaging in is “religious” and that they would reject entirely the idea that the figure they are celebrating is a god. So celebrity worship is ambiguous; it is a kind of religion."

This may, of course, be a reflex of the sense that religion is something very 'other' and formal and to do with obviously 'religious' rituals and actions. So the ability to see the 'heart-enthronment' as at least potentially idolatrous. There really is no understanding which would relate these admiring, imitative, loyal and formational attitudes to celebrity with 'spiritual' or religious themes in most people's minds. This is 'entertainment' not religion. This is a bit of fun, not spirituality.

The separation of spirituality/religion from ... well, other 'stuff' is complete.

But what is happening, really? Well perhaps there's a clue here:

Madonna was able to reveal herself because of the willing cooperation of the media. We know about her because it is hard not to know. Through her self-revelation, she became the product. She commodified intimacy.

The bringing together of something that could be accessed through the regular channels which touched the devices and desires of hearts through culturally relevant and attractive means.

celebrity offers a source for identity and belonging: they are a store of orientating reference points or possible ways of living (or not living). The significance of celebrity culture relates, therefore, directly to questions of identity and the complex interaction between media representations, and to the way that these influence are taken into individual and communal senses of the self.

So it comes down to the way that identification and identity construction takes place in our culture. However, the relation to authority is different from traditional religion as we have often known it -or is it? Is it just that the way that different socially-powerful institutions are able to 'capture' the narratives operating at a popular level? In this case, the media, fashion and entertainment institutions rather than churches, monasteries, courts or guilds. This would be analogous to the way that punk was captured by the media, fashion and entertainment institutions and commoditised. The medieval church institutions captured popular piety and devotion to saints and incorporated them in 'legitimate' Catholic Christianity. Today it is not the churches who seem able to do this but 'cultural industries'. But that's not to say that there aren't connection points to matters of positive theological concern.

There may be recurring notions of fall, redemption, salvation, and so on in celebrity culture, but this does not mean that they are equivalent to Christian doctrine or, indeed, that they replace Christian theology. I want to suggest, however, they are missiologically important. What I mean by this is that they form a part of the theological resources of our culture.

I want to suggest, then, that we want to pay attention to the themes of identity, definitions of good living in order to understand how we could connect with culture. So while we might want to read celebrity as an alternative religion,, that is likely to make our approach oppositional. It would be yet another variant of the knee-jerk Christian response that simply alienates without really properly understanding what is going on or what the consequences are likely to be.

Rather, by noting the issues that people are attempting to address and by observing and understanding how they 'use' celebrity to address them we can work out ways to address those issues in culturally resonant ways or to oppose them, as necessary, in strategic and telling ways.

This article is a contribution to that.

What have the Romans ever done for us? Given us the Swiss Army knife !!!!

You may respond, "So why isn't it called the Roman Army knife?" And I say: 'no idea', probably the same reason as we don't use the Latin word for concrete; it had to be reinvented. But there's no arguing with the archaeology:
1,800-Year-Old Roman Multitool | Gadget Lab | Wired.com:
"the Roman version has a lot of foldaway implements stowed inside: a knife, spike, pick, fork and a spatula. Unlike the modern-day equivalent, the Roman Army Knife has a useful spoon on the end, making it likely that this iron and silver artifact, found in somewhere in the Mediterranean countries, was meant for eating with"
Well, a good idea is a good idea ... and there's nothing new under the sun.



Except new stuff.

Micmacs

I've just watched
MICMACS | A Film By Jean–Pierre Jeunet
And I've really liked it.
If you liked the quirky humour, the photographic palette and some of the visual and humorous themes of Amelie, then there's a good chance you'll like this. The plot is fun, there's a nice use of slapstick humour and there are baddies who get their comeuppance. Some lovely,rich visuals, nice artistry of various kinds and a bit of romance. All round a fun film.

I enjoyed spotting reprises of visual motifs and gags from Amelie, including filming using the same sort of palette (the green of the water, the late-afternoon sun shots, the Paris buildings, the return of the moto and even about 4 members of the cast). In addition the carefully unexplained build up of the constituent parts of the denoument, structured like a joke, is nice and rather like Amelie in style too. So while you may think I'm making it sound formulaic, it doesn't come over that way; it is the re-acquaintance of old friends.

The funnest thing for me was the way that the denoument incorporates an expose of the arms trade, not in some heavy-handed, 'worthy', way but in a way that has you thinking, 'Actually, this is sick and immoral ...and wouldn't it be great if the amoral people promoting could be exposed and de-clawed like that'. There was something of a heterotopic dimension to it. I trust CAAT will be promoting showings!

Oddly, I realised that the bits of Paris used in this film have surprising resemblances to the Quayside in Newcastle ... or is it vice versa?

Strong Opinions, Weakly Held - Bob Sutton

Apparently the Palo Alto Institute for the future have been giving advice for helping people to develop attitudes for facing the future:
"to deal with an uncertain future and still move forward – they advise people to have “strong opinions, which are weakly held.”"
Basically strong opinions give us energy to develop arguments for them and to test them, weak opinions don't get our juices flowing -we don't care enough about them. The 'weakly held' bit is that we nevertheless need to be open to disconfirming evidence and to get past confirmation bias.

When I read that I felt that there was something here about religious or spiritual beliefs. On the basis of this argument, it would seem at first sight that having firm beliefs is a good thing as long as we also develop critical skills and reflective practice -or am I (a practical theologian with a brief for reflective practice) simply exhibiting confirmation bias?

See Strong Opinions, Weakly Held - Bob Sutton

Of course it would also indicate that we should respect and not vilify politicians who change their minds in the light of evidence see here. Interestingly, on another tack, I found a sentence in that last one that resonated strongly with me. I've noted the same in myself and others over the last few years: "... study after study documented in the book Drive (Dan Pink) – and find out that high stakes and increased pressure actually inhibit performance on tasks that are complex and creative." We need 'space' to think our best: retreats, time out, leisure, times for discursive non-directed chatting.