Cremation, Burial -or what? -Christian eco-propriety in funeral practice

We've been thinking about disposal of human remains lately, particularly our own when eventually it needs to happen: what do we want to do? Mostly our thinking has been around it being ecologically righteous as far as possible, starting with the body itself not polluting or being treated in a way that will hinder the natural recycling that nature has been doing for millions of years with dead bodies. And then also the processes of funeral rites not contributing to pollution or global heating (or at least minimising that impact).

But/And, as Christians, we also want funerals to be consistent with Christian discipleship. So this article when I happened across it, caught my attention. It did so because the article had no consideration of the environmental dimension but rather mainly a -forgive me for the slight disparagement- a narrow individual-salvation concern as shown by this couple of sentences early in the piece.

Some believe that the Bible says you can’t go to Heaven if you’re cremated. This isn’t what the Bible says. There is nothing in the Bible that forbids cremation as a means of disposing a person’s body.

Fair enough as far as it goes: our hope of salvation lies in God's grace and remembrance (both in the sense of knowing us 'timelessly' and of re-making us eschatologically) of us beyond death not in a particular treatment of human remains. A few moments reflection will show up problems with the idea of the physical remains being necessary to ultimate participation in the new creation: many, many people's bodies do cease to exist after enough time. eventually in most conditions even bones' molecules are dissipated into the environment. A theology of reconstruction, if I may characterise it like that, means that after a few hundred or thousand years, there is nothing to reconstruct. It also implies a reconstruction using 'new' material to replace decomposed flesh, so why not simply replace everything? Especially if the new creation's material basis is different to the current material basis? 

Anyway, to return to the main focus: I think that a more wholistic consideration of disposal of our remains should take place; it isn't just about whether we 'go to heaven' or even whether we are being consistent witnesses to Christian teaching. Actually that last clause in the quote includes, in reality, noticing that being good witnesses to Christian perspectives should include -prominently at the moment- doing right and justly by the ecosystem and climate.

With the following quote from the article, however, I see both a positive basis for thinking about corpse-composting and also I find a quibblesome point.

Cremation, however, subtly suggests that our bodies are of no significance. Burial, on the other hand, communicates something far more consistent with the Bible. It affirms not only that the human body has dignity, but also that it has a future. It affirms that death is not the end of the body.

The positive basis is the appraisal of human bodiliness as good and having dignity as well as having a future and those things I definitely affirm. I'm not convinced, however, that cremation really does suggest lack of significance for bodies; I think that's a value judgement that doesn't make sense from 'my' (ecological) perspective -I can see why someone might say that but it lacks force because it only communicates those things if you come from a certain cultural background or with a certain way of looking at life-processes narrowly focused on individuals in an industrial system. 

I'm not convinced that the means by which a body is decomposed do in themselves suggest any such appraisal. Because that's what we are talking about -burial, cremation (or whatever) are all about what processes we entrust a body to for return to the elements. We need to see the bigger picture of molecules and elements returning to the wider ecosphere. What gives a body significance (which is a cultural construct) is how we treat it in terms of 'fare-welling' and how we link that fare-welling to whichever 'bigger picture' of life and cosmos we are beholden to. 

I want to suggest that it is also important to affirm bodiliness by recognising that 'from dust we are created and to dust we shall return' -"dust" being matter, essentially, and the energetic means for its decomposition back to 'dust'. We can do that slowly, by letting bacteria, fungi and biochemical processes work through their life-cycles with the body as raw material. We can do that quickly by oxidising using heat. (And there is another option mentioned below).

More important in terms of Christian ethics and witness is surely making the process most consistent and compatible with the Creator's designs of energy and matter cycles and flows. So, if there's a problem with cremation, it's not really that it disrespects the body or a Christian appraisal of bodiliness. The problem with cremation as I see it, is that it uses methods to accelerate bodily decomposition that are noxious for the environment (ie usually fossil-fuel in the form of methane based gas jets). It may be possible to mitigate that, and to do so would help return to a more positive appraisal of cremation.

As a related side-note here, I would also point out that embalming is a pretty bad thing to do from the perspective of environmental impact. 

And while we're considering less-direct issues of body preservation, we might want to consider how a body is stored pending burial, cremation or whatever. Cold-storage often does have a carbon footprint or dangers around coolants' storage and release. So the title of the article that stimulated my response here might also ask "is it OK for Christians to be embalmed?". I think that embalming is far less good than cremation in the bigger picture.

As a Christian, I believe that we honour our Creator by playing our part in good creation-care practices. And this includes disposal of earthly remains. That is a very body-respecting and material-creation-affirming thing to do. It is good biblical theology to recognise the dust from which we come and to participate well in the systems of life-and-death in which that dust plays its part -to 'tend the garden' with our remains as well as our living effort. The practice of embalming seems to me to be not only dishonouring to the living flow of the ecosystem but also to speak, perhaps, of an overemphasis on appearance and human convenience which is not easily consonant with Christian teaching and virtues. Perhaps that's a harsh thing to say, but maybe we need to be sober about such things rather than simply sentimental and revise our funereal practices in the light of the bigger picture I'm trying to work with in this post.

Personally, I'm looking into Water Cremation to recommend and/or enable for my 'relicts'. It seems to overcome the difficulties associated with conventional cremation and offer a way not to take up lots of rooms with a grave plot. And, as a Christian, I'm trusting in God's recreative promises not the condition of my corpse for a share in the resurrection to Life.

And as a PS -as I've looked at what internet search brings up in relation to the environmental impact of cremation, I've noticed that much of the find is backed by funeral industry with an interest in promoting cremation. One of the effects of this is to not quite compare like with like and be low oncomparative detail, giving the impression that hot-cremating is better than burying. Admittedly this is perhaps true if you take in embalming, plot-maintenance etc. But the simple act of burying a body is less fossil-fuel energetic than firing a body. What needs to happen is to factor-in the ecological impact of the 'extra' acts to corpse-disposal: travel, preservation, storage, containment etc of the body and things like travel by mourners. And these need to be accounted for side-by-side in whichever disposal means is chosen. It's hard to believe, ceteris paribus, that like-for-like accounting would put cremation ahead. The one exception may well be so-called water cremation mentioned above.

What Does the Bible Say About Cremation | Is It OK for Christians to Be Cremated - Beliefnet

Christ-centred creation and prodigality

This excerpt from a talk by Tom Wright resonated with some things I've been thinking about in relation to the nature of creation centred in time and space on Christ. +Tom says:

... if creation comes through the kingdom bringing Jesus, we ought to expect it be like a seed growing secretly. That it would involve seed being sown in a prodigal fashion in which a lot went to waste, apparently, but other seed producing a great crop. We ought to expect that it be like a strange, slow process which might suddenly reach some kind of harvest. We ought to expect that it would involve some kind of overcoming of chaos. Above all, we ought to expect that it would be a work of utter, self-giving love. That the power which made the world, like the power which ultimately rescued the world, would be the power not of brute force, but of radical, outpoured generosity. We ought to expect, in other words, that the creation would not look like an oriental despot deciding to build a palace, and just throwing it up at speed, with his architects and builders cowering before him. 

What I find helpful in this is how our attention is drawn to the prodigality of it all. One of the minor objections from creationists is the wastefulness of the processes that the rest of us believe we discern in the geological records and other related evidences. Linking the debate in the way that +Tom does here; to the parable of the sown seed, helps see a kind of implicit endorsement in Jesus' own teaching of a prodigal creative process in which there is some 'hit and miss' element to it all. It kind of finds in creation a prodigality, which Jesus draws attention to and thereby endorses rather than questions. And while this doesn't add up to saying 'this is the meaning of the parable' it does take Jesus' acceptance of the wastefulness of both the creational type and the parabolic antitype as at least the possibility of seeing that generous endowment in which there is more and to spare as the way things are and develop.
I'm finding that really helpful to think further about.

Jack Lewis, meet Matt Fox for an original blessing

Jack Lewis meet Matt Fox ... Matt, this is Jack. Matt, you may recall Jack by his nom de plume: CS Lewis. Now, I've brought you two together because you have both influenced me in a congruent way. I know it may be hard to believe, one of you apparently defending a Christian tradition that the other has found deeply alienating. Yet, actually I learnt a particular something from both of you and I find myself wondering how best to tell a story of human corruption against that background.

So, what is that particular something? Well, from you, Matt, I became convinced that we really do need to make sure that we tell the story starting with original blessing rather than making original sin the main and key point in our thinking. I became convinced mainly because that is where the Hebrew and therefore Christian scriptures begin; with "And God saw that it was good". But this is also where you come in, Jack. Because I had learnt something from you already which, over time, I realised was deeply congruent with the idea of original blessing. From you I had learnt in my undergraduate reading, that we must understand evil as derived, unoriginal and merely parasitic on the Good. Evil cannot be thought of in a dualistic way as somehow 'being' an equal and opposite force to 'good'. Your reasoning convinced me that behind every evil is a perverted or misused good; that evil is, in a sense a parasite feeding off what is good and unable to exist without goodness.

In this, I think, you are both united. Reality is fundamentally good and we are called to participate in that fundamental goodness, and indeed to tend it and help multiply it. This is our human calling before any other calling: to be blessed and to bless in turn. I actually think both of you would probably agree with that, in broad terms, leaving aside quibbles about terminology or which metaphors might be most apt and resonant.

What I want to do with this conversation is think about where we go next in terms of accounting for what has tended in the Christian tradition to be called 'sin'. Though, to be sure, there have been and are other terms for it and a variety of images to think it through.

You see, I think that a further dimension of what I think Matt has got right in all this is to be critical of where the fall-redemption model, as he tends to call it, sometimes (indeed, often) pushes Christians and those influenced by that way of thinking. On the other hand, what you, Jack, do really well in so many of your books is explore the inner world of sinning in a way that helps us to see how sinning is a non-dualistic thing. It's not an alien force that takes us over so much as a directing of drives and desires that in other circumstances and dealt with differently would be simply an ordinary good. What you also do is help us to see that there is a fundamental surdity about it. These things would sit well enough, I suspect, with the fundamental right insight behind the idea of original blessing.

So, in future blog posts, I hope to try to tease this out a bit further: what is sin in a non-dualistic account, recognising that so much popular thinking about sin is at root dualistic, I think that may be what you were saying, Matt. I don't recall you saying that Jack, but as I indicate above, I think that your approach amounted to that.

Arthur C. Clarke's 31-Word Sci-Fi Story, "siseneG"

Read Arthur C. Clarke's Super Short, 31-Word Sci-Fi Story, "siseneG" | Open Culture: “siseneG,” a story story — a very short story indeed — Clarke sent in to Analog magazine in 1984:

And God said: DELETE lines One to Aleph. LOAD. RUN.
And the Universe ceased to exist.
Then he pondered for a few aeons, sighed, and added: ERASE.
It never had existed.

I liked this because it does imply some interesting philosophical reflections. Of course, it is hard to really imagine a being outside of time 'pondering for a few aeons' (what could that possibly mean?). But I warmed to the idea that we could perhaps think of the universe as fundamentally code. I think that's where I see a lot of physics thinking at the moment. And then, if code, then what of "In the beginning was the word"?

Does the Church really exist for the worship of God?

What I need to say, right upfront, is that I support, broadly, the organisation Praxis which originated the following definition in support of its mission (this is the UK instantiation of the organisation):

The Church exists for the worship of God.
Worship is the only activity of the Church which will last into eternity.

Worship enriches and transforms our lives.
In Christ we are drawn closer to God in the here and now.
This shapes our beliefs, our actions and our way of life.
God transforms us as individuals, congregations and communities.

Worship provides a vital context for mission, teaching and pastoral care. Good worship and liturgy inspires and attracts, informs and delights. The worship of God can give hope and comfort in times of joy and of sorrow. Despite this significance, we are often under-resourced for worship. Praxis Home

I think the problem with this is a conflation and confusion of different meanings for the word 'worship' which often, I think, ends up misdirecting our attention and effort when it comes to what happens in church buildings.

I think I need to unpack what I mean more. You see, I think that the two meanings of worship play out in that statement but one tends to displace the other while relying on the displaced meaning for its justification.

I guess that still needs unpacking further. So let's start by saying what I think the two meanings are and how they relate to one another.

The first meaning is summed up in Romans 12:1-2 "... in view of God's mercies, offer your bodies as a living sacrifice to God which is your spiritual worship ...". This is picked up in Anglican communion liturgy in the prayer after communion in which we "offer our souls and bodies to be a living sacrifice". That this is an important way to understand "worship" is accentuated by Matthew Myers Boulton's book God Against Religion, which (drawing on insights from Karl Barth) makes a case for understanding liturgical worship as a fallen artefact and understanding the message of the first chapters of Genesis as showing the more fundamental human calling to be to tend and till creation as created co-creators.

So, I think that there is a problem with "The Church exists for the worship of God" and "Worship is the only activity of the Church which will last into eternity", if "worship" is understood primarily as an assembly for the the performance of  rites, actions, words (what many would call 'liturgy'). Assuming the basic rightness of Boulton's (and Barth's) thesis, the church exists for the worship of God only really if we understand worship primarily as becoming and being part of God's work (and rest from) [re]creating. The problem, it seems to me, with the Praxis landing page blurb is that it seems to shift the meaning into narrowly liturgical events. Such meaning -by the Barthean thesis as picked up by Boulton- is precisely the wrong way to go: there is no temple in the New Jerusalem and the liturgical acts of Revelation chapters 1 to 20 are not to be understood as eschatological but as representations of present reality (as per the kind of approach to interpretation of the book of Revelation in David Wilcox's commentary). The only  kind of worship in the New Jerusalem seems to that which could be included in the wealth of the nations -which would surely be all human achievement rooted in God's own work of creation.

So what place liturgical worship in the Christian life? Well, I think that the blurb does give indication of that where it says:

In Christ we are drawn closer to God in the here and now.
This shapes our beliefs, our actions and our way of life.
God transforms us as individuals, congregations and communities.

 Liturgical activity in the form of "public worship" and it cognates of prayer groups, family prayers, so-called personal devotions and the like, should have the effect all being well of drawing us closer to God, shaping us Christicly and transforming us ("by the renewal of our minds" as Romans 12:2 puts it). Barth and Boulton point out that this can only happen because such a fallen artefact as liturgy is reoccupied (my metaphor not theirs) by Christ who redeems it by the Spirit so that it can accomplish such purposes.

So, when the blurb says; "Worship provides a vital context for mission, teaching and pastoral care." I am inclined to say that it should be more radically stated still: Worship is mission, teaching and pastoral care (Rm.12:1-2, applied), some worship is accomplished through liturgical acts much may be supported by them.

And this speaks to that last line: "Despite this significance, we are often under-resourced for worship".  It might be better to rephrase it "... under-resourced for liturgical events" to help us to recall that the resourcing of these events is meant to be part of equipping the saints. Perhaps even a major part given that for many church folk an hour in church most weeks is it for corporate formation. Thought about like that, perhaps we should indeed be taking with utmost seriousness the potential of liturgy to support and strengthen worship in terms of joining God in mission beyond the service.

Of course, this prompts a question as to whether a lot of liturgical worship really does a good job of promoting in-life worship. I have doubts that  it does, in many cases. I suspect that the confusion between the two meanings of 'worship' misdirects churches as to what we are meant to be about when we meet together round the Lord's Table or other 'services'. Believing that worship is preeminent in Christian life and interpreting it as wh at we do together when gathered for a service, we end up fetishising liturgical acts and the criteria for assessing them becomes detached from -or downgrades- equipping the saints and prioritises aesthetics and/or shared emotion.

That's not to say aesthetics or shared emotion are irrelevant to equipping the saints. However, we should recognise that it is really easy for them to become ends in themselves with little carry over into the service of life. They should play their part in inspiring, encouraging and making connections. They make good servants but terrible masters. So liturgy might be under-resourced, but I'm not convinced. I worry that there may be many churches where liturgy is quite possibly over-resourced in relation to the in-life worship of their members. Where what goes on in church is in effect considered the most important part of discipleship.That would be like considering medical school the most important part of a medic's life and work. It clearly is important but it is supposed to be focussed towards a career which will help many people to be well, become well or not to die so soon.

Theology From Exile Volume II: The Year of Matthew

 I decided to take a look at this book for a handful of reasons: one is that I preach in churches that use RCL; another is that this book seemed to promise commentary on the RCL readings in a way that would bring out the Empire-resistance themes. I was also intrigued by the suggestion in the blurb that insights also from creation spirituality were part of the commentary.

Now, of course, the difficulty of reviewing a book like this within 30 days of receiving it*, is that it is a commentary on the weekly readings, so it's not a regular 'read-straight-through' sort of book since it's meant to be consulted on a a week by week or at least 'as needed' basis and each set of commentary pondered on the way to writing and performing a sermon. This makes it quite hard to read in the same way as a novel or standard book with a unitary argument, thesis or theme. And what is really needed is to 'road test' the volume over several months actual usage in informing the preparation for preaching. So what I'm doing here is having read the readings and commentary for about 3 months' worth of Sunday readings, to give an impression of the kind of commentary being offered. It's a little harder to comment directly on how well the material worked as stimulus for preaching.

The first thing to say is that I think I will continue to refer to the commentary pieces in this volume as a prepare for preaching. This is because the comments I have read do seem to me to have the kinds of insights that could provide the seed of a sermon. There is a useful reference to the kinds of insights that come from the work of people like John Dominic Crossan on the economic and political effects of the Roman Empire on Judea, Galilee and the rest which can yield interesting possibilities in understanding the gospels and epistles. Also an attentiveness to the environmental dimensions of it all are potentially useful to someone like me who is keen to help people to value justice, peace and the integrity of creation in discipleship and therefore in preaching.

What, I guess, I find less helpful is the way that the volume picks up the sometimes strident enemising of more traditional approaches to scripture and theology. Partly this is because I'm not fully 'with the program' that the author is signed up for: I'm not committedly materialist in my philosophical presuppositions, I do tend to think that the Jesus Seminar approach to the texts is unnecessarily skeptical and somewhat belligerent. I sometimes think that creation spirituality is more New Age than orthodox Christian. (That said I think that CS does alert us to distortions of orthodoxy and challenges us to reconsider the tradition and the way that we translate it for contemporary life). So in using the volume, I will not be automatically taking on board all of the perspectives but I do expect that some of the insights will be productive for me and that in wrestling with the things I'm less convinced by or even sense I disagree with, I will be challenged to develop my own thinking and appreciation of the texts more fully and carefully.

I do find myself, as I read, sometimes musing over a certain irony. There is a new orthodoxy espoused which reads the Bible as a manifesto for political resistance and change of a particular sort (I happen to agree with the thrust of this), but I do find it odd that while undermining these writings as Scripture, they are yet being used as in some way authoritative or at least as validating resistance to Empire. This feels a little parasitic on the tradition and I can't really see any reason for retaining it except to access the more general religiosity of north American society compared with Britain and Europe. I'm not sure that holding on to the tradition seems as useful politically in GB and EU and that the kind of orthodox radical approach of people like Jim Wallis or Shane Claiborne is more likely to feel authentic.

*Disclosure of Material Connection: This was a condition of getting a review copy; I received this book free from the  publisher through the Speakeasy blogging book review network. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR,Part 255 -even though I am British, residing in Britain.
Theology From Exile Volume II: The Year of Matthew eBook: Sea Raven: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

Art needs resistance in the materials

I've been familiar with the concept, indeed I've found it a helpful way in to reflecting on artistic process ever since I came across the idea in the theology (theodicy) of Vanstone in Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense. In it Vanstone (without, I think, making a link to Morris -but I may not be recalling aright) explores the artistic enterprise as dialogic between the ideas of the artist and the capabilities and resistances of the materials. He then explores this as an image of the Creator-creation relationship.
Anyway, good to discover it is something penned also by Wm. Morris.

Limitation and Resistance: Why Freedom Is Overrated in Creativity � canalside view: As the textile artist William Morris said, “You can’t have art without resistance in the materials.”

Composers As Gardeners

For me this was a deja vu article in the sense that I recognised in it themes from elsewhere, particularly theological, despite the fact that it's Brian Eno in an interview piece on Edge. First a quote that probably sets the scene best.

Composers As Gardeners | Conversation | Edge:

for me, this was really a new paradigm of composing. Changing the idea of the composer from somebody who stood at the top of a process and dictated precisely how it was carried out, to somebody who stood at the bottom of a process who carefully planted some rather well-selected seeds, hopefully, and watched them turn into something.

As those readers alert to the paradigm shifts in science over the last 30 years or so will realise, this has something to do with chaos, complexity and emergence. But let's put it together with John Polkinhorne's line about God making things make themselves and the metaphor that Eno uses is ripe to be crossed-over into theological thinking about creation. Two things theological then occur to me: one is to recommend engagement with Fretheim's work on God, creation reflecting on passages and themes from the Hebrew Bible. Fretheim does an inspiring job of reading passages on creation and showing how they really do support ways of thinking about creation which includes the chaotic, the unpredictable and the self-assembling and so relativistic and chaordic insights.

The other thing that it links with is one of the themes in Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense where a major metaphor for God that Vanstone develops is of God as artist working with materials that have a certain recalcitrance and how the artistry lies in how the dialogue between artist and materials is worked through. This would certainly play well with the complexity science insights.

Another thing I bring to this is a conversation a few months back with an older artist who clearly didn't resonate with Vanstone's reading of the artistic task; defining good artists as being in total control of their materials and distinguished by the greatness of their vision.

Of course an artist must be capable of crafting their vision, but I still think that Vanstone has a fundamentally right insight. In actual fact, no artist can entirely reckon without some recalcitrance in materials and I think that there is a greatness in a redemptive approach which explores with the materials rather than over or simply through the materials. Therefore their vision, however implicitly and perhaps unreflectingly, is already in dialogue with the materials, the media (as Andy Crouch notes, even architects have to 'compromise' because builders rarely manage to realise the artistic vision).

And, it seems to me, Eno's reflection on what he has been trying to achieve with his generative music, tips the balance away from the modernistic 'mastery' vision of art (and theologies of creation -dare one mention Calvin here?) to the emergent, chaordic art where distinctions between artist and audience or 'public' are eroded and the event/ed-ness of art is played with and the sensuousness of materiality is often foregrounded. Eno's picking up of the gardner metaphor does a really nice job of capturing this.

Part of what is going on is also a reappraisal of what form of art gets to be thought of as paradigmatic of art. I'd like to put in a plea for drama too ... or live music: in both of these forms the trialogue between audience and performers and between author/composer and performers and directors is crucial. And who is the 'artist' in a play? The playwright? The actors? The director? There's a real issue of synergy and community in this. And this, I and others, would argue, is the important thing to capture when thinking theologically about creation and creating. Meticulous sovereignty/providence is out; it is untrue to what we experience and what we genuinely know about the way things are through scientific enterprise.

Creation and creating are actually communal, social and synergistic. We need to get away from the myth of the solitary artist and their brave vision and recognise, even celebrate, the embeddedness of art production and appreciation in human, indeed, creational community.

Service materials for Creationtide 09

I think it may be important for people to know that this has just been made available. "Central to the resources are sermon notes, with a choice of two 5 week frameworks, one based on the Lectionary readings, the other linked specifically to the theme. It is possible either to follow the whole 5 weeks or to dip into the material and use it as required. The final 'theme' sermon works particularly well as a stand alone Harvest resource.
Other items include a LOAF service which would be suitable for a Churches Together event, action ideas, additional prayers and liturgical material and discussion group ideas.
The material is available as free downloads. The sermon materials, LOAF service and discussion group ideas will be available in Welsh and Irish language versions, as well as in English." Go here:
Churches Together in Britain and Ireland - Creation in Crisis - Introduction:
And note that Creationtide this year is closing with a day of prayer:
"Sunday October 4th is suggested as the day of prayer (though individual churches will be free to make their own arrangements and dates). This date is St Francis Day and the final Sunday of the Time for Creation (September 1st – October 4th). It will also be harvest festival in many churches. The time of prayer could be from 12 noon to 6 pm and will encourage people to ‘stop' in a busy world and take time out in prayer and meditation. People may want to combine this with a time of fasting. People will be welcome to come for as short or long a time as they wish."

Quantum arguments for God veer into mumbo-jumbo?

I think that perhaps this riposte article in NS about whether quantum indeterminacy gives room for God's action in/on the cosmos. It's a response to a Christian scientist (note small s!) making such a claim. A little while back I commented on a possible development in theory that could change the way we view this argument anyway. Read the whole article: Quantum arguments for God veer into mumbo-jumbo - opinion - 06 May 2009 - New Scientist and the nub of it seems to me to be this, starting with a restatement (how fair?) of the argument being reacted to: "So, because God somehow tinkers in a quantumy type way, it's worth praying for divine guidance and intervention. To me, and to other scientists and commentators, Collins is straying into pseudo-scientific speculation simply to keep God in the earthly frame. Believing in God in the first place is by definition a leap of faith, and one that many scientists and many non-scientists are, after careful and reasonable thought, unwilling to take. For those who have trouble accepting that we're a product of pure chance, there is the option of believing that God set everything in motion."
To add my two-penn'orth: I think that the riposte misses the point that if time is part of 'created' order, and that the Theist view of God is that God is outside of this space-time continuum. Therefore the creative act could be (and I think should be) interpreted as covering the whole STC. So if there is a conceptual possibility for a deist 'wind-up-the-clockwork' god, there is by the same logic one for a theist God. It doesnt' help us with the 'how' of God-STC interaction, but we should be careful to note creation and sustenance are not completely different categories, but rather a time-bound 'observation'-dependent thing.

Born believers: How your brain creates God

Interesting and occasionally irritating: despite the attempts at various points to remain neutral or agnostic about religious claims and their counterparts, this article keeps (as the title does) leaning to atheism-lite. That said, I think that we need to think about this stuff. As a God-botherer (though actually I don't think God is 'bothered' by me, though probably about me), I am one of those who is comfortable in principle in recognising that the processes of this world are part of God's activity, in a sense. This means that the mechanisms by which we come to be are part of that creative activity poetically presented in different ways in Hebrew and Christian scriptures, variously as fiat, dust of the earth being breathed into, chaos being defeated, building blocks being assembled and held together and so forth. This means that the questions being asked in this article and the attempts to answer them in terms of normal cause and effect are not really at issue for me (unlike for those who feel that scripture compels them to 6x24hours of special creation). So do have a look at it: Born believers: How your brain creates God - science-in-society - 04 February 2009 - New Scientist.

One quote may get us into the matter (pun not intended but allowed to stand): "So if religion is a natural consequence of how our brains work, where does that leave god? All the researchers involved stress that none of this says anything about the existence or otherwise of gods: as Barratt points out, whether or not a belief is true is independent of why people believe it."
I guess I think that this is a good illustration of how apparently objective study vears into smuggling conclusions in premises. The latter bit is the sop to the 'religious'. However the 'damage' is done by the way the first-quoted sentence is framed; by summing up the findings in terms of "religion is a natural consequence of how our brains work" the dice are already loaded. Let's not be detained by defining religion (which is one problem with the article, which does pop up implicitly in the comments -which are not on the whole edifying reading). I rather think that the sentence in question is a bit like saying, "since seeing other people is a natural consequence of how our eyes and brains work, where does that leave society?", or possibly, "since speaking is a natural consequence of how our larynx and brain works, where does that leave language?". The latter may be appropriate since it may well be that language is a side-consequence of the body doing other things, so to speak and so may provide a rough parallel at that point. I guess the obverse of that point is that if the kind of theistic claims I think that I am making are about right, then we would expect to see the processes of development of life (which produce emergent properties at an oblique to the main 'purpose' of some developments, for example) produce effects which might obliquely enable relating to God. And if you're puzzled by why I seem so darn keen on 'oblique' read more here or here.

We should hold that together with what (atheist) scientist Scott Atran is quoted as saying a bit further on: ".. [religion] arises as an artefact of the ability to build fictive worlds. I don't think there's an adaptation for religion any more than there's an adaptation to make airplanes." If I could tweak that a bit to give my own spin: "scientific theory arises as an artefact of the ability to build fictive worlds ..." In other words metaphor and imagination are the main tools of religious ideas and of invention and theory. I think that perhaps what is actually being said in this theorising is that the things that enable religion are present in human beings and like every other higher order thinking ability (including those driving scientific discovery and theory), derive from basic somatic and psychological facts of human being. That does not rule out facticity: it merely allows us to appreciate how we might be able to perceive something...

Lent for Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation

Lent will begin for those of us following the Western Kalendar in just about a fortnight. It is worth beginning to think now about how to keep Lent. Let's start with the tradition:

"… St. Gregory writing to St. Augustine of England laid down the rule, 'We abstain from flesh meat, and from all things that come from flesh, as milk, cheese, and eggs.' This decision was afterwards enshrined in the 'Corpus Juris', and must be regarded as the common law of the Church."

(see here for fuller account of the history)
So what about keeping Lent today? Of course we should start by remembering that it isn't for show [See Mt.6:16ff], and that it won't make God love us any more to be very strict with ourselves not make God love us less if we don't do anything. The main point is to do what will help us to draw closer to God and to express more fully God's agenda and values in our lives. In this sense it may mean it is more useful to ask ourselves what we should take up as well as give up -keeping the common good and welfare of humanity firmly in mind.

Isaiah 58.6-14 encourages a fast that leads to greater justice. Human beings are making some decisions that are making things worse for everyone and particularly our children and grandchildren and we in the planetary north are living at unsustainably high levels of consumption. One way to help us understand this is to get an idea of our ecological footprint. The responses we could make to learning what our ecological footprint is could vary from recycling things that we don't normally, cutting down our consumption especially of meat, power, fossil fuels etc. So giving up the car for at least some kinds of journey might be appropriate.

Since a lot of our ecological footprint is made larger by consuming more goods than we need perhaps, fasting from 'retail therapy' might be a good discipline: only shopping for food and absolute necessities during Lent.

British researchers found that in order to reach sustainable prosperity, Londoners would have to shrink their ecological impacts 80% in the next four decades.... And the more we learn about the extent of the damage we're causing the planet, the shorter our timeframes for change become. I suspect that we need to be thinking more along the lines of cutting our impact in half in the next ten years.

(See)
Remembering it was the normal practice of the church (still is in the east), become vegetarian or even vegan for Lent. Or if that's too great a step cut down to once or twice a week. There are lots of good reasons for doing this. Meat is in world terms a luxury and giving it up is an act of soldarity with the world's poor. The resources given to raising meat for the high consumption in the planetary north would be better used in raising crops for human food, and may help slow deforestation in the planetary south.

Fasting from things that may have gained an undue prominence in our life: shopping (perhaps we should learn to take our sense of worth from God rather than retail therapy?), watching television, alcohol, caffeine, certain activities may be reviewed perhaps. Giving the time saved to activities that help us to grow closer to God -whether that's taking a walk. praying, reading scripture, meditating, spending time with a spiritual mentor or whatever.

Do a stock take of your food throwaways and use that to replan your shopping strategies. If you are throwing away certain foodstuffs, ask yourself what the practical psychologies of obtaining and usage actually are. Are you buying stuff like some of us tend to buy books -meaning to get round to reading it someday? Are you actually finding that you feel too tired to prepare it and so end up in the junk-food end of your fridge and freezer, or reaching for the takeaway number? In a world where many of our brothers and sisters find it hard to discern the positive answer to the prayer they pray for daily bread, those of us who throw 'daily bread' away, should consider how the world's systems of food distribution have become distorted and take more responsibility for restoring God's purposes. Our 'your kingdom come' might then be their 'daily bread'.

It may seem odd, but think about it .... if you long for a simpler, more human Christmas, now is the time to start planning it. You’ve got a blank slate for 2008, and if you wait until the pressure hits in October or November, it’s too late. If you want to talk to your family about it, and have a bit of a discussion, now might be a good time to make some suggestions. You can talk again in the summer and decide for sure whether you want to go for it, but get the ball rolling early
(see)

As we take actions that tend towards a more just and fair world, as we begin to act in ways that preserve and enhance the God-given living systems of our planet, we are creating the conditions that are likely to make for a more peaceful world. This is because so many conflicts begin with injustices and concerns for resources. Jesus said 'blessed are the peacemakers', as we take such actions we begin to deserve the label.

The ideas on this leaflet are not exhaustive and are intended to push us beyond the usual and all too easy 'giving up chocolate' for Lent sort of response; to encourage us to make Lent a testing ground for embedding more of God's agenda into our lifestyles.

There is a helpful aid to Lent-keeping here.

Homo Creator

Interesting little post from Maggi Dawn. maggi dawn: "Only God can create ex nihilo, but our creative powers go far beyond simply reproducing or rearrainging what was there before". Nice quote from Schillebeekx to support.

A note to creationists ..

Gunter Wagner is reported here commenting on more recent research on mutation in Evolution Gets a Boost: No Cost for Complexity | Wired Science from Wired.com: He says, "'I would say the only intellectually interesting argument that the creationists are using, at least the scientifically more sophisticated ones, is that random mutation can not lead to the evolution of complex organisms. And there are interesting mathematical arguments that have been made to support that. But our results show that organisms found a way around that problem by restricting mutational effects on very narrowly confined parts of the organisms.'"

Metaphysics and the God of Israel -a review

This looks very, very interesting. So much so that I've put it on my wish list for future reading. I'm particularly interested since it seems to offer help -or at least perspective- to the the issue of God's relatedness to time and space which is a major background issue for thinking about God and language. Here's what Ben Myers writes.

Neil MacDonald’s book, Metaphysics and the God of Israel, is a remarkably creative and provocative attempt to rethink this relation – indeed, to rethink metaphysics as a whole – from the standpoint of divine self-determination. MacDonald’s central thesis is simple enough: the mode of all divine action is self-determination. God acts by determining himself to be the one who acts. In other words, God acts by directing his own identity, by acting on his own being. According to MacDonald, all divine action can be understood along these lines. God is creator, for example, simply because he determines himself to be the world’s creator. This determination is strictly something God does to himself.

The question I have -which Ben tangles with to some degree also- is whether this view doesn't end up making creation essentially un-contingent; in other words potentially uncaused. But I like the way that it appears to be able to pull in some of the stronger insights or possibilities that are important in process theologies while maintaining (I think) a largely orthodox theism. Obviously, I'll have to read the book!

Is Blake also among the Creastion Spiritualitists?

Yesterday was the 250th anniversary of William Blake's birth. Probably most of us know little of the man except for the song Jerusalm ("And did those feet ...?") and that he painted watercolours with religious themes and wrote poetry, which we've largely not read. Time to ponder, however briefly, that he had a radical political philosophy that sprang from a mystical bent that revealed itself in him even in childhood. As Terry Eagleton tells it the Guardian, he sounds like an early exponent of Creation spirituality.
"Blake, by contrast, viewed the political as inseparable from art, ethics, sexuality and the imagination. It was about the emancipation of desire, not its manipulation. Desire for him was an infinite delight, and his whole project was to rescue it from the repressive regime of priests and kings. His sense of how sexuality can turn pathological through repression is strikingly close to Freud's. To see the body as it really is, free from illusion and ideology, is to see that its roots run down to eternity. 'If the doors of perception were cleansed,' he claims, 'everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.' Political states keep power by convincing us of our limitations."
You can almost hear Matthew Fox cheering (and probably he has in one of his books that I have not read), but wait; perhaps two cheers for we are also told:
"Brothels, Blake wrote, are built with bricks of religion. Today, hardly a single Christian politician believes with Blake that any form of Christian faith that is not an affront to the state is worthless. Blake was no dewy-eyed radical, convinced as he was of the reality of the Fall. He had a radical Protestant sense of human corruption. His vision of humankind was darker than that of the Panglossian progressives of our own time, with their vacuous talk of "moving on". Yet it was more hopeful as well. London had lapsed into Babylon; but it remained true that "everything that lives is holy", and it might still prove possible to transform the city into the New Jerusalem."
Actually there's a lot about Blake, on this showing, I think I like. And I quite like this:
"In a land of dark Satanic mills, the exuberant uselessness of art was a scandal to hard-headed pragmatists. Art set its face against abstraction and calculation: "To generalise is to be an Idiot," Blake writes. And again: "The whole business of Man is the arts, and all things in common." The middle-class Anglicans who sing his great hymn Jerusalem are unwittingly celebrating a communist future."
Maybe I don't go with the communist thing: replacing the tyranny of capital with that of state monopolistic capital seems to be a frying pan to fire journey. But a future where people are cared for, treasured and given the means to make the world better than we found it ...
Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Terry Eagleton: The original political vision: sex, art and transformation:

Navel-gazing, omphalism and speech

Ever since I discovered it in a book called "Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?" I have thought that omphalism is a great illustration of special pleading. If you're unfamiliar with it, it's "a special brand of young earth creationism that is generally referred to as “Omphalism”. Omphalism comes from the Greek word for the umbilicus, omphalos. In brief, it explains the signs and appearance of a very advanced age of the universe by stating that God created it fully-formed to appear as if it were much older. This nice little dodge allows omphalists to explain that data from things like the geological record, paleontology and ancient fossils, radiocarbon dating, and measurements to distant stars are phenomena fashioned by God as if the universe were billions of years old. The earth, then, is 6,000 or so years old (some generous young-earth sorts will allow up to 10,000 years) but made fully-developed as if a long history were true."
I actually mentioned it previously on this blog in relation to its linguistic reflex in that the original couple seemed not to have to learn language to speak with God, and possibly each other.

mayfly � Blog Archive � Navel-gazing: Htt Doug at Metacatholic.

Happy Creationtide

The Second Ecumenical European Assembly adopted the following resolution: "We recommend that the churches consider and promote the preservation of Creation as part of church life at all levels. One way would be to observe a common creation day, such as the Ecumenical Patriarchate celebrates each year. Rationale: The seriousness of the ecological dilemma for the future of the human race means that churches' consciousness of it must be raised. Commitment to preservation of the creation is not an issue among many others but an essential dimension of all church life.'"

It was part of the document which can be downloaded here (allowing you to see it in context):
Care for God’s Creation, A Discussion Guide for the Third European Ecumenical Assembly in Sibiu I'm a big fan of the idea; when I was in University chaplaincy I experimented with it: after all the university year is hard to process liturgically alongside the regular year. So in our chaplaincy we began with a season of creation-related Sundays (after a couple of welcome-related ones) with a focus on creation care, eco-footprints, counter-consumerism etc. I'm just wondering now how to bring it into the Common Lectionary ... [goes away musing].
Htt CEL

The Gospel whispers to J.K. Rowling

Interesting musings are going on ... "When C.S. Lewis started out to write The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he didn't have Christianity in mind. 'Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something abut Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tales as an instrument, then collect information about child psychology and decided what age group I'd write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out 'allegories' to embody them,' Lewis once wrote. 'This is all pure moonshine. I couldn't write in that way at all. Everything began with images,' Lewis continued. 'A faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sled, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn't anything Christian about them. That element pushed itself in of its own accord.'
Something similar seems to have happened to J.K. Rowling. She began writing about wizards and quidditch and Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans, and somewhere along the way, Christ began to whisper into the story."
I think, myself that it's probably down to the kind of thing Lewis said about the way that Christ is echoed in pagan mythology; that the reality of the Christ event imprints on the whole of creation (okay so that's my take, but I think it's one that corresponds to Lewis'). That said, when someone writes, as Ms Rowling does, about love, good and evil and does so in truthful ways, there's no avoiding the Christ-echoes, they are indeed part of the deep magic of creation and nothing can avoid them that deals with real reality.
That's the big story. Not a metanarrative, I think; but (pace John Drane in 'What is the New Age saying to the Church?') it is a vital fulcrum of understanding that enables us to lever cultural weight for Good and break open forces of ill-ideology ...
The Gospel According to J.K. Rowling | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction:

Islamic Creationism

More years ago than I now care to recall I was at university. Actually it was not long after the Iranian revolution, and we had at the university I went to (htt Reading University) a number of avid pro-revolutionary Iranians (no doubt the anti-revolutionaries would not get an exit visa). I was at first surprised when some of them were very interested in one end of the Christian Union bookstall. You see, that CU in the late 70's had a number of influential 6-day, young-earth creationists. Our Iranian acquaintances were interested in picking the Chrisian creationists' brains for arguments against evolution that could be used from a Qur'anic perspective. I'm not able to comment on how well the cross-over can be managed, but I am interested that it is clearly still and issue and likely to continue to be so.

Support for creationism is also widespread among Muslims, said Dr. Edis, whose book “An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam” was published by Prometheus Books this spring.“Taken at face value, the Koran is a creationist text,” he said, adding that it would be difficult to find a scholar of Islam “who is going to be gung-ho about Darwin.” Perhaps as a result, he said, Mr. Yahya’s books and other publications have won him attention in Islamic areas. “This is a guy with some influence,” Dr. Edis said, “unfortunately for mainstream science.”

Islamic Creationist and a Book Sent Round the World: