The Bible in a Disenchanted Age -a brief review

 Why this book? For me? -I've been finding myself wanting to wrestle more and more with the interface between scholarly questions and devotional reception of scripture. Walter Moberly has a reputation which suggests he could be a helpful thought provoker and angle-giver. I've not previously read much of his work, so I also felt that this might help me to orient to his oeuvre and suss out whether more acquaintance could be good.

What this book does is to consider the challenges that we face in commending the Bible to our contemporary cultures. Obviously, this isn't quite meeting what I mentioned I'm looking to wrestle with, but it is adjacent-enough to be helpful to me. It also has the advantage of coming at the issue through the pathway of attentiveness to culture and mission which lie in my background. It does deal with the reception of texts and as part of that there is relevance to the devotional reception while making use of scholarly insights, approaches and techniques.

One of the interesting things that Moberly does is to cross-reference specifically, as a kind of case study, Daniel 7 with the chapter 1 of the Aeneid. I feel embarrassed to say that I'd never known about the Aeneid, -I'd heard of it but had no idea what it was or where it fitted in Roman history and culture. I have to say that it was really helpful for me to do the compare and contrast that Moberly does with it. It was interesting to get some insight into the way that Roman empire Christians appreciated, made use of and critiqued the Aeneid. I was glad of the insight that gives into their strategies for reading texts which carry across to using scripture.

 It was helpful also to be walked through the likely composition drivers of the Aeneid as well as to get insight into why it would have been received by imperial Romans as a kind of divine oracle which bolstered and underpinned the imperial mythology and solidified a sense of destiny and participation in divine design. This was helpfully compared and contrasted with the same sort of examination of Daniel 7. The contrasts were helpful as the similarities. I also found it useful to be reminded of the multivalency of such texts, that they could/can become unmoored from their original purpose and gain a wider reception which can be disclosive. 

For me too this helped to consolidate thoughts and reflections about the way that apocalyptic language and imagery works and gives a useful handle on why we really do need to understand it and be able to use it so that we don't fall into the kinds of 'dating the signs of the end' we see with Schofield, the JWs, Adventists and others.

What this careful work does also is builds a basis on which to be able to commend the Bible for spiritual use to intelligent and 'disenchanted' readers. For me this is important as I am increasingly thinking about the formation needs of those adults who are new to the Christian faith and considering what it is that we need to do with them to help them to develop service-able habits of mind, perspective, approach and routine. I think that this book gives insights and approaches that could help in that task.

I was interested to see Moberly take an approach I've seen used in Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics where the main text is interposed with more in depth comment -excursuses- in a different typeface. This was done with the suggestion by Moberly that if the reader didn't want to go into the detail, then they could easily identify what to skip over. The only problem for me with that was on my e-reader, it was quite hard to get the small text to be a reasonable size for easy reading without having huge main text.

I quite liked the excursus on how to present dating 'AD and BC'. There's a handy little description of how we got "AD" and "BC" (and he shares my puzzlement at why one set of initials refers to a Latin phrase and one to an English phrase -why wouldn't you be consistent: AC and BC, for example). And I like his alternative to the CE and BCE -using an up arrow symbol for numbers rising (ie CE/AD) and a down-arrow for numbers falling (ie BC/BCE). Personally I think we should give that a go, but I also doubt it'll catch on, unfortunately.

So, I commend this book to you if it looks at all interesting and resonant for you.

Links relating to Review The Bible in a Disenchanted Age on Amazon R. W. L. Moberly’s Website Tag - #TheBibleInADisenchantedAge

Note:  This review was given of the book which was supplied free for the purposes of review. Nothing but an honest review was asked; no inducements to make it a favourable review were offered.

Funerals and tech -evolution?

Having now outlived both my parents, I find myself wondering more about funeral arrangements in a more personal way. And it is notable to me, being involved as I am, from time to time, in the funerals of university students, that funeral practices are changing. And then covid-19 arrived and introduced further changes, which may be to some degree permanent. it is poetically expressed by an Episcopal priest, Padre Angel of Boston, Ma.

 A smartphone is no longer an intruder into the numinous, but an acolyte in service of the sacred. The tablets have transubstantiated into pallbearers: holders of the moment, and not transgressors of it.

It has been a forced development, but now it's happened, perhaps it will mean that it will not feel so odd or sacriligious for remote viewing or even more active participation to take place.

On the other hand...

Mr Collier watched a ceremony live-streamed from Kerstin’s garden. “I feel like I witnessed it,” he says. “I don’t feel I took part.

On the other hand, some notice that the reduction in numbers being able to attend personally has meant a return to something that has been downplayed in recent years.

During the pandemic — particularly during lockdown, when numbers were so small — funerals got back to their original purpose of being allowed to grieve. And we’d almost forgotten that in funerals before then. The interesting thing will be what the long-term impact of that is, whether we’ll hold on to that. We want ritual, but we’ve got to reimagine ritual,

It seems to me that it is still too early to tell how this will play out. It is plausible that a hybrid might emerge: funerals becoming normally smaller, more immediate, affairs where bodily action is at a premium: being able to touch one another and perhaps the coffin or the body being more central possibilities. But those smaller events might be 'attended' also virtually by more people whose relative emotional distance means that it 'feels' okay to pay respects by viewing online. It may even be that others, more distanced by geography, could participate more actively by video interaction.

My question is about how this would all play out into ritual and the staging of memorial events. I suspect that the recent trend towards foregrounding the 'celebration of the life of...' someone may continue in later events. This life-celebration has probably had the effect of moving the grieving elements out of public view (understandably) and into more private spaces. Perhaps more intimate funeral services are allowing ostensible mourning back into the now-semi-public space of a church building.

My concern in it all is that what happens enables people to mourn. It is important that people are allowed and given supports to enable them to recognise their own grief and losses and to express them helpfully. 

I do still worry that the unspoken conspiracy to keep public things positive and upbeat is not doing us any favours in relation to processing loss, grief and even rage.

Drawing initially from this article: Funerals in 2020: better for mourners?:

Screens change how we read scripture

I considered putting a question mark at the end of the title of this post. It's substantially the title of the CT article I'm about to comment on. However, I don't want to question the proposition of the title. I do want to question an implication and a supposed remedy of the article.

The suggested remedy seems to be to encourage Christian readers to return to using paper Bibles. The implication of the article is that Christians have always read the written word on paper and so we should return to that. I'm more interested in the matter of returning to supposedly ancient practice and so would then go on to question the reading on paper issue.

What concerned me was the unnoticed and materially poor consumer of God's word before rag-paper and moveable type kicked in to make a bible in every home or hand a possibility. You see, the remedy mentioned above elides most Christian interaction with the bible before then. I think we need to properly reckon with the preliterate experience before assessing the effects of the digital revolution. But before I say more about that, let me interject another concern.

There's a concern I have about the research that this is all based on. Basically, I'm unsure how much stock we should place in it at the moment. We are in a process of cultural reception and there are a number of variables that we don't yet know how to assess, so are we testing the right things, the right people and in any case what will things look like in 20 or 30 years (assuming that civilisation still supports such things) when/if people have evolved strategies of reading around screen use? I'm not sure how far this is an issue for digiborigines and how far for non-native digital tech-users. Which kinds of users have we been testing and how does a long background in different ways of reading affect the particular experimental packages of the studies? I'm not doubting that effects have been found, I'm just not sure whether other factors have been properly controlled for and whether what we are seeing are, in a sense, transitional effects of cultural change on particular groups as they adjust. It's not just about cognitive processing as the article seems to imply, it's also about cultural reception. We should also bring to the table the actual reading practices of recent and contemporary Christians with access to printed bibles. I think that the writer may be comparing the actual digital experience with an idealised analogue experience; not comparing like with like in significant parameters. I worry that this is a kind of sophisticated, low-key, moral panic.

So what about the longer-historical point? It's not new, but the writer of the referenced article hasn't weighed it heavily enough, I think. I was, frankly, a bit surprised that it wasn't considered more when the mention of icons was made. There, we were told, many icons have figures with open books and their fingers rest on open pages pointing to particular scriptures. (I found intriguing the link with Thomas with the resurrected Christ, btw, but that's another matter). That should have been the cue, in my opinion, to consider the reception of scripture within those kinds of cultural milieus (indeed, why icons and not written texts?), but instead the writer switches in short order to the post-Caxton era situations.

So, what I think we need to recall in this is the experience of an ordinary non-literate or barely-literate Christian in late antiquity or early medieval Mediterranean society or similar societies beyond and after. 'Similar', I mean, in the sense of the technologies relating to reading and their cultural embedding. In such societies, books and scrolls are expensive both in the materials they are made of and in the time that it takes to produce them. Partly as a result literacy levels are low. Most Christians and Jews would experience Scripture as oral/aural, not as something legible; ie not as something that they read themselves. They wouldn't be able to afford to have written copies of scriptures in their own possession. So, for them, interacting with scripture involved hearing someone else reading it, probably at a local house where they would meet for worship and fellowship. That might be once a week, perhaps more often in some situations. It probably wouldn't involve access to the whole of what we think of as the Bible but only whatever books their community had managed to save for and collect. In such a situation, what you do is hear passages read -probably a whole book at a time. You might also request to hear some parts again and you would commit to memory some passages. There would be likely some discussion, question and answer which would help recall as well as living out the message.

That's in many respects very different to how we experience scriptures nowadays. We read passages on our own, silently. We might journal about them. On our own. We rarely hear the words spoken except in church and even there often in paragraph-sized chunks but with a pew bible to hand if we want to check things out. And if we are honest, so many contemporary western Christians read small, decontextualised, chunks with a 'devotional' gloss which often does not really expound the passage or put it in context but rather reinforces popular spiritual tropes giving the impression of biblical engagement without it actually happening. So, I wonder whether some of what the digital research is picking up is in fact mirroring that and therefore it's not the digital reading that's the problem but a cultural habitus reinforced by certain bible reading artefacts which is also reflected in popular Christian culture. To be clear, Every Day with Jesus has long offered paper-readers decontextualised devotional nuggets and I think that what may be being tested is this way of using scripture transferred to screen. But it may not be inherent to screen reading.

All of which makes me wonder whether the suggested remedy is right. If earlier Christians 'fed' on God's word by aural means and oral exploration, is it so concerning that contemporary Christians may be retrieving some characteristics of pre-pan-literate culture? Does not the history encourage us to think that the new technologies may open up new opportunities (and re-open up old ones) as well as new dangers in bible-encounter? In spirituality? I'm concerned that the apparent remedy is about doubling down on what we have just been doing and not engaging with the new situation. This reminds me of the 600 year old laments about the printing press changing the way people read, think and write, implicitly calling people to eschew the mass printed book and retain the habits of listening and memorising.

Surely our task should be to understand well what is happening and to begin to craft spiritual habits that work with and through the emerging screen cultures? -Not simply resisting and damning them? The question of the article's title remains, "How will we process the Bible differently?" -and we need to discover the opportunities as well as name a few concerns.

I do think also we should not let the idea that reading the Bible should always be "deep reading" become too fixed in view. To be sure sometimes it should. But what I think the history of Christian interaction with the Bible tells us is that often the kind of deep reading seemingly in mind in the article has not been the main strategy. Rather, reflective reading, Christological reading, communal reading, prayerful reading has been predominant but I'm not sure that these add up to or compose the deep reading in view in the article. And I'm not sure that any of the research or interpretations of it make those sorts of reading less possible or intrinsically harder. In fact, I wonder whether they may be helped by screen presentation of texts.

The article tells us,

that the habit of superficial comprehension developed in digital reading transfers to all reading such that “the more you read on screens, the more your mind shifts towards ‘non-linear’ reading—a practice that involves things like skimming a screen or having your eyes dart around a web page" 

I think we should consider things behind and around that. I think I want to see more longitudinal studies on that assertion. I think I would want to see that correlated with the difficulties of many readers of conventional paper-based texts not least various forms of dyslexia. I would also note that many speed-reading courses attempt to wrestle with and train the phenomena mentioned in that quote. Would it be too much to ask for us to go back to Walter Ong's seminal book 'Orality and Literacy' before we try to discuss this more?

The article also reinforces the assertion that,

the physical layout of the biblical text is important for comprehension, memory, and “correct interpretation.”

That is my experience, but then I should remind us that this is not something necessarily to panic about. Recall, again, the experience of most Christians for over a thousand years. They would not have built a visual memory of the text or relied on printed text for comprehension or correct interpretation. Let's learn from them some tricks for the post-paper culture we may be heading into.

Screens Are Changing the Way We Read Scripture | CT Pastors | Christianity Today: As digital reading habits rewire our brains, how will we process the Bible differently?

I've been noticing signs of this a bit lately with some of the people I work among.

It would seem that younger males especially are being bombarded with hyper-idealised images of not only what females “should” look like, but also how they themselves “should” look. By watching those fit, hairless (but presumably sexually successful) specimens on television programmes or on social media, it’s as if the famed “male gaze” is being savagely and pitilessly turned back on themselves.

It's not the first time I've remarked on it. but I do think maybe there's another question to ask that could potentially help in understanding this. It's rooted in my own pre-adolescent experience and reflecting on how that played into growing up subsequently. As I wrote there;

As an 8-year old boy I can distinctly remember two interacting issues being a part of my life. One was reading comics of the superhero genre; especially Spider-Man. The other issue was that I was very thin (mostly as a result of having thin bones). The problem I had with these two things together was that I was taking in images on a regular basis of male bodies which were well muscled, though not body-builder beefy, and graceful (lovingly drawn?) This male body shape filled my imaginative space and what I take to be my mimetic instinct drew me towards a desire to be something like that image. 

What I'm now reflecting further on is what stood in the way of myself and, presumably, my peers following through in the way that many young men do in the studies the linked article report? Clearly the incipient pressures were present -and the Charles Atlas body-building adverts in our comics and the 'Boy's Own' articles for training regimes were trading off (literally) some concerns that pre-pubescent boys had but what made the difference so that we largely followed a trajectory which didn't involve such body modding and extreme body-image issues? (And while I'm asking that question, I'm wondering what was the experience of my female peers at that time?).

I know for myself that part of what helped was seeing pop-stars who were slim or even thin and not fulfilling the film-star 'good looks' paradigm. In doing that, I was able to begin to re-calibrate my sense of what counted as beautiful (or at least okay) and to critique the given images. I think I began to think that a set of norms that excluded so many of us were suspect.

It's worth thinking about some more. My question remains, how to help other and many more young people to be weaned off toxic imagery and norms.

Hallowe'en and dodgy Christian responses

Fundamentally, Halloween is a humorous reversal. We take bad, frightening or horrific things and treat them as if they’re good because it’s a funny thing to do. That’s not a step into genuine darkness at all. It relies completely on a shared moral compass.

I think maybe he has a point. He, in this case, is David Mitchell. I have a small series of confessions in relation to this. One is that I find David Mitchell's tv personality too remniscent of public school bullies for my taste -but perhaps that has no bearing here unless I fail to spot it in my reactions below (hence the warning to you). Another confession is that I used to be one of the people he's taking aim it in the referenced article. A further confession is that I've changed my mind about Hallowe'en. In fact I do think we need to pay attention to the underlying social psychology that Mr Mitchell draws our attention to and respond, as churches, 'smarter not harder'.

I used to make the argument that to celebrate the symbols of evil is to soften ourselves up for accepting evils and I used the analogy of dressing up as SS officers for fun as perhaps helping us to understand the dangers of such an approach. (Interestingly Mitchell along with comedy partner Webb, did a comedy sketch on just the theme of SS officers wondering whether they were, in fact, the baddies -actually a very clever piece of work). I'm not now convinced by that analogy or that the argument applies.

What I have become convinced by is that there is a social need for times when we look things that scare us in face, feel the fear and learn to put it in its place, maybe even laugh at it. There is something psychologically healthy about that approach. And we Christians ought to be helping this to happen for the health of society. So my challenge (to myself as much as anyone) is to think through how we could celebrate Hallowe'en and find ways to do so as Christians. In the first wave of response, in dark ages Europe, having services of remembering the dead, lighting candles etc was part of it. Our challenge now is to step up to affirming the psychologically healthy aspects of hallowe'en dressing up etc and to connect it to Christian spirituality in a positive way which also allows us to critique things that are unhelpful, unhealthful or genuinely dangerous.

Smartphones and the art of conversation: we only have a Bible because there wasn't sound recording technology...?

I just thought that this was a really intriguing thing. I hadn't come across it before and I'll be on the look out for it among the students I work with.

using the voice memo function on WhatsApp as a sort of dictaphone to “talk in turns” rather than hold “a live conversation” is now a thing

The title of the article that introduces this seems to be adding to the moral panic reaction. The actual article is actually better than that. But I did read this because I was wondering in what way I was going to disagree. And in relation to the sentence quoted above, I felt I could see how, in fact, this development might be viewed as a positive by users. Now, I'm not sure in what I'm about to write, whether I'm interpreting rightly in terms that users would recognise. What I'm offering is an interpretation of why I could imagine myself doing that.
Perhaps you might sympathise if I tell it this way: have you ever found that you wished that your conversation partner would stop interrupting and just let you say the whole thing in one go? Have you ever found that the data-bandwidth of your phone connection keeps meaning that you lose chunks of what the other person says because of your own interruption, cough, or background noise at your end forcing the connection to switch and choose between send and receive to the detriment of the conversation? (Because at that point you can't listen and speak at the same time). If you have then you have possibly come across the situation that this clever little trick may have been designed to overcome. Add to that the possibility that you are holding the conversation in conditions where interruptions are taking place (having to give change, get on the bus, etc) and it becomes a way to optimise communication. It also gives a way to listen again to parts to make sure you have got it right before you compose your own response. In fact it could helpfully slow down a conversation to proper thinking speed. It also gives the speaker the chance for a 'do-over' when something is not well expressed.
Far from an indicator of the end of civilisation, it may actually be the harbinger of better listening and speaking.
As Neil Postman and Andrew Crouch would remind us, though, we might do well also to consider the downsides: what is disabled or made harder by this. And I guess for some people it is easier to spot these. Probably it means that some of the joyous spontaneity of a lively conversation is deadened: that sense of mounting excitement as ideas and perspectives are shared and well received and a synchrony of thinking and feeling develops. What is also lost is the feedback of visual clues and verbal cues that as a speaker you have tried the patience of your listener(s) or that you have failed to convey your meaning and are puzzling your hearer(s) -or are angering them. Those feedback clues that enable us to adjust our speaking and self-presentation in order to communicate better and to rebalance rapport in the present moment.
If we think about what it is like to hear an answer-phone message, we get a clue also to how it might go. There is a slightly greater degree of 'objectivity' in the listening because we are less directly involved. For the speaker it is just a little bit harder to order our thoughts, but we do have to think a bit more about how what we are saying will be received because we don't have the visual and verbal cues to give us in-the-moment feedback. These factors will prove to have their plusses and minusses and we will have to evolve our practice to take account of them as they become apparent.
But the thing to remember is that it is the trying these things out that shows what is and isn't possible. If the things that it enables are useful -and more useful than the downsides are difficult, then the thing will develop and pick up its own etiquettes which will also affect the perceptions and notions of 'good practice', respect etc. So try it, wait and see if and how it is useful. It won't kill the art of conversation: there are too many pleasures in synchronous conversation for it to die. But it might be supplemented by this less synchronous form.
In Christian terms, I think I welcome the possibility of having a slow form of conversation where people can think about things less immediately. Being able to listen more fully and to meditate on what is being said and shared chimes well with a big stream of Christian thought over a long time. It can be a positive expression of loving neighbour by giving them space and consideration to express themselves and to give us a chance to respond better in loving attention and reply. It could be a school of re-ordering our responsiveness by giving us a chance to practice good replies and self-awareness at a speed we can think by initially -until our neural pathways have built a highway for charitable responding.
Perhaps too, it helps us to ponder what communication is and in doing so to think more about divine-human communication. While we are only too used to thinking about the word of God as something written, we have tended to forget that originally it was/is spoken, indeed performed. The Bible is a record of that (an inspired record and interpretation, but still somewhat second hand). So re-learning through a slightly strange medium what is involved in 'live' oral communication may benefit us in considering human-divine communication afresh. It may be worth considering that perhaps we only have a written Bible because there wasn't sound-recording technology ... ! ... ?

Have smartphones killed the art of conversation? | Technology | The Guardian:
And PS -see whether this article from four months later picks up the same thoughts.

Behemoth, bully, thief: English taking over the planet

I'm always interested in language. I keep noting that the easiest way to distract me and get me off-topic is to raise something that relates to dialect or a foreign tongue. So this Guardian article distracted me from sermon preparation (where I was kind of not quite getting it).

I'm thinking to my recent experience of the last handful of years of watching a lot of foreign-language films of television series. Many of them spoken in languages I'm not well acquainted with and subtitled (Swedish, Finnish, Russian, Japanese) some in languages I know fairly well (Spanish, French, American English -that last is a wry dig!). And so I've been observing with one part of my brain when English has been getting into those other languages (and for AmEng go along to this blog).

I note that English swearwords have become almost ubiquitous alongside or replacing native words and phrases. But I do wonder whether Tim Parks may have overstated his case or missed seeing it from a different angle:

The writer and translator Tim Parks has argued that European novels are increasingly being written in a kind of denatured, international vernacular, shorn of country-specific references and difficult-to-translate wordplay or grammar. Novels in this mode – whether written in Dutch, Italian or Swiss German – have not only assimilated the style of English, but perhaps more insidiously limit themselves to describing subjects in a way that would be easily digestible in an anglophone context.

My response is that perhaps this is more to do with culture than specifically language. That is to say the Hollywood story industry and its ancillaries.

I'm not saying that English as a language isn't influential, as I said above, I do notice it creeping into other languages and even influencing grammar. However, I do also notice that there are things that the subtitled translation doesn't pick up eg the change from formal to informal address -'you'- or a switch from Swedish to Danish in The Bridge which tells you something about the characters' relationship but isn't signalled in the subtitles. That doesn't seem to indicate Englishising. And in any case the variability of English itself may militate against this idea: regional and class and subcultural dialects some of which are driven by other-language contact may make a big difference in this analysis.

If we're worried about range of expression, it's capitalist globalising culture we should worry about; panicking about English may be a huge distraction from the real task.



Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet | News | The Guardian

Funerals should affirm the reality of death

I think that this is in the same ballpark as a post of mine from a couple of years back.

current practice seems determined to deny both the fact and the solemnity of death. We say “We are sorry for your loss,” and talk about the deceased’s “passing”.

I'd just invite Angela to consider the place of 'customer is always right' capitalism in reinforcing and maintaining this unhealthy situation. And don't get me started on this new euphemism 'passing'! I guess it's derived from 'passed away' but somehow even the 'away' was felt to be too final, so it is cut off in its prime. Passing is the new dying.



Angela Tilby: Funerals should not deny the reality of death: 'via Blog this'

Blue Ocean Faith -book review and reflection.

I have to say that I'd never heard of the Blue Ocean network, and when I read what they were about I had a bit of a 'where have you been all my life?' moment.
So, what's the 'blue ocean' thing about then? Well, we're told neart the beginning that it's a way to describe churches who "fish where other churches don't and because it's the blue oceans that connect all people". I like the idea of fishing where other churches don't and I wonder how that really works out even while I recognise a real need to do so from a situation where I see rivalrous churches casting for the same kinds of people to form congregations of middle class soft-rock singing slightly multi-media soft-charismatic people. And while I get it that they'd want to pitch in where there is obviously some traction, I can't help wondering what about the huge number of people outside of that kind of demographic -is God's Spirit really not at work beyond it?

The movement is characterised by six things. First what they call a 'solus Jesus' framework and with that a centred-set mentality. They aim for a childlike faith approach to spiritual development and a third way for controversial issues. They aim to be ecumenical in relation to other churches and for joyful engagement with secular culture. All of these things I warm to and in many ways I would describe my own position in very similar terms. Of course those are the headers. What do the particulars look like?

Solus Jesus is looked at through a historical development lens, a trajectory from the Reformation (and worth thinking the more about given that we are in the 500th year since Luther's famous 95 theses) and in particular the Sola Scriptura approach that emerged from it. The point is well made that without inspired interpretation, it perhaps doesn't help us as much as we'd like to have a sola Scriptura thing going on. So the thought is to take our attention to the Jesus who speaks through scripture and to embrace the subjectivity involved in that. I found one quote intriguing and probably about right in this matter; "Neither Jesus nor Paul, nor Peter were sola scriptura people. Actually, their apponents better fit that description" (Loc.558)
I also liked the approach to subjectivity captured in this quote: "When Joan of Arc's opponents assert that what she calls the voice of God is in fact only her imagination, her response is 'Of course. How else can we hear God?' " Perhaps that is slightly undermined by the real doubtfulness of what she 'heard', but the point is well made that our human faculties are inevitably involved and interpreting scripture does not deliver us from that.

On the matter of childlike faith, it seems to me that the idea is to focus on faith as trust and counterbalance the inherited 'faith as propositional assent' that we seem to have got locked into in much of the west. There's a nice tour of scripture to show that this is really consonant with the experience of God's people and the thrust of a lot of scripture.

One of the things I'm left thinking about is the 'third way' approach to controversial subjects. It is based -rightly in my opinion- on Paul's approach to the meat offered to idols controversy and from that the basic approach of inclusion until clarity is found (and a historical point is made to say it takes a lot of patience and quite some time) is taken as well as the principle of respect for 'weaker' brothers and sisters -but the way that is done is worth considering. I'm not sure that it helps fully as the problem of identifying who is 'weaker' still complicates things -but the principle of inclusion as the default is definitely worth thinking about further as a principle based in a clear biblical strategy. For the record the 'weaker' here are identified as those who take the more restrictive role in a dispute. I think that this is probably right and a good way to approach things. However, it may just become a political football of a principle: I suspect we need to test it a bit more against some hard cases from history...

In some ways, apart from the third-way approach, I don't think there is anything radically new here, and that is fine. Similar things are said by others. But then they need to be said perhaps quite a lot to be heard: said by many people in many ways to get through (think advertising and political slogans). And not only said but, as we glimpse here, acted upon and made the heart of a curriculum of Christian formation. I think some of the ways these points are put over are likely to grab some people but maybe not others, but that's okay since the idea is to find somewhere to fish where others are not.

It's interesting to read too from the perspective of not being in the USA which is, of course, not nearly as far down the post-Christendom road as the UK and indeed western Europe. So I'm left musing about the fishing-where-others-don't motif. In England that probably means noting that the HTB church planting network will continue to do a good job of creating the kinds of church they tend to produce where there may be relatively good numbers for that expression of faith. However, there may also need to be room and encouragement given to those fishing in other waters where the results may be less spectacular and take longer (and indeed there are signs that the HTB folk are finding this at the edges).

I found, also, the question raised and partly answered here about how the hippy-like Jesus movement became entrapped by right-wing fundamentalism. I think that this book offers an intriguing answer to that but I suspect there is more to be said too. However, it is a question adjacent to my GB-centric question of how come the creative and radical Charismatic movement of the 70's in Britain became so influenced by fairly hardline and defensive approaches to Christian faith. Admittedly the GB scene has retained a great deal more openness to concern for the poor and for the environment, but still ...

There are some interesting glimpses of how this approach is fitted for engagement with post-modern culture. For example, "... what you're saying is that Jesus is for everyone, not just for Christians! I've never heard such a thing!" -Said by a previously-unchurched person wishing to bring similar friends to a set of workshops held at the church.

Link-Love: 
Blue Ocean Faith website
Blue Ocean Faith at Amazon
Blue Ocean Faith on Facebook
Blue Ocean World - Podcast
Hello Horatio - Website 

hashtag for this book is #BlueOceanSpeakeasy

I reckon it's only fair to let you know that I got an e-copy of this book as a deal: review within 30 days of receiving it. However, that is the full extent of the 'contract': I am not obliged to make the review favourable and there is no direction given to me whatsoever concerning the content of this review. the Only thing that is given is the 'Link-Love' bits above.

Universities & 'lad culture': calling time on harassment

I grew up  thinking, because everyone else around me seemed to think or take as read, that what is now being called 'lad culture' was something we just had to accept. And while I was sometimes encouraged to be part of it, I felt that drinking to the point of illness and bullying relatively random bystanders didn't seem such a good thing to me. Though I have grown to understand that there's something about bonding with mates and telling stories about it afterwards which is the 'good' thing that appeals and holds it together over time. On the other hand, I suspect strongly that a lot of the claims not to recall events are no more than claims: it's a way to distance themselves from embarrassment and give mates a chance to 'admiringly' diss them.

Of course, another aspect of the lad thing is sexual. But given that there have been bawdy songs, jokes and banter that imply that women are merely breathing sex dolls with no real agency, then it seems likely that those who are encountered by the lad pack who don't fulfil that role are likely to be treated that way anyhow. And not everyone has the ability to hold their own verbally and attitudinally.
So given those sorts of 'facts on the ground', it probably is about time that we looked at lad culture.

One in four students (26 per cent) - and 37 per cent of women - had also suffered unwelcome sexual advances such as groping and touching, it added. Two thirds of respondents said they had been aware of students putting up with unwanted sexual comments, with just under one third bearing witness to verbal harassment because of a student’s gender. From: Universities must unite to beat 'lad culture' sexism on campus, claims NUS - News - Student - The Independent

There is another side:

the NUS looks set to undermine one of the best things about campus life: the chance to engage with fellow students and, in doing so, to grow and become a more rounded adult. This means experimenting, talking openly, making friends, sometimes being hedonistic. In trying to straitjacket students by regulating their behaviour through ‘zero tolerance’ policies, the NUS is doing the students it claims to represent a great disservice. from Spiked-online.

Though personally, I find that 'conclusion' (for it is the last paragraph of the article) a little disingenuous given that it does earlier acknowledge that it could lead to taking more seriously certain behaviours: "misbehaving students who ‘catcall or grope women students or undress themselves’ potentially facing disciplinary action, or even expulsion." In context it could almost seem that they are condoning groping or creating unpleasant harrassful environments for others. While it's true that sometimes talking openly can make things awkward and it is right for that to be the case. Sometimes talking openly is just plain bullying or wanton harassment with no mitigating public goods. Sometimes being hedonistic can also be done without abusing others, but when it is making sport of other people, that's a different matter. I don't think those things really contribute to growing and becoming more adult -unless they are challenged effectively. They are actually continuances and reconfigurations of rather childish and adolescent behaviours. By all means discuss them and test them, but something does need to be there to protect and safeguard the vulnerable from bullying.

Nature and urban spirituality

 

Photo by Mike Wilson | Unsplash

The internet is full of beautiful mountains, sunsets, plants, scenes and other wondrous natural productions in photographic glory. Many times they have written across them some scripture or other words that appeal to our sense of awe and wonder. Our spirituality is so often bound up with the natural world in its appreciable grandeur or exquisiteness.
But ... i wonder ... leaving aside the concerns about the uglinesses in nature (in reality our inability to appreciate, in many cases) or the triteness that this ends up generating... Why is it that we seem to shy away from seeing the urban environment as a potential source of inspiration? Whether we're thinking about visual or other dimensions of experience.

One answer is probably that we somehow see hills and fields as more directly made by God or at least not human-made. The obverse of that is seeing urban environments as more to do with human effort than something that 'tells God's glory'. That phrase points us to scriptural ideas such as in Romans 1 where the majesty of creation discloses something of God. On this basis, so much of the urban reveals its creator: humankind.

One of the effects of this almost unquestioned way of looking at things is that we seem to have many retreat centres in the countryside but very few in urban areas -I can only think of three urban retreat centres in Britain: one in Bradford, West Yorkshire, one in Edinburgh and one in Durham. Perhaps there are more but I would be surprised if there were a great many more.

So, my question is whether we can have an urban spirituality which would undergird the development of city retreat centres without damning them with faint praise compared with those set in beautiful countryside contexts. I do wonder how far the retreat to the country might be rooted in the impetus which drove pioneer monastics to the desert: to get away from the currupt urban civilisation and its vanities. But even that observation reminds us that the early Christian faith is very much and urban faith and in many parts of the world today, that is still the case. However, much western Christian imagination is still drawing deeply from the wells of our rural past and perhaps the way that the renaissance of the urban is tied to the 'dark satanic mills' of industrialisation has played a big part in maintaining that. Yet we should recognise that the urban population of the world is now bigger than the rural and that the economies of scale probably make being human as urbanites will tend to be better for the planet than otherwise.

First of all, in response to the question of developing an urban spirituality which could support city retreat centres, I'd actually like to note that seeing the landscape as natural and somehow more directly from God's hand is actually a bit of a stretch, in reality. Geologists are beginning to say that we live in the anthropocene period. What that means for us now is that we need to recognise just how much of our landscape (in Britain definitely) is actually human-formed or human-made. Britain was once pretty much one big forest but centuries of farming and land management by animal husbandry have altered our landscape. Trees are replaced by fields or moorland and prevented from regrowing by sheep or by burning. We know this to our cost in the last decade or two as we have really missed the water absorbancy that more woodland and forest would have given to protect some areas from flooding. The upshot of this observation is that when we look at a British landscape, we are looking at an artificial landscape altered, sometimes drastically by human economic and subsistance interests. Admittedly, many of us like the view and appreciate that it still consists in many green and growing things, but it is not 'direct from God's hand'; it is a co-operation between humans and the rest of nature.

What i think this means is that the difference between rural and urban is not absolute but rather scalar. And that allows us to acknowledge that we should expect non-human life in the city as well as to expect the artificial in the rural context.

So much of the natural is actually human-touched and altered. And even to describe it in that way is to talk about things as if humans are outside of nature. But the truth is that we humans are created beings and take our life from the rest of nature and return it there. All our making only ever re-uses or repurposes nature created and sustained by God. Our tower blocks and pavements, lorries and ships, our computers and mines exist by permission of God fashioned from the stuff that God has brought into being. And we could also do with recognising that human ingenuity and capacity for thought and engineering are God-given talents.

So when we see the Shard, for example, some of what it would be legitimate to do would be to admire the size and the materials and to appreciate the gifts of imagination and engineering as well as the God-inspired concerns for safety involved in the building of it. The urban landscape is a meditation in the grandeur of creation and simultaneously the impact and stewardship of human beings. And so it is also a meditation on the good use and the abuse of what God has made by humans. We can recognise a call to manage and develop the world and with that recognise that we do that badly and sometimes well. So and urban retreat reminds us both of the goodness and the fallenness of the human cosmos. But then, if we know how to look, so does a rural retreat: it's just that we are better at fooling ourselves about the latter; it's easier somehow for us to pretend that the human-elements are absent when in reality they are not.


What this means is that an urban spirituality has to be one which has a prophetic edge. In fact that has been the case for rural spiritualities at their best, though at their worst they have been 'Rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gates, God made them high and lowly and ordered their estates' (a now normally-omited verse from All Things Bright and Beautiful). The prophetic edge is to recognise the inhumanities implied by various elements in our awareness of the urban scene and it does so sometimes by recognising where in some sense we have got it right and what it could be. The vision of the New Jerusalem at the End-Fulfilment of all things is one in which all the wealth of the nations is brought: this is an urban vision of a harvest of civilisation -and let's not forget the etymology implict in 'civilisation'.

And yet, for all of what I've been saying, I am not proposing to junk a spirituality that enjoys and learns from nature. Partly that is because what I'm proposing is actually about recognising that the urban is still part of nature, merely with the direct, appreciable, human influence more obvious and scaled up. Perhaps it is worth recalling that one of the earliest biblical images of the good life involve gardens -the word 'paradise' is connected here. A garden is, obviously, not a wilderness, a wildness. It is a co-operation of 'found'* nature with human mindful obseration and learning with human aesthetics, planning and effort. And again, on the other hand of course, a paradise garden, can also speak of accumulation through an imperial wealth extraction system and having been built and maintained by slave labour. It does not need to be that way, of course, such beauty can emerge from free co-operative effort and exchnage or in more just and democratic system

We might also want to take into account the reserch, increasingly emerging about the beneficial health effects of exposure to green and growing nature. So a continuing challenge in urban areas is to make sure trees, and other plants are a big part of the environment. An urban spirituality will recognise that it is not about being a celebration of a brutalist concrete jungle but having a vision of greened urban civilisation with paradises for health and aesthetic enjoyment. An urban spirituality will protest against concrete monocultures while also celebrating human constructions of grace, elegance and which help build the common good.

So we could envisage a city retreat centre doing a variety of things: celebrating green spaces and helping people to appreciate them and to pray with them; celebrating the sights and sounds of the city; engaging with the implicit calls for justice and to share the fruits of prosperity widely; appreciating the opportunities to scale up human creativity and cultural development; discerning the brooding of God's Spirit over this ongoing [co-]creation which is City. I would imagine a curriculum of cultural appreciation, community enjoyment, celebration of 'paradises' and learning to discern and support moves towards justice, peace and wellbeing.

It used to be that in a number of British urban areas, there were urban theology projects. I think that we might want to revisit that but with urban spirituality as the central idea.

*In using the word 'found' here, I'm referencing the word as it is used in art to mean objects that are found in the wider world and picked up by the artist and incorporated into the artwork.

PS it's intriguing to read alongside this an article I recently found about evolution of animals and plants in urban environments. By noting how other creatures are adapting to the urban, the article implicitly locates the urban as part of nature, albeit a newish part.

Advent: do we need to reclaim the season?

Okay, so the season is well over, but perhaps, while it is fresh in our memories, we could think about how to improve things into the future?
The article has some interesting thoughts but I do want to ask who is the 'we' here? The article seems confused between thinking about 'we' as a wider society and 'we' as Christians.

... some churches in the USA are exploring the idea of Extended Advent�– reconnecting with the fact that Advent used to be a season of seven Sundays until Pope Gregory VI cut it down to four in the 11th�century ( Christmas without Advent is cheating: Why we need to reclaim the season | Christian News on Christian Today)

To be fair, Advent has had several forms in the western churches. And today in the East, it is 'little Lent' and practised as a forty day season of preparation. The Celtic church seemed to have the same forty-day season. However, in the contemporary world, we might want to recognise a huge tension. While the inherited religious tradition has twelve days of Christmas starting on 25th December, the culture around about tends to see the 25th as the culmination of the season, perhaps supplemented by New Year's eve.
So strategically, we might be better to recognise that Christmas season begins earlier and have our more Lent-like preparatory season before that. I would suggest that pretty much all the current Advent season is, in effect, the Christmas season with the parties, the food and coral services where the incarnation is read about and sung of.
This would mean that perhaps the Kingdom Season should be treated as a preparation season. Interestingly its lectionary themes do tend in that direction. So, perhaps we should start 'advent' in November and shade into Christmas season in early-mid December. Encourage fasting in November. Perhaps consider a Ramadan-style fasting in that time (the shorter days in the northern hemisphere might make this not to burdensome).
Perhaps it is time to encourage experiments about all of this. including how to mark the various bits and phases with liturgical colours, music and ceremony.

Sentimentality, Business and funerals

 The article I'm about to reference is about sentimentality and how it shows up in art and also, interestingly, business. It reminded me very much of an insight I had when I was more involved in funerals. The article tells us:

There are two causes of sentimentality in business. The first is a fear of the fragility of the audience, a worry that it won’t be able to cope with the truth. You think the truth is actually OK. But you fear that other people will get excessively agitated and upset. Sentimentality in Art – and Business | The Book of Life

 Once or twice as someone who had been asked to conduct a funeral, I realised that funeral directors don't always act in the best longer term interests of the bereaved. Now, don't get me wrong here: this is not a general 'down' on funeral directors: some of them definitely do get how their vocation is to help the bereaved and most of them most of of the time comport themselves in a professional and appropriate manner. However, just a couple or three times I felt in my interactions with funeral directors that their desire to help the bereaved had been, in the words of this article, sentimentalised. That is, they were approaching the task of offering comfort in a way that slipped over into a refusal to face a certain cold, hard, fact: someone had died. Perhaps that is even a little too harsh, perhaps what I was observing was not a refusal, rather simply a redirection or skirting round the 'elephant in the room'.

And it occurred to me that this was because there was a customer/client dimension which could prioritise short-term feelgood vibes of the service offered and so colluding in or even encouraging a degree of denial. This would be because the purpose of a funereal company is like any other company in crucial respects;

When imagining how to get other people
to like us or be loyal to our company or interested in something we’d
like to sell them, we too often feel we have to omit all the weaknesses
and rough bits. 

And, let's face it, when thought about from a bottom-line perspective, an undertakers' business is about selling funerals more than it is about helping bereaved people for the longer term. In the shorter term, it is desirable that people feel good about the service you've offered and that means the temptation to a sentimental approach is big. The longer-term perspective, however, sees that denial of a death is not going to be helpful for the growth and flourishing of the bereaved.

There is another problem that can hang around funerals and which can get entangled in the relationship between undertakers and bereaved. In some families, perhaps most to some degree, there are dimensions to the relationships between the deceased and the bereaved that are unwhole, unhealed or even downright fractious. This typically brings guilt and even anger close to the surface in and around a funeral service. This is very much the kind of thing identified in the article as a second dimension:

The second reason for business sentimentality is darker. People sometimes get very sentimental when they feel very guilty, when something pretty bad is going on just off-stage. It’s a kind of bubble wrap around brutish things. 

 Again, don't mistake my meaning. I'm not thinking of those rare times when undertakers are negligent about things like labelling bodies. I'm thinking of those situations when the unresolved tensions and guilt among the bereaved is simmering or bubbling. It is only natural then that undertakers, sensing this (who wouldn't?) want to bring out the bubble wrap and keep a lid on the emotional turmoil. An understandable desire even if unhelpful in most long-term bereavement processes.

So sometimes there has to be a way, gently but firmly, to do some things that don't collude in pretending that somehow there has not been a death. Some of the rites or ceremonies around funerals are there precisely because the harsh recognition of a death has to be made before it can begin to be incorporated into the personhood of the bereaved from that time forth. Sometimes a minister at a funeral will need to say the words 'dead', 'died', 'death' etc. even recognising that such things may bring tears. But this can be cathartic. It may usually be necessary to help people to process their grief.

PS Giles Fraser recently wrote in a way that broadly coheres with what the concern I've tried to express here is about albeit focussing more on the trend.

Are we seeing the start of a cultural shift in sexual mores?

I've been involved in a small group in my university of staff concerned about so-called 'lad culture'. I share the group with feminists and gay-rights activists. We talk a lot about issues of consent. It is recognised that sometimes women are the perpetrators of 'laddish' behaviour and men (hetero and homo) the victims. However, on that last point, we should note that it does seem that the biggest problem is men on women and where it goes in the other direction it is about an imitation of the worst behaviour and attitudes and as such is a cultural reflex; a kind of equality gone bad.

In a piece advocating a zero tolerance approach to sex with minors, an interesting further dimension arises, foregrounding issues of consent and wider cultural attitudes to sex which set a context for abusive actions:

It’s like drink-driving. Decades of relativism on that issue were probably fair to nice folk who were driving home after a glass or two and meant no harm. But a lot of people died. So now we have an absolutist approach and a lot of mildly tipsy drivers have been very harshly punished – perhaps unfairly in the immediate, individual sense – but far fewer people die. No, Adam Johnson, child abuse is not a grey area | Victoria Coren Mitchell | Opinion | The Guardian

For a while now I've ben wondering whether this is laying foundations for a very different sort of social contract around sexual behaviour than has been around since the mid 20th century. Here's why I'm wondering that.

It seems to me that a great deal of the 'sexual revolution' has been on terms formed by patriarchy: presumed female compliance and male rights (often grounded in a 'might is right' sensibility) with an ethic rooted in a walk-away attitude which recognises very little emotional entail. This background, I suggest, meant that the sexual revolution was conducted largely on patriarchal terms in many ways. And Christian ethics on the matter were caught in a double bind of having been associated with a quasi-Gnostic attitude towards matter and body and so simply pleasure-denying -and hypocritically so- on the one hand. And on the other hand, it had been stated and explained through a cultural lens inextricably bound up with patriarchal assumptions and attitudes albeit ones that forked from the more libertine versions of patriarchy.

But, what I think we may be seeing in the world outside of the the churches and other religious sub-cultures, is a problematising of presumed sexual liberties. What I mean by this is that the recognition of not just physical coercion but also psychological coercion and grooming begins to erode the presumption of consent until it is fairly obvious and explicit. In time this constructs a degree of hesitancy about the idea of sexual intercourse early in a relationship particularly where drink or drugs may have been involved.

And in another cultural strand, we have a recognition of the profound psychological impact of assault and particularly of unconsented sexual contacts of all kinds (verbal, touching or violent). Such recognition is partly related to issues of psycho-somatic unity drawn from the discoveries and implications of scientific research and treatment of the aftereffects of abuse and a growing realisation about the mechanisms of grooming, priming etc. In conjunction with a rightful concern for the vulnerable and more careful thinking at institutional levels (and thus in terms of training in workplaces etc) about rights, equality and diversity, there is a fuller cultural groundswell towards care and caution in matters of sexual expression, I think.

To be sure this is not the same as a former 'Christian' sensibility based in "sex only within marriage" (contaminated as it was by ideas of property and male supremacy /female incompetency). However, it is nevertheless an ethic based on consent, care and awareness of vulnerability and consequences.

Christian sexual ethics need to be rethought and restated against this background.  Much groundwork for this has actually been done (I think of the work of Jack Dominion, for example) but I think that Evangelicals probably need to re-examine the presumed interpretations rooted in Genesis 1 and 2 and a handful of NT texts.

That's as far as I've got with that, really at the moment. I would be interested in comments that help push the ideas above forward or at least engage with them constructively. I'm not so interested in restatements of the 'traditional' positions: I know them well, want to keep faith with the best intents and insights of them but I want also to tackle whether the cultural matrix for interpreting sexual mores is changing in the kind of way I'm trying to sketch above and whether Christian theology can engage the positive aspects of the changes in an open and yet critical manner.

The fun in funerals and the bittersweet

I've attended a number of funerals in the last few years as a support to mourners. Mostly the deceased have been students, most young people in their 20s. A number of them have been non-religious ceremonies. And I've also been to a number of funerals for other people too. One of the strands running through many of all of the above has been a declared desire to celebrate the life of the person who has died. In fact, thinking about it, when I was reasonably regularly conducting funerals myself, this was a refrain I was increasingly hearing as I spoke with the bereaved next of kin and friends.

The BBC have recently run an article on this growing phenomenon in which we can read:

 Instead of looking ahead to the afterlife, British funerals increasingly rejoice in memories of the deceased's triumphs, relationships and their favourite songs. There's a phrase for ceremonies like this - "a celebration of life" Happy funerals: A celebration of life? - BBC News

The manifestations of this desire can show up in a variety of ways, but my experience would note requests from the family of the deceased for people attending the event to wear bright colours or particular forms of clothing that were in some way meaningful to the person who has died. Also what was said in the ceremony would highlight the fun and good times. This makes more sense in the increasingly commonly articulated idea that the only afterlife that can be guaranteed or made sense of by many is 'living on in our memories'. In that scenario, one wants happy and positive memories to be a host to!
There's a lot to affirm in this but there are a couple of concerns that a responsible ceremony-leader should probably be balancing in the planning of the occasions.
To be affirmed is the recognition of the value of human relations and of memory: that each of us is because of the others in and around our lives and that the things we can celebrate about those we have loved are the very stuff of growing and worthwhile relationships (in general terms, at least, occasionally I do wonder). To be affirmed (though I suspect this is not really what is intended by those wanting celebrations of life) is the bittersweetness of such recollections. In the fond recollection there is an awareness that this has come to an end and this produces a feeling of Sehensucht. And I think that is probably a good thing at a funeral.

"Instead of looking to an afterlife" is an interesting counterpoise. I take it that it is meant as a characterisation of a traditional religious funeral. And I certainly gained the impression in comments about funerals as celebrations of life, that one of the things that people were trying to get away from is feeling that they could only really participate if they had some kind of belief in the afterlife and/or God. The two don't necessarily go together, of course: some people believe in some kind of God without an afterlife and some consider an afterlife perfectly possible but not really God. What we should take from that is that it is not necessarily the case any more that the concern uppermost in mourners' minds about the fate of the deceased after death and doing something for them to make things better or at least not to get in the way of their post-mortem happiness. Denial or agnosticism about life after life therefore shifts the horizon of the ceremony in most people's understandings. Now it has to be about the way that those who are left carry on and a big part of that is how they remember the deceased.
Never mind that most CofE funerals have, for a good while, included concern for the bereaved and incorporated some kind of eulogy; clearly the God/afterlife themes have a stronger cultural hold associated with the church funeral hanging on in the popular imagination than the frequent realities of the actual experiences of the funerals.
This leads into my concerns. A bit further on in the article, we read: "despite being being the great leveller, death is increasingly seen as an occasion to express one's individuality." That can work quite well with the celebration of life and may have played a part in strengthening the idea: what one wishes for oneself, is projected onto the funerals of others (and that in turn becomes a template for still others). I don't have a problem with that except in one respect. Sometimes the wishes of the deceased may not be appropriate for the needs of the mourners. As one of those interviewed puts it...

He doesn't want any tears. The purpose is not to dwell on loss, he says, but to rejoice in what happened when he was alive: "I don't want them mourning - I want them laughing."

But, I want to say, it's not just about what you want. In any case, you will either be completely absent, or at least in a position, I would hope, to appreciate better the needs of those left behind. They may need to grieve and the ceremony probably should be an occasion when something of that can be expressed in solidarity with other mourners. This gives permission for it to be done. In actual fact, it is an honour to the deceased that their impact has been such that they will be missed. Tears are appropriate. That's not to say that laughter is out of place and I think that there is a rightful reaction against funerals being only about grief.
You see, I think it is important that the positive place a funeral can have in the bereavement process is recognised. For it to do that, it should normally help the bereaved to face their loss, at least in the initial or early phases. To do this in community with others is part of what a funeral offers by way of benefits. Bereavement also involves recognising and beginning to renarrate ones own stories in relation to the person who has died; to make meaning out of the event of the death by situating or re-situating in the stories which carry most meaning for us. This is a time for bittersweet and for Sehensucht, and something of that should normally be part of the funereal proceedings; after all, any remembering has to entail some recollection at some level that a sad event involving the one remembered has taken place. This has been where, traditionally, relating to the big story of God and human destiny has come in.
So, it seems to me, that remembering something of the significance and the abundance of the life of one who has died is important. To give hospitality to laughter and tears is likely to be part of that. In some cases the laughter is part of the ceremony, in others, part of the informal eating and drinking afterwards.

And we remember. And it is true that remembering is a kind of afterlife for the one remembered. We do all belong to one another in the memories and stories we share; we don't just exist in our own heads but in the minds and memories of those we love and who love us (as we are reminded in 'I am a Strange Loop' by Douglas Hofstadter). Keeping the memory alive, in this sense, is a kind of maintaining the remaining life of the deceased.
As a Christian, I want to affirm that and gently suggest that there is One Who Remembers more fully, intimately with greater love and more realism than any of us. Remembers each and every one of us. Eternally. And as creator is able to give life to that remembering in a way that far exceeds the lingering but fading recollections of us humans. Giving a fullness of life and a perfecting of life. Dipping that lively remembrance in glory and setting it in a web of recollection of the best and of fulness and completion. We call this New Creation. Do we dare speak of this hope?

Churchgoers keeping quiet on gay marriage

It's an interesting little window that this opens up into British Christianity. At first I was not sure whether the results of the survey were indicating that of the c.50% who held more 'liberal' views, 38% were quiet about it or whether it was 38% of the total surveyed Somehow the former seemed more likely. However, this paragraph in the report seems to indicate the latter.

A survey of worshippers across the main denominations, found that Christians were effectively evenly split on whether same-sex relationships should be considered sinful.But 38 per cent of those polled said that they believe churches should accept and affirm same-sex relationships but are reluctant to say so openly. Churchgoers keeping liberal views on homosexuality ‘secret’ - Telegraph

Now, what I find interesting is the implications about church life because 38% is a big proportion when we are considering something like feeling unable to express views. But when I think about it I can understand, I suspect, the dynamics. It's probably a bit like what I hear some Muslims saying about expressing less conservative views in Mosque influenced communities. That they feel that the religious discourse space is owned by the conservatives and that they do not feel sufficiently empowered religiously to gainsay the official statements. Perhaps because they don't have a sense that they may be more than a small minority allied with the sense that the tradition seems to favour the conservative interpretations and that those who hold those interpretations hold the influential positions by virtue of having been through the system and in position because they are entrusted with it.

I've also been inside systems where a particular line has been dominant and where it is difficult to speak a different perspective. Those who are already in positions of respect and trust by dismissing or even ridiculing, or perhaps even aggressing against 'unsound' opinions and maybe even people. This is a very strong signal to others in the community to discount or even take ostracisitive actions. This means that at the very least the ideas are discounted and quarantined and those holding them are dismissed or even ridiculed. All of which functions as a fairly effective social control.

The worrying thing, of course, is that it inoculates dominant perspective holders from considering issues that may actually be helpful for them in the longer term (whether or not they end up agreeing). All of this can be seen in the way that Steve Chalke was responded to by Evangelicals when he announced that he now considered that Scripture was not against committed lifelong-intended homophile sexual partnership. The gatekeepers of soundness denounced him and others picked up or reinforced this dismissal. Very few actually offered arguments that properly engaged with Chalke's arguments, many reiterated arguments which Chalke had shown to be less than conclusive.

All of which makes me wonder about whether we can work, as churches, on better ways of disagreeing. It seems to me that derision, abuse, dismissal and ostracism of people who disagree is not loving our neighbour as ourselves. I can scarcely think it possible that any of us, finding ourselves wishing -even compelled- to express a minority viewpoint or disruptive idea would want to be on the receiving end of the disdain or outright abuse that Steve Chalke saw (and I saw directed at him on Twitter and Facebook). And the consequence of that observation is that if we wouldn't want that ourselves, why do we think we have a right to pass it on to others?

More, we should ask ourselves how we would like to be treated given that we could be wrong: how should those who disagree correct us? Well, isn't that the way we should offer to correct others? All of which says that churches should be communities where we disagree humanely, with a desire for the good of the other and with a teachable humility because we could ourselves have something to learn. The 38% who don't feel able to say what they think are a testimony to us as churches that we still have a way to go on this.

Pan, Hook and innocent cruelty

In this the panto season in Britain, a post involving a play that is often put on as part of a pantomime season offering may be apposite. I have a number of memories from early childhood  and quite a few from what I think of as mid-childhood (roughly primary school age). One of these was shaken loose by this article about Peter Pan in which early on we are told:

... the Boy Who Won’t Grow Up is—in actuality—a terrifying protagonist .Peter Pan’s “Greatest Pretend” is Heroism | Tor.com

It reminded my of my first reaction to the Peter Pan story when it was read at school in class (you know, that carpet time thing at the end of the day). I recall actually not liking Peter Pan very much. I remember thinking that he reminded me of school bullies: that sense of what I would now label 'entitlement', being full of himself and the carelessness for others. It all just seemed to me that the kind of characteristics I was, in most other parts of my life, being encouraged to emulate were spectacularly absent from this boy's character, not even in embryo were they there nor was this a story of a journey to wisdom on his part. And worse, this lionising of Pan seemed to be empowering to the attitudes of those who swaggered around the playground and the classroom assuming that if they could take it, it was theirs and if anyone objected, we were to be agressed into line.

Now I've got that flashback of my chest ...

The article linked to reminds us how never Neverland is some kind of virtual world (programmed by Tinkerbel who seems to be of a piece with Pan's negligent insouciance) with Pan at the centre.

Peter Pan is lord dictator of Neverland. His word is law. His adventures take precedence. His desires are paramount. Super fun as an avatar for any child, but what about everyone else who occupies space, who breathes Neverland’s air? What happens to the indians, the Lost Boys, the pirates? They are only relevant in terms of how they play into Peter’s story.

So in some way, fair enough: if it's his 'party' then he can be the centre of it. Note, though, there's an interesting Christological counterpoint we could explore on the back of this.

Not only, though, is he dictator; he is a kind of pagan god (I had to say it that way because I was intrigued as a child by his apparent naming for the Greek mythological god of woodlands).

Barrie states—in no uncertain rhetoric—that when the Lost Boys get too numerous, Peter Pan thins out the herd. ... . And we have to assume that he either deliberately leads them into danger, or that he does the deed himself.

Perhaps apt for a character who shares a name with a woodland god: a survival of some version of the fittest -fittest in this case to capture and hold Pan's interest. It really does feel like a version of a pagan sprite or deva has been narrated into this tale.

Again it is hard to avoid thinking of the this god's carelessness in contrast to another Centre of the/a world who self-empties and submits to death rather than condemning others to it and in order to bring life to those others.

So I found this piece somehow affirming of my 7 year-old self's distrust of Peter Pan. interestingly it was because, at that age, I was taking a view from the margins, from the point of view, more in a sense, of the lost boys who outlive their usefulness to Peter Pan and are 'thinned out' of the herd: I knew what it was like to be one of those.

So it is worrying to realise that this is still the world we live in. Emily Asher-Perrin, who wrote the article makes a good point (and I defer to her as she studies Barrie's Peter Pan as a life project, and I don't). I think it is right that what I was as a junior-school child reacting to was the heartlessness of Pan. Dimly aware that something was wrong about it. In this case, we are invited to consider ...

as Barrie states, Pan will always come back to steal our runaways and
lost boys, and will continue to do so as long as children are “Innocent
and heartless.” The genius of Pan’s tale, is that innocence does not automatically denote goodness. Instead, it makes a child’s lack of experience a very frightening thing after all.

it is that important point: innocence does not necessarily mean goodness. Not only children, but animals are innocent. However, the levels of what we would consider cruelty, exploitation and bullying in primate bands, for example, are horrific by our standards. 'Frightening' might be the right sort of term. indeed. But it is the discomfort of the fact that we are considering human children not chimpanzees.

But there's a further discomfort. In part we can see this played out in the film Hook (which I think is brilliant in many ways). Where we meet what turns out to be a grown-up Peter Pan who has been lured back into the grown up world by love. (In this context, this is an interesting reflection in itself: the way into goodness is through love). This Peter Panning (as he becomes) makes his living by mergers and acquisitions -as 'granny' Wendy says, he has become a pirate. But in this case, it is the grown-up who has become hardened against the simple delights of love and joyfulness who needs to discover the innocence of delight and, actually to rediscover the love of and for his own children. But the interest is in how the man mirrors the carelessness of the Pan though in this case by being lured into 'piracy' -a macho, game-playing, status-seeking heedlessness of human costs. So this discomfort, I'm saying, isn't about the cruel innocence of children but the fact that the selfish cruelty runs through into adulthood.


And there's a question as to how far it is right. I'm not convinced by this innocent lack of goodness. I think, theologically, I'm committed to the insight that goodness is basic and evil is dependent on, parasitic even, on goodness. There can be goodness without evil but no evil without goodness. Evil is always derived from, a twisting or negation of what is good. This is rooted, for me in the Genesis declaration, which the early church understood to rule out gnostic attitudes to the material world, that "It is good". So I'm suspicious of something that appears to see 'good' (and by implication 'evil') as human impositions on a 'neutral' cosmos.

But is that what the phrase 'innocent but cruel' implies? The word 'cruel' seems to be about a lack of kindness or love, well more than lack; in fact, will to harm or hurt. 'Innocent' however, seems to be about not having a will to wrong. So I'm wondering whether 'innocent cruelty' is not an oxymoron. But of course, the words attributed to Barrie are "innocent but heartless". So the question is about whether heartlessness is evil, in truth.  I've translated 'heartless' as careless and cruel, above. Is that fair?  Well, to me 'heartless' seems to mean something like 'lacking empathy' on the basis that 'having a heart' seems to mean being kind, understanding feelings or in some way having empathy. Not having a heart seems to involve being, to some degree, cruel. So I think that these are words sharing a huge amount of semantic overlap. However, I wonder whether cruelty has connotations of deliberate intention of harm whereas heartlessness has the same connotation: could it mean ignorant harmfulness?

All of which, to me, indicates that in Barrie's estimation, children lack empathy or fail to understand others' feeling and are unkind. But could that unkindness stem from simple inability to understand others' feelings and to have empathy. So, is their innocence, in fact, not having yet developed the capability to be empathic? But if so, then I'm not convinced: child development studies indicate children mirroring and matching emotions with those around them, particularly those with whom they share bonds. -Perhaps that is it: the heartlessness comes from not sharing bonds or not having developed them. If that is so, then the difficulty is one of failing to extend the circle of sympathy, perhaps of even refusing to. There may be a degree of willed carelessness arising from an inarticulate understanding that to do so would mean giving up the advantages that their 'lordship' can confer. Such power over others requires the cultivation of heartlessness, learning to suppress or evade sympathy. And perhaps this is what name-calling is about: a distancing mechanism; framing the other in a way that rules out empathy by emphasising distance and making difference a cause for repugnance.

So, it's not so much that children are innocent but cruel as that their (actually 'our') emergence from innocence involves distancing and suppression of empathy. Of course, this is why love of God and of neighbour is a cardinal virtue in many spiritual paths: it is not so much an attempt to restore innocence as to weigh against the creeping distancing and growing repugnance. Peter Pan is not testimony to innocent cruelty but to the loss of empathy and acquisition of the attitudes of objectifying others which allows us to instrumentalise them and even to justify cruelty.

I can't, however, leave it there. One of the other memories shaken loose by this article was that, having got over my dislike of the heartless Pan, I did manage to identify with one aspect of his character: the love of action-adventure. And it is here that I think that Pan's appeal to us really resides. When I watch my nephews playing rough and tumble, when I remember my own children doing the same and when I think about my own childhood, then I realise that it is the exuberance of physical movement and of pitting yourself against something that draws out your abilities particularly when it puts you in a story where you are winning the acclaim of others perhaps by rescuing them or winning a prize for them. (Of course the story may be one that justifies distancing, repugnance and cruelty). So where Pan scores for us as story is identifying with the sheer joy of physical expression and the excitement of deeds of daring-do, especially when these can be framed as the heroism of the smaller or weaker standing up to and defeating the mighty (Pan the child with a knife against the adult Hook wielding a sword). (Again, interesting to note a resonance with a gospel theme here). I guess this further illustrates, in fact, how evil is parasitic on the good.

There is something in this that resonates with the Biblical theme of growing in wisdom, perhaps.But that is an exploration for another post, perhaps.