Not good but better

Excuse me for writing again, but I have been a little surprised by the innaccurate reporting of the Pope's speech to the Curia a few days ago. It was not a great speech, it seemed to be based on wonky science much closer to prejudice than reason, and it did suggest a disgustingly negative attitude to transexuals. But the speech did not mention gay people once, it brought up many other concerns and seems to have been over wrought by people who should know better.
 
I was surprised (and pleased) by this tidbit (from the Guardian):
'Catholic bishops in England and Wales are encouraging a more pastoral approach. Last month they issued a leaflet - entitled What is life like if you or someone in your family is gay or lesbian in their sexual orientation? ... and what can your parish family do to make a difference? - urging clergy and parishioners to welcome gay men and lesbians. "As a group that has suffered more than its share of oppression, the homosexual community has a particular claim on the concern of the church," it said. The leaflet cited comments received during a survey suggesting the church acknowledged it may have played a role in victimising and marginalising gay Catholics. These included: "The continual message from the church is that homosexuality is so, so dreadful. Our gay son just hasn't stood a chance."'

It seems at odds with what I know about Cormac Murphy O'Connor but a very positive step.

Intolerance

Truly one of the most inaccurately used phrases in the English lexicon must be "Christians believe..."

 

It so often prefixes a statement of something I don't believe in, for example in Alexander Chancellor's column in todays G2 (why must the Guardian, my favourite paper by far, insist on being so rabidly atheist, with the exception of Giles Fraser's excellent articles?): "Christians, of course, believe that even unassisted suicide is a sin".

 

For goodness sake.

 

Many of us do, particularly the most vocal and well publicised of our number, but many of us don't, and just as we are careful about generalising about any group defined by race or religion so should we be careful of generalising about Christians. There are 2bn Christians, so one might expect a little variation.

 

As it happens I think suicide is rarely the best route out but I would always hesitate to call it a sin.

"After Rome"

I'm not a big Boris fan (by a long shot) but his new BBC series 'After Rome' is exceptionally good, you can catch it on the BBC's iPlayer if you're not in the UK. For those of you not in the know Boris Johnson is the (fairly) recently elected Conservative Mayor of London, a notorious former editor, old Etonian and philanderer.
 
Its a pretty quick history of the Clash of Civilisations, but very reasonably told, intelligent, but with none of those ridiculous reenactments and a minimum of silly music. It also happens to be one of my favourite periods of history but I think it's entertaining by any accounts and with some excellent insights into the many periods of religious tolerance in the Alhambra, the Near East and so on that characterise what is often seen (not inaccurately) as a very blood thirsty period of history.

Song and Pain

By a not very well known war poet:

 

Song and Pain
 
 
Out of my sorrow
have I made these songs,
Out of my sorrow;
 
Though somewhat
of the making's eager pain
From Joy did borrow.
 
Someday, I trust,
God's purpose of Pain for me
Shall be complete,
 
And then -
to enter the House of Joy....
prepare, my feet.

Ivor Gurney

Literature in a Time of Disbelief - a talk by Lord Harries

At Lord Harries' (former Bishop of Oxford) lecture to Gresham College this afternoon he spoke about the different challenges that atheist novelists and playwrights pose to Christianity. It was a great talk, the peer is obviously a very erudite reader and seems to have enjoyed the work of all three of the authors he talked about: Ian McEwan, Philip Pullman and Samuel Beckett.
 
He divided them by the kind of challenge they offer: Philip Pullman, one of subversion of the believers' God into a wretched, antiquated beast; Ian McEwan, one of the illusion of a truth beyond immediate human sense, the written record and memory; and Samuel Beckett, one of battling difficulty, of anger with God, of a perpetual sense of the evil of the world that makes belief in a God impossible but a sense of the goodness of the world preventing radical atheism.
 
Needless to say Lord Harries concluded that Beckett's was the most important and sympathetic account we have, although he did raise interesting points about the opposition of science to McEwan's post-modernism and the strongly moral nature of Pullman's atheist characters.

Great St Mary's, Cambridge

Great St Mary's, Cambridge
Originally uploaded by gb332

An evening picture of a powerful Church, built from the bottom up in the Perpendicular style, with great galleries added in the 18th Century. Great St Mary's, the university church, is an attractive if understated centre point to Cambridge, dwarfed by nearby King's College Chapel. It is the point from which distances to Cambridge are measured and was the orginator of the Westminster Chimes.

Well worth a visit.

St Clement Danes, Central London

St Clement Danes is one of few late 17th/18th Century neo-classical churches I really like, built by Christopher Wren in 1681 despite escaping damage in the fire of London. It stands in one of the busiest thoroughfares in London, at the heart of the city, echoing the magnificent institutions of Royal Courts of Justice, Somerset House and so on. After being gutted by an incendiary bomb in 1041 the church was virtually rebuilt by the Air Council as a shrine to all those who lost their lives fighting in the RAF. The interior is perfectly restored, a pristine return to 300 years ago, the familiar boxy shape with a very broad central aisle and large galleries, a vast, gleaming floor inlaid with hundreds of RAF badges. The high windows and polished stone make for a light and airy interior. The chancel arch is magnificent as is the stain glass.

Rowan and John... On the Credit Crunch

There have been a lot of interesting speeches recently, none of which I have blogged on. Today George Osborne banged the "don't trust Labour with capitalist finances, they're all Bolsheviks" drum, Willetts argued that it was middle-class white men we should be crying for, Brown impressed with a passionate speech playing up patriotism and policy. For this blog it was, of course, the words last week of our Archbishops that particularly impressed.

Both Rowan and John spoke out against the "bank robbers", short sellers, etc, to point out particularly the lack of wealth distribution, the irresponsibility and the thoughtless levels of debt and risk that these traders built up. I do not especially want to hash over their comments or to talk about Ekklesia's (http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/7750) embarrassing muck raking that showed the Church was not free from taint itself. I am a little sceptical that the problems in our current economic circumstances can be so easily ascribed to one group of traders, acting within the law, paying tax and so on. It is very easy to label as irresponsible now what none of us were looking at then. One man's sub-prime mortgage is another's good way to provide accommodation for aspirant low income workers who formerly could rely on low interest rates and an expanding economy to pay it. Judge not lest ye be judged.

The predictably hostile response evoked on in the secular press (newspapers particularly) was, I suppose, predictable if sad. The most common response was to question the legitimacy of these two men commenting on the crisis, usually (of course) by people willing to espouse instant and damning judgements on Christianity, theology, capitalism, and so on. Sometimes it was for their lack of expertise but this rings false: not only was Rowan's speech (which I read) remarkably learned but it certainly read as a more academic critique than many newspaper columnists. Others mere asked "who cares what these two have to say?" - seemingly their role in the church makes their opinion less interesting or less valid or something. The writers ignored the fact that these comments were given in speeches to large audiences, written up by journalists, reported in newspapers or online, stimulated much debate on newspaper message boards, and that the Archbishops are among the leaders of a large religious denomination. If you really didn't care what they had to say why would you write about it?

I was delighted to hear these respected churchmen tackling a difficult, contentious and political subject that is immediately relevant for hundreds of people. Too many sermons are on subjects where guidance is least needed, while vicars shy away from topics of great moment and power. You don't have to agree with them, you don't have to like them, you don't have to follow their religion - just listen.

Obama vs McCain

I enjoyed the first Presidential debate, it’s a great feature of the American political system and, for all its faults, does illustrate in a remarkably upfront and transparent way, the distinctions between the candidates. It is not a popularity contest, a crowd pleaser or even as ad hominem as convention speeches tend to be. The quality of the debate is high, the debaters intelligent and more aggressive than they are defensive. It might not change many voting decisions but perhaps it should, I think it probably tends to be more telling than newspaper articles carrying an endless flow of gossip and make believe.

The most interesting topics by far are not the questions on Iraq (too predictable and hedged) or the economy (again both candidates have a pretty clear line to take) but on their plans for government. Most particularly one of my favourite subjects - the size of government. The two candidates split, in a pleasingly familiar dichotomy, into right wing small government and left wing big government. McCain pointed out that Obama's plans to increase spending sit unhappily next to his promise to increase public spending, Obama played for the popularity of universal health insurance and tax cuts, McCain argued that business taxes drive businesses to other countries with lower taxes (the US, he said, has three times the US's tax rate), and so on.

As many countries (Ireland being one) head toward recession, unemployment increases and the world economies appears to enter a period of unbelievable change and uncertainty it seems foolhardy to start decreasing the role of government. The people who feel economic problems the hardest are always those with the least to lose. When HBOS gets swallowed up it is a dramatic hit for the banking sector of the UK economy but these changes are nothing compared to the employees who lose their jobs, the house buyers who will be shopping around in a less competitive mortgage market or whose cost of living outstrips their wage increase. Unemployment benefit, Jobcentres, schooling, retraining, healthcare, public sector employment, cheap transport, help with home insulation and energy costs, etc become ever more critical.

Cutting taxes and decreasing spending is not a sure-fire way of stimulating the economy; it is a sure-fire way of exacerbating the experience of the recession in real people's lives. The US congress considers spending $700bn to help out businesses, a flagrant acceptance that letting free markets run their course is devastating and unthinkable. It is also a flagrant acceptance than small government makes poor business sense. Capitalism is too violent, too unpredictable, as socialists have pointed out since long before Marx, for government not to maintain a tight control over it. The Third Way has extended this idea not just to protect people from capitalism but to protect capitalism from capitalism. We cannot risk the mass failure of Wall Street for humanitarian reasons, capitalism is too endemic, and the decision to take Northern Rock, AIG, Bradford and Bingley and so on into some kind of national ownership is an acknowledgement that these institutions are too important for the state to allow them to fail. Big government is both a direct and an indirect humanitarian necessity.

Love (III), George Herbert

Another George Herbert poem, his most famous probably, a really wonderfull piece of writing, with a very honest account of what its like being a Christian.


George Herbert (1593-1633)
Love (III)

1Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
2 Guilty of dust and sin.
3But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
4 From my first entrance in,
5Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
6 If I lack'd anything.

7"A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here";
8 Love said, "You shall be he."
9"I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
10 I cannot look on thee."
11Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
12 "Who made the eyes but I?"

13"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them; let my shame
14 Go where it doth deserve."
15"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
16 "My dear, then I will serve."
17"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
18 So I did sit and eat.