In the wake of recent debates on assisted suicide…
This is a must-read. HT to Doug Chaplin.
Posted on Wednesday, 26 August 2009 by Paul | Posted in politics,theology | 1 comment
Coming to a Church of England church near you this weekend: communion in one kind
Readers in the Church of England may be surprised to learn that the Archbishops of Canterbury and York have written to all clergy recommending the withdrawal of the common cup (ie. the chalice) at Holy Communion, commencing this Sunday. You can get the official word on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s website. This is potentially controversial, as one of the hallmarks of the Reformation was the restoration of communion in both kinds (bread and wine) to all participants. In this, the Archbishops seem to be following government advice.
As I’m not a parish priest anymore, with the responsibility of implementing this policy, I feel somewhat free to give my opinion. That opinion is from someone who has no medical training whatsoever, so take it on that basis…
The last significant ‘flu pandemic was in 1968 – so-called Hong Kong ‘Flu. During that time, weekly consultation rates rose to a peak of over 1200 per 100,000 (ie. over 1 in 100 visited the doctor each week with symptoms). At the moment (25 July 2009), with Swine ‘Flu, weekly consultation rates are at just under 200 per 100,000. Quite how many people currently have swine ‘flu is probably impossible to know.
However, the point is this: in 1968, the common cup was not withdrawn in Holy Communion. So what’s changed? After all, this is a bad ‘flu, not bubonic plague or cholera.
Simon thinks the difference in the response is to do with there being a potential breakdown in confidence in taking Holy Communion in church – which, given our media-saturated age, may be true. A big factor, for me, is that people (and therefore governments) seem to be far more risk-averse than they were in 1968, a year which I somehow managed to survive (along with the vast majority of the Church of England).
Perhaps somewhere there are lawyers breathing the phrase “duty of care” into some ecclesiastical ears. But I can’t help feeling that this is massive overreaction. The people most at risk from this ‘flu are already ill – and they already know that they will need to take extra precautions to avoid infection. But I doubt whether withdrawing the cup from the Church of England communion services is going to make any significant difference to the spread of the disease, and hence the risk to those who are already immuno-suppressed or who have chronic illness.
Other changes apparently coming in are:
- Communion wafers will be placed in the hands, not (as in some churches) directly in the mouth or on the tongue
- In some places, Holy Water stoups are being drained
- Priests and distributors of the Communion are being urged to avoid touching people’s hands while giving them the bread/wafers
- Communion by intincting bread/wafers in the wine is being stopped – apparently, it’s more likely to spread disease than drinking directly from the cup, since we have nastier and higher-numbers of bugs on our fingers than in our mouths
Then of course, there’s shaking hands (or in some places, hugging and kissing) at the Peace… Maybe that’s why the Church of England managed to survive the 1968 ‘flu outbreak. It was before the arrival of Holy Communion – Series 3 and ‘The Peace’. People kept in their pews and didn’t try to snog each other.
Posted on Saturday, 25 July 2009 by Paul | Posted in good ole cofe,politics | 7 comments
Do you want to live in an unpoliced world?
My previous post of today leads, inevitably, to another area of discussion; that is: the ‘policing’ of the internet. I flagged up the possibilities which ‘geolocation’ software and web services offer to governments and big-business. The internet, especially in its early stages, was strongly shaped by (mainly American) libertarianism. Early internet occupants relished the freedom to communicate, without barriers, which it offered. When hard-line communists attempted, in August 1991 to stage a coup d’Etat by kidnapping Gorbachev and holing Boris Yeltsin up in the Moscow White House, it was the primitive internet links to the White House which allowed Yeltsin and his allies access to the wider world. The plotters weren’t up to speed with the new technology. That would now not be possible.
But these days, especially given the very unsavoury use sometimes made of the internet, we should ask the question, ‘do we want the internet to be entirely un-policed?’ In the most recent discussion, is it right that civil authorities should have a way of tracing the immediate whereabouts of all users of the net? And if the net is an extension of the wider world (which I believe it truly to be) then do we want to live in an un-policed world? Or even part of the world? And what is the implication of saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to that question?
This is one of those posts which is an attempt to provoke some kind of discussion (and, in the process, try to work out who, if anyone, reads this blog!)
Posted on Saturday, 4 July 2009 by Paul | Posted in politics | 2 comments
Church water bills
There has been quite a furore about a change in water-drainage charging which affects churches, other faith communities, community halls and the like in the UK. In some areas, churches and community-halls have faced increases in charges amounting to 1300%. The recent General Synod of the Church of England also debated the issue, passing the following motion unanimously (which I think is a first in my experience):
‘That this Synod, concerned about the effect on many parishes of sudden,massive rises in water charges for churches, request HM Government to remind OFWAT of its obligations to ensure that the water companies adhere to the clear guidance given by the Secretary of State for the Environment in 2000, which states that “there are many non-household users who are not businesses … including places of worship … and it would be inappropriate to charge all non-household customers as if they were businessesâ€.’
I signed the e-petition on the 10 Downing Street website some time ago. Today we received the government’s response to the issue which is moderately encouraging, indicating something of a stop-gap position and some pressure being exerted on those water companies who are acting in a fairly merciless manner. They (and Ofwat) are taking a dim view of the proceedings. You can read the government’s response here.
Posted on Thursday, 30 April 2009 by Paul | Posted in politics | 1 comment
MC Paxo vs Dizzee Rascal
The most sublimely funny part of the coverage of the Obama victory yesterday was in the extended edition of Newnight when things got to the point where we saw bro Jeremy gettin down wiv da kids. Check it out, yo’ll be crippled, innit. I think they should give “Mr Rascal” a guest slot fronting the next edition.
Posted on Thursday, 6 November 2008 by Paul | Posted in humour,politics | Comments Off
Obama and the religious factor in American politics
It would be entirely wrong to assume that Barak Obama’s victory in the American presidential race indicated a decline in the religious factor in American politics. The Democratic party have had to learn, again and again, that to ignore the strongly religious component in their country’s culture is to court electoral defeat. The practical problem they face, however, is that the religious Right have managed to capture their political constituency by a simple message of “pro-life or not”. Whilst this is an easy enough message to understand, my conversations with many American evangelicals suggest that for many of them, this is the win-or-lose question into which the whole of their understanding of politics has been poured. As a result, the resurgent evangelicalism among the Baby Boomers has served to boost the fortunes of the Republican Right – all a candidate needs to do is be reassuring on the Big Question, and the evangelical vote can almost certainly be counted upon. This was exemplified by the interview which Rick Warren, pastor of the megachurch Saddleback in Lake Forest CA, conducted with the two candidates back in the summer. You can see the responses to the question “at what point does an unborn baby get human rights in your view” by both Barak Obama and John McCain here. Barak Obama starts out by saying that answering the question from “a theological or a scientific point of view” is “above my pay grade”. He then clearly says that his is “pro-choice” but also would like to see both a limiting of late-term abortions (if the health of the mother is not under threat) and also at ways in which the number of abortions could be reduced. John McCain comes straight back with “at the moment of conception” without any hesitation. The church congregation cheer. The right answer has been given to the Big Question.
Yet today we have a new President Obama who has been elected by a majority of about 2:1 of electoral college votes, and McCain failed to achieve nearly all of his electoral targets, whilst Obama did better than anyone would have believed back in August. What is going on? Well the economy and the quality of his campaign probably won the election for Obama, and a variety of factors lost it for McCain, including the economy, the quality of his campaign and the choice of Sarah Palin. Palin is another interesting factor in the basic religious question, since she was in the ticket to reassure the disappointed Right enough to get them out to vote for a non-Evangelical Republican candidate. The problem was that she clearly had neither the experience nor the intellect for the job, and this quickly became clear to most thinking Republicans and swing-voters. Her evangelical credentials were impeccable however, even if a little tarnished by Troopergate.
This returns us to the initial question of the religious component in this election. Which way, if any, did it go? Beliefnet seems to be pointing to a likely set of circumstances: namely, that Obama managed to forge a faith coalition of his own. This comprised the non-Evangelical mainstream denominations, who were worried about a wider range of ethical concerns than solely abortion – it is important, but not the Big Question; the fact that Obama, in ways more apparent than McCain, has a clear, active and thought-through Christian faith, founded on an Evangelical conversion with a strongly experiential component; and perhaps most significantly, what is called “The Rise of the Religious Left”. This includes elements within the broader-Church Evangelical constituency which we could identify as “Emerging”. Then lastly, of course, he could rely on votes from the Black Church constituency, which too often has been either divided or unregistered. There are echoes of a Martin Luther King effect here: mobilising black evangelical churches politically is quite an achievement, and perhaps it takes a black candidate or cause to do so.
Both from the perspective of politics and the religious landscape of America, it seems as though we have witnessed a change of historical era. Unlike the last Democratic presidential triumph (Clinton, 1992), here it seems as though permanent changes in American religion itself have participated in the process which allowed a non-white American citizen to enter the White House as President. Although this unique set of circumstances will probably never recur, the religious politics of America are on the change.
Posted on Wednesday, 5 November 2008 by Paul | Posted in emerging church,politics | 1 comment
Thoughts at the end of a momentous day
Well, here we are at the end of Day 1 of rebirth of the planned socialist economy. One thought that’s been lurking at the back of my mind for the past week or so is this: since the banking crisis has forced world capitalism to accept its limitations and, in the last resort, to surrender itself into the protective arms of the governments of nation states, I guess that’s about it for an unregulated global world economy, and in many ways, for the dream of globalisation. What, today, does ‘globalisation’ mean? Certainly not what it was widely thought to mean until about a month ago. If so, then we need to do some philosophy – or at least some re-evaluation of some philosophies which, until this all happened, were taken almost as givens.
So what is the intellectual stock value of Francis Fukuyma and Jean Baudrillard tonight? Both, in different ways, argued for ‘the end of history’ as the global economy took over the reins of the world from the hands of state management.
Perhaps today we’ve witnessed a point when history just ‘restarted’.
Posted on Monday, 13 October 2008 by Paul | Posted in politics | 2 comments
Style in the New Economy
Good morning comrades!
Well today is the start of a new era, with the return to a state-managed economy and the final, petering-out swawk of Thatcherism. Now if this sounds a little like overstatement, just consider: by the end of today, it is likely that the banking system of Britain will be committed to becoming state-controlled and state-backed. Politically it isn’t possible to pour such unheard-of amounts of money into banks without ensuring that the Chief Investor (the State) has control over its investment. It appears that over the weekend, even those countries which appeared to balk at this step, have been forced to fall largely into line with the actions of Britain. Comrades Brown and Darling have their political stars in the ascendent, internationally and domestically. In terms of economic theory, as it pertains to Western democracies, Capitalism has bowed to inevitability of Socialism rather than face a total meltdown of the world financial system.
Now I’m aware that there are a lot of people out there, not least those working in the City of London, who were born after the year 1979. (Historical note: this was when Margaret Thatcher‘s government was elected to power in Britain). The New Order which has emerged in the past week might leave many younger adults culturally and stylistically at something of a loss as to how to present themselves in the economic environment our New People’s Republics (of Britain, USA, etc…) So, some words from an Old Lag on these pages will, no doubt, help as people get up and dressed for their work this morning.
Your Dress Code
In the bin needs to go your natty suit, Italian-styled jacket, soft-leather booties or shoes, white shirt and silk tie. Embrace neo-Punk. What need is the following (and today’s stock-traders may wish to take note of the companies who will be called upon to supply the new People’s Uniform):
- Trousers (US: Pants) — Black or dark blue drainpipe jeans with definite signs of wear, ideally turned up at the ankles to about mid-calf length
- Tee-shirt — Either Che Guevara, Anarchy in the UK, or something with a quote by Ginsberg or Marx, unwashed and definitely un-ironed, over the top of which you should wear…
- Woollen jumper — ideally knitted by your mum, gran, or aunt, with cigarette-burns, unravelling at the cuffs and elongated in length (to just below the crotch) through washing many times on unsympathetic wash-cycles **without fabric conditioner**: hard water is better than soft, giving that true Hammersmith Palais look. Should have the texture of cardboard.
- Underwear — Y-fronts: the older the better, if you must wash it every day, don’t make a point of telling anyone
- ESSENTIAL — Doc Martin 1460 8-hole boots *in black only*
- ESSENTIAL — a Donkey Jacket, as worn by true comrades on picket lines in the golden years
With your donkey jacket on, you will look sufficiently a part of the New Lumpen Proletariat to do some hot deals in the trading rooms today.
Your Accessories
With the turn of history’s wheel, you will need to completely re-evaluate all the other items you may have got used to carrying about with you. There’s an immediate problem here with electronic items which were produced by the old capitalist economy. The New Socialism is emphatically not anti-technology, but some rethink on the effete stylistic elements which had grown up in the era of the fat cats…
Take, for example, your iPod™. If anything symbolized the era of unrestrained individualistic capitalism, it was this little box. So as of today, you should rebrand it a statePod. In addition, you need to get rid of those wussy white earplugs. This change may be more difficult to manage than most, as all options were designed to be either discreet or linked to the capitalist style economy. But a careful look up on internet army-surplus sites should produce the right kind of replacement:
Out:
In: 
Of course, you will also have to do a major replacement of your listening tastes (partly because the sound isolation of the cans above is such that everyone will hear what you’re listening to). Delete all that Lounge, RnB, Ambient and NuJazz. In comes anything recorded in Britain between the years 1976 (the arrival of Punk) and 1981. Essential listening as you get out of the underground and walk to your dealing room is London’s Burning (The Clash), Ghost Town (The Specials), and, probably most appropriate of all: Babylon’s Burning (The Ruts).
Your Politics
Of course, the ability of political parties to weather economic changes and to completely re-invent themselves for new circumstances is nothing new. At the moment Gordon Brown is safer as Labour leader (and possibly as Prime Minister) than he’s ever been. So the Conservative Party needs to do some serious re-alignment for the new Socialist Order. This won’t be too difficult after turning into New Labour just a couple of years ago. This new change obviously means dumping David Cameron and making a truly inspired and innovative leadership appointment for the New Political Era.
Tory Leader: Yesterday’s man …
Tory Leader: an Inspired Choice for the New Era …
Your investments:
National Savings Certificates
Doctor Martens
Army Surplus Stores
Your Charitable Giving
Just because you’ve just lost 55% of the value of someone’s investment portfolio and will never see a personal bonus again in this life-time, that doesn’t mean that there’s any excuse to be ungenerous in this new economic era. There will inevitably be some time-lag before the State manages to take control of all aspects of social security, so consider, particularly those causes which may have fallen through the grid (or who had invested in Icelandic banks), especially those who are presently facing a greater-than-usual number of calls for their help at this difficult time; for example, the Fat Feline Protection League.
Summary
Well, that’s a start. Now you know how to roll up to work, (with a copy of the Financial Times cautiously wrapped-up inside a copy of the Socialist Worker ) without suffering stylistic death. But this is only a survival guide. There is now ample opportunity for other old geezers to offer further stylistic advice in the comments below to help our younger colleagues to survive stylistically in the New Keynesian era. Over to you …
Posted on Monday, 13 October 2008 by Paul | Posted in humour,politics | 7 comments
The Great Emergence – with the greatest respect, I demur
Perhaps the most well-announced book to be published this year in the American Christian book market, especially in Emerging circles, is The Great Emergence, by Phyllis Tickle. It’s published by the Emergent Village imprint of Baker Books, so comes as the latest in a highly marketable succession of titles. I managed to pick up a copy not long after its publication and read it some weeks ago. Phyllis Tickle has had an auspicious career in religious publishing and is in a very good place to act as an authoritative commentator of trends within contemporary American Christianity. So it’s with some trepidation that I am going to have to say why I think the book does not deserve the significance all the pre-publication marketing hype has given it.
Phyllis Tickle’s theory is a simple one: that every 500 years, an upheaval occurs that forces the Church to reconstitute itself in ways which will set the scene for the next period of half a millennium. It is her belief that the Church is presently passing through one of these upheavals, and that the Emerging Church movement is laying the foundation of what is to come. To claim that an easily-identifiable, if amorphous, contemporary movement has significance for the next half-millennium of global world Christianity is some claim indeed. The theory, therefore, demands some scutiny. Tickle’s reference-points are the birth of Christianity itself in the 1st century; the pontificate of Gregory the Great; the Great Schism between Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism; The Reformation; and, today, the Emerging Church.
The first question which naturally arises, therefore, is whether the first four of these points in Church History all have sufficient significance to support the theory, for without it, the basic thesis of the book crumbles. Certainly, no-one is going to argue with two of these being of primary significance to Church History: the First Century and the Reformation. The question is over the signficance of the other two points in the 500-year schema. There is no doubt that Gregory the Great’s pontificate was good for the Western Church. It marked the emergence of the Western church structure as a strong political, missional and social force at the very time when the rest of Western Europe was succumbing to the collapse of classical civilization; a collapse which took roughly two hundred years. The problem is that the pontificate began in 590 and ended in 604, about 100 years after the time the theory indicates it should have happened. So a 20% margin of error becomes apparent. [Since writing this review, Phyllis Tickle has responded in the comments below. If you are looking at the comment-free version, you should click here, to see where she says I've got it wrong, and my response.]
What of the Great Schism, which took place in 1054 (10% error margin)? The mutual anathematization between the Pope and the Patriarchate of Constantinople is largely of symbolic significance, for the Eastern and Western halves of the Church had been drifting apart intellectually since Latin theology emerged in the Third Century, bringing in a distinctly different agenda to that of the East. The move of the administration centre of the Empire to Constantinople and a series of sacks of Rome (by the Visigoths and the Vandals in the 5th century, and the Ostragoths in 6th) led inevitably to competition between the major sees. The formal excommunication only capped a half-millennium of growing mutual isolation between two ecclesial tectonic plates. It was not a crisis, or even a seminal period for the Church. It was just a new low. Indeed, even after the excommunication, cordial relationships were restored and things did not really reach their worst point until the sack of Constantinope during the Fourth Crusade (1203-1204). By choosing the Great Schism, therefore, is Tickle selecting events of symbolic, contemporary, or consequential importance? For if these distinctions are not clarified, to what extent is the theory useful at all?
In addition to these questions of the margin of error and actual significance of two of the four points in history upon which Phyllis Tickle bases her theory, even more questions surround her omission of other events which do not fit neatly into the 500-year schema. The rediscovery of Aristotelian philosophy, the work of Thomas Aquinas and the triumph of Scholasticism between the 12th and 14th centuries transformed the nature of Western Christianity, yet barely get a mention. The emergence of post-biblical patrisitic thought in the 2nd to the 5th centuries, including such giants as Irenaeus, Origen, Athanasius, Augustine and the Cappadocian Fathers, is absent from the picture. And although the conversion of Constantine, and Christianity’s toleration with the Edict of Milan of 313, is not exactly kosher from some Emerging perspectives, it is rather a difficult ‘hinge-point’ to ignore in the history of Christianity. Sadly, its dating is not easily divisible by 500, not even with a 20% error margin, so it gets left out of the picture. Of the global expansion of Christianity through missionary expansion between the 18th and 19th centuries, we hear nothing. Occasionally, we get a hint that Tickle herself is aware of the inconvenience of these significant developments, so she suggests other happenings such as these belong to settled periods between the great moments of change, but by then the flaws in the theory are all too apparent. If such settled periods contain developments which sow a seed for new crises, all well and good. But when it is far from obvious from the evidence that the crisis always breaks on a 500-year cycle, there is nothing plausible left by way of a theory.
So why does the book need this unlikely theory at all? The purpose of the climactic chapter of the book is to proclaim that we are now at one of these once-every-500-year moments: The Great Emergence. Her 20% error-margin allows Phyllis Tickle the scope to embrace just about any event of the 20th century, and even the 19th century, as an overture to what she has to say about the present. We get a helter-skelter through recent American church history (the Rest of the World tends to figure with rather less prominence). However, it is clear that this is ultimately a tract about the Emerging Church. At this point, the hyperbole gets out of hand. The footnotes to this chapter inform us that Doug Pagitt is ‘one of Emergent Christianity’s most influential and brilliant thinkers’. However, this is nothing compared to Brian McLaren, whose A Generous Orthodoxy is ‘an analog to Luther’s ninety-five theses’. With such giants among us, we are walking in a once-every-half-millennium moment. So hold onto your hats.
The publication of the book worries me, not because of the implausible nature of its view of history, but rather because of its strong links to the movement which it seeks to fete. History, when read free of a grand narrative, is a humbling thing. One realises that the concerns and battles which fill our days, though perhaps important, must in the end be set alongside the long list of persons, events and concerns from earlier times. It is nigh-on impossible to make a judgement on the significance of present events when set in the train of this long, long story. The Great Emergence is not so much a grand narrative as a grandiose narrative. It is futurology masquerading as history, forcing the latter into an unlikely and unsuitable corset of teleology. Of course, all historians betray as much about their own time and concerns as those which they narrate. Published, as it is, under the Emergent banner and feted by those of whom it speaks, the events surrounding the publication of this book are saying a lot about how the present leaders of the American Emerging Church see themselves. Like Phyllis Tickle, I have a great respect for these people; as indeed do I for the author’s standing as an eminent commentator on American Christianity. But amid the book’s hyperbole, which reduced me at times to a state somewhere between laughter and tears, am I alone in detecting more than a little self-importance? The brand of Emerging Christianity which Tickle describes began as a gentle protest in the face of an over-dominant, comfortable and formulaic Evangelicalism in America. If, as I fear, it may now be succumbing to the perennial hybris of Religious Movements That Have Become Significant, it is likely to find that Church History will take a slow, leisurely time in proving, with its ruthless inertia, how relatively insignificant most of us are in God’s wider scheme of things.
Posted on Tuesday, 7 October 2008 by Paul | Posted in emerging church,politics | 10 comments
Wisdom from Truth or Consequences
Whilst staying with Chris Webb, an old student of mine and now President of Renovaré, we were looking at a map of the USA in his office and I happened to notice that in New Mexico there was a town called Truth or Consequences. What a great address!
I was somewhat surprised, then, to be directed to a very interesting blog post by two residents of the very same town, discussing the likely impact of the current financial crisis on the values as lived out by poorer societies. They write:
When we built a world on top of one that was given to us and we thanked ourselves for it we parted ways with the natural world and we made gods of ourselves for the doing of it. What do we have to gain from this collapse? Only paradise and the rediscovery of our humanity. And perhaps wealth will finally move to the hands of those most capable of holding it, those who know how to live in the real world a world that teaches us through our ability to live in it that the health of the individual is dependent on the health of the whole.
Thanks to Gina Trapani at Lifehacker for the link.
Posted on Monday, 29 September 2008 by Paul | Posted in ecology,politics | Comments Off
