In ze fifz and final fas of ze grat reform, ze kompletly unesesary o kan be dropt from vords kontaning ou, and similar changes wud of kors be aplid to al ozer kombinatons of leters.
AI zis vil giv us a reli sensibl riten sty! and we shud hav no trubl or dificultis in persading evrivun to understand ek ozer.
And Se of Faz magazin shud go from strengz to strengz, making its ovn spesal kontributon to geting rid of al zos ugly foren vords. Long liv Englis, ze langag of Saksper, Kaser and ze Azorisd Verson of ze Bibl! [Not: an atempt by ze Komison to otlav ze vord “non” vas vetod by yor Stering Komite on ze grond zat zis vud eliminat al distinksons betven relists and non-relists. “Viv la diferans!” as zey say in Urop.] POSTSCRIPTS Postscripts by Seafarer Lead in my pencils Years ago I was told that I was made of slugs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails. 1 am now informed that I contain 10 gallons of water, enough fat to make seven bars of soap, enough phosphorous to tip 2,200 matches, carbon to fill 9,000 lead pencils, iron to make a 3cm nail, and lime sufficient to whitewash a hen-coop.
This I learn from a lively book called Spiritualty in Focus, published by Heinemann (£7.99) as an RE teaching aid “to help upper secondary students become aware of the wide range of perspectives and experiences in the world today so that they can develop their own views and insights”.
Starting with a section on Humanism (written with wonderful clarity and sensitivity by John White), it summarises the essentials of Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism and other perspectives such as Native American, Australian and African spirituality, ending with Gaia Consciousness.
Without banging the drum of “religious faith as a human creation”, this splendidly illustrated work vividly depicts the breadth of creative imagination with which humanity has pursued its search for value and “the spiritual”, the life and essence of what we are. [ remember reading somewhere else that I also have as many brain cells as there are trees in the world, and as many connections between the cells as there are leaves on all those trees. All that in a grey blob no bigger than a bath sponge.
Still grinning I am taken to task by SoFer W.J.
Milne [Postbag, page 25] for express- ing delight at the May Day landslide.
Dare | say that my delight was occasioned less by Labour’s victory than by the Tories’ crushing defeat. I cannot imagine that anyone concerned with refashioning a framework of human values (which is what the Network must be about) would have been anything but dismayed had the greediest, sleaziest, most cynical and least compassionate Government in living memory been returned to power.
I hope the Network will resist the temptation to position itself on Parnassus, above the common fray (even a Parnassus exemplified by the genial Matthew Parris, an ex-Tory MP turned columnist on the Top People’s paper). I don’t mean, of course, that SoF should ever owe allegiance to a political party or ideology. But our exploration of human values in a wholly human world will never be more than superficial so long as we confine it to the personal and fight shy of the social (which, inevitably, is also the political). New Labour doesn’t equate with New Promised Land, but it does revive hopes which had dimmed over the last two decades.
So I’m not going to wipe that grin off my face just yet.
Republican peacemaker A number of readers have also complained at the space given by this magazine to Robin Percival, a Quaker supporter of the Irish Republican cause, who has chosen to make his own contribution to peace and justice from within the Republican movement. A.W. Alger writes to say he cannot imagine what relevance this has to what the Network is all about.
He couldn’t bring himself to touch the magazine for a week.
But it is easy to cry peace among the peaceful, justice among the just (if you can find them). It takes courage and commitment to stand for non-violence in the heart of violence, and there is some evidence, in the: shape of the current cease-fire, that Republican peace-makers have made some headway with their comrades.
We are not required to endorse Robin’s political judgment, but we might recognise and salute his courage. And we would like to hear from more SoFers for whom human values are not just a theoretical preoccupation but the stuff of practical decision-making on the tough battleground of the real world.
Cover story On top of all this comes Daphne Hampson’s’ complaint (at a Conference workshop) about the cover of our Summer issue, which featured a review of her latest book under the heading “And Woman Created God”. This, she says, implied that she shares SoF’s view that God is a human creation.
But of course no such meaning was intended or implied. The heading reflected SoF’s viewpoint, not Daphne’s. This was abundantly clear to anyone who read Aileen La Tourette’s thoughtful and _ positive review. The heading was intended to suggest, a little mischievously (but mischief isn’t always appreciated), that maybe feminist theologians tend to create God in their own feminist image, just as men (as Daphne is not slow to tell us) have always created him in theirs. I am very sorry indeed that Daphne found it offensive.
From Blackpool with love Everyone who has been delighted by Anne Ashworth’s poetry workshops at SoF conferences will know they are in for a treat with her new book, The Girl Who Runs Backwards. An autobiographical medley of prose and poetry, it runs a sharp, humorous and critical eye over her first twenty-five years of © life in Blackpool, noted for its tower, its rock, and “fresh air and fun”.
She starts with an arresting quotation from Mary Warnock: “For an autobiography...to work, it is not necessary that its author should have led an ‘important or an ‘interesting’ life, judged by the standards imported from politics or social history, or any of the sciences. What it needs is the search for truth, through memory and the interpreting imagination... Because human beings are bound together by sympathy, the reflection in the glass is necessarily not of one person only.
The common, the shared and the general is to be found in the particular, if the particular is truthfully described, and with imagination. To discover such a common truth is an intrinsic good.” It is precisely the quality of her “Interpreting imagination”, working on memory in a search for truth, which makes Anne’s book such a very good read. Her self-discovery as writer prompts our own as reader. It is fiercely intelligent, passionate — and even, dare | say it, mischievous. A nicely produced 190page paperback at £8.50 from Pentland, ISBN 1-85821-490-4.
Just imagine!
Talking of imagination, there seems to be a lot of it about.
There’s the London SoF Groups’ conference on “Religion and the Creative Imagination” at Birkbeck College on November 1, with Don Cupitt, Jude Bullock and Mary Charles Murray (places still available: details, 4° Oliver Road, New Malden, KT3 3UA), to be followed by one at Dartington, Devon, on “Religion and Imagination”, led by Donald Reeves of St. James, vee s ‘Lost Person’s Area’, Pasadena, California, 1963 photo: Elliott Erwitt Piccadilly, February 13-15 (phone 0171 734 4511 for details).
The original ET I continue to despair, however, at the follies into which imagination untempered by reason can lead the gullible. The deluge of books, articles and television programmes on the irrational, the paranormal and the supernatural surely poses as serious a threat to human responsibility as the old fundamentalisms of bible and church. A recent TV poll of 100,000 viewers of one such programme found that 92% profess to believe in “alien” visitation from outer space, and more than half in “alien abduction”!