The author proposes a five-point framework for judging the ethics of protest and pressure tactics, separately from their aims. It asks about legitimate aims and targets, fair and proportionate tactics, consequences, and who the campaigners...
Final report to the 2003 AGM arguing that churches should allow more doctrinal diversity, drawing on a survey of heresy cases since 1900, theological arguments and the symbolic nature of religious language.
In our November session, we explored developing an ethical critique of ‘Pressure tactics’. This topic was introduced by Patti Whaley.
The author describes how music, especially Bach, Brahms and Schubert, has come to fill the place God once occupied. She sets out how music can hold displaced meaning: release from self, a different sense of...
Patti Whaley revisits Alasdair Gray’s Five Letters from an Eastern Empire, a fable of a poet manipulated by a totalitarian state, and reflects on how it reads against modern governments’ deceptions.
Patti Whaley examines what we really want when we want an afterlife, from reunion and justice to explanation, meaning and eternity, and what these wishes show about how to live.
Patti Whaley describes herself as ‘post-non-realist’: she plays the organ in an Anglican church for the music, works on inequality and climate change through ActionAid, and values SOF for freeing her from hankering after a...
Patti Whaley reviews Colm Tóibín’s novella The Testament of Mary, told in Mary’s voice, which questions the gospel account and the idea of redemption; she reads Mary’s ambivalence as the gap between lived experience and...
Patti Whaley reviews John Shelby Spong’s Jesus for the Non-Religious. She finds his account of the Gospels as myth clear but inconsistent, and his positive portrait of Jesus shaped by Spong’s concerns and silent on...
Patti Whaley reviews Ian McEwan’s Saturday, a day in the life of a London surgeon, finding in it a Sea of Faith-like wonder at ordinary life and consciousness.
