Gordon Cole, Swift’s Orchard, Duck Street, Tisbury, Wilts. SP3 6LJ POSTSCRIPTS Postscripts by Seafarer ‘Is nothing sacred?’ Congratulations to the London SoF group on its November 7 open conference on “Is Nothing Sacred?
Myth, Meaning and Sprituality”, with Karen Armstrong, Don Cupitt and David Hart. I am perforce writing this a few days before it happens, but I know it has been fully booked for weeks, and must be a resounding success.
It shows what an imaginative and energetic local SoF group can do. London found a stimulating theme, expressed in a provocative title, went for first-class speakers who would be a draw, and were not afraid to publicise the event widely.
No bashfulness here about “promoting religious faith as a human creation”!
Plans are afoot for greater local group participation in next year’s annual conference, the theme of which (subject to confirmation) is likely to be “What is religion for?” What contribution can your local group make?
Sea in Oz Duncan Park writes to tell us that the Australian SoF Network is now up and running, thanks to the initiative of Greg Spearitt (from the well-established New Zealand Network) and Allison Cotes, a writer and broadcaster who was a guest at our own Sheffield conference. Allison has been religious affairs correspondent for the Queensland Mercury and has many Oz contacts.
Duncan himself was one of the wizards of Oz, being in Brisbane to assist at the birth. As I write, Duncan and our own Patti Whaley are helping with the organisation of SoF seminars in Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, and with the first Australian national conference early in the new year. Don Cupitt will participate via live BT video-link.
Duncan signs off: “Any contacts in Oz or brilliant ideas for making Sea of Faith the state religion, let me know”. He can be found, when not down under, at 1 Stratford House, Tenterden Drive, London NW4 1EB.
Onward Christian Socialists...
Look out for a new journal next year from the Christian Socialist Movement. It will be called Political Theology and_ is the brainchild of Graeme Smith, who will be its executive editor, and Alison Webster, its assistant editor. It aims to “bring together theology, political theory and cultural studies to analyse the complex and _ everchanging landscape of British politics”. Its strength and uniqueness, say the editors, “will lie in its ability to bring together party-political practitioners with philosophers, theologians and ethicists in mutual creative dialogue.” When the journal was first mooted a year ago the editors could write of “a new mood of optimism, participation and engagement with things political in our culture at large, including within the Christian/theological community”.
Some might fear that the optimism engendered by a new Government led by Christian Socialists may already be on the wane. But the engagement the journal seeks is necessary, and we wish it every success. Among contributors to the first issue, due in the spring, are likely to be Don Cupitt and the editor of Sea of Faith magazine.
Critical study And while I’m plugging journals, a mention of another newcomer. The Journal for the Critical Study of Religion, Ethics and Society “seeks to promote a broadly humanistic understanding of human culture” and “exists to publish articles in any area of religious studies, or studies of society and culture which have a bearing on the understanding of religion”. This one is published by the Centre for Inquiry at Westminster College, Oxford, and Council members include Robert Ashby of the BHA.
Religion meets humanism Which brings me to news of another project. Plans are hatching for a gathering of international “religious humanist” organisations some time in the year 2000. Sea of Faith UK is represented on the planning group by Patti Whaley, and the convenor is the editor of Sea of Faith. magazine. John Klopacz, our man in the USA, has also agreed to serve, and Friends of Religious Humanism in New York is among the organisations invited to participate. “Religious humanism” is for some a contradiction in terms.
Many humanists dislike it for its acceptance of religion, and many religious people dislike it for its acceptance of humanism. In the past, religious humanism has often been a transit camp for those whose spiritual journey has taken them from religious belief and practice to a secular life-stance.
Some organisations which began with a religious humanist position - like the South Place Ethical Society - have gradually abandoned religion and become entirely secular. Until recently, religious humanism had begun to look like a relic of past controversies, but postmodern theology and the Sea of Faith movement, with its stress on religious faith as a human creation, have put it back on the map.
There remains a place for religious language and religious commitment in a world-view we now acknowledge to be wholly human, and that’s what the conference will discuss. Watch this space.
POSTSCRIPTS Oldie-time religion One magazine which won’t want to be represented is Richard Ingram’s The Oldie, which has been railing against “modernists with bright new ideas” in the Church, including clerics talking “a load of old guff” about “gnostic-inspired Creation Spirituality”, and bishops who invite people to teach “feminist, creation, political and liberation theology” in their diocese. The Oldie quotes with approval a complaint by a Catholic woman relating “the distress I felt at last year’s Easter vigil because of the overtly sexual and violent way in which the priest had plunged the Pascal candle into the holy water”. There is even a priest, the magazine shudders, “who is a member of the Sea of Faith (sic), a group which holds that God is a human construct”.
Oldies are warned that things are now so bad that “the only unacceptable heresy is orthodoxy”.
Oldies have one consolation, however. They won’t have to put up with all this new-fangled stuff for long...
Happy 100th If you want to give an oldie apoplexy you could try sending them Movement, the SCM journal _ which has just celebrated its 100th issue in fine style with a retrospective drawing on its 26 years of radical, experimental Christian journalism. Sample quote: “Once there was a person who came from heaven and lived amongst us. That person touched the sick, said a lot of meaningful things and enraged those in power. That person died at the hands of those who persecuted them for so long, went to heaven and within a year a movement of devoted followers rose up, and signs and wonders followed... But enough about Princess Diana.” Subscription details: 22 Dowanside Road, Hillhead, Glasgow G12 9DA.
Post-postmodernists?
This past year saw the death of Jean-Francois Lyotard, who could be seen as France’s Don Cupitt. His hugely influential 1979 book The Postmodern Condition first floated all those ideas which have since become so familiar: the “grand narratives” of modern industrial society are now seen as no more than language games, there is no possibility of objective truth, religious faiths are language games like the rest, as is scientific enquiry and politics...
Meanwhile, the other guru of French postmodernism, Jacques Derrida, is still (like Cupitt) turning out new books, each one (just like Cupitt’s) marking an unexpected change of direction. Derrida has recently turned his hand to theology (where postmodernism might be said to have been invented by the “Death of God” school), but his most recent book is a fascinating study of The Politics of Friendship (Verso, £16). Why do we make friends: for them or for us? Why do we love: for our beloved or for ourselves?
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the later works of Lyotard, Derrida and Cupitt is that all seem to be pushing beyond 1970s-90s postmodernism, reaching for something not yet articulated: perhaps an early twentyfirstcentury post-postmodernism still awaiting definition. Can we keep up with it all?
Holy Smoke From time to time a self-proclaimed religious person comes out with some pious reflection that has the effect of driving me into the to-hellwith-all-religion militant-atheist camp. Like Libby Purves, in her new book Holy Smoke, where she sings the praises of the Rev. Stephen Pullan, vicar of Sundon, who wrote in his parish magazine that 95 per cent of his parishioners “live out their sordid little lives without any reference to God”. Purves comments: “He became my Christian pin-up... I looked up ‘sordid’ and its definitions were very satisfying in this context — ‘base, mean, ignoble, coarse, squalid, selfish and influenced only by mercenary considerations’. Well, what else is modern life, witinout worship, eh?... By and large, life without any religion comes, pretty quickly, to meet all the conditions of that dictionary definition of ‘sordid’.” In contrast to this base, mean, ignoble, coarse, squalid, arrogant faith, I quote from the “Thought for the Day” by Richard Holloway, Bishop of Edinburgh, on October 4: “For many of us it is not easy to believe in anything. If only the meaning of things could be made more obvious; if only the logic of faith was worked out to an inescapable conclusion; then we might have faith. But it is never like that. There is a yearning, unresolved quality to faith. In my own case, I do not so much possess faith as long for it, am haunted by its possibility...” Which honest-to-God uncertainty must seem pretty sordid to the worshipful Ms Purves.
Letter from Canada We get more letters than we can answer, but I’ve just had one from G Graham-Cumming of Vancouver.
He tells me he is 92, “blurred of vision and hard of hearing, confined to a wheelchair and with only limited use of my hands and arms Earthworks: a tractor, some seeds and the human imagination. Aerial photo of a farmer's field near Lincoln, Nebraska from an old neck injury, but I have this joyous sense of security and deep inner tranquility I feel I must report to someone. Time was when I directed the medical and health services of Hong Kong, presided over the deliberations of the World Health Organization, planned and co-ordinated the federal medical services of Canada - but those days are gone. So be it!” Now he describes himself as “a new strand seeking to knit into the Sea of Faith Network”. Every — stitch counts.