Well, clearly the earth didn’t move for all of you...
Our postbag (both for publication and for private consumption) shows that some of you like our new look and some of you don’t - or, more accurately, that some of you love it and some of you loathe it.
Which is only to be expected. We are a diverse lot in Sea of Faith.
A big thankyou though to all who took the trouble to write and give us your views. You the members own this magazine, and your voice does count. We hope you'll go on telling us what you think, what you want more of - and less of.
Two things to remember, though, when you find yourself in hearty disagreement with what you read. First, every article in the magazine - including “editorials” and Seafarer’s ramblings - puts a personal view. Nothing in the magazine has the status of “official policy”! So please don’t do a Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells and reach for the cancellation button every time someone writes something which makes you see red! Instead, share your own view with us and our readers. The more contributions, the merrier.
Art attacks One or two readers were offended by the main picture we used to illustrate Dan Cohn-Sherbok’s article “Taking Leave of Jesus” (our choice, of course, not Dan’s). It showed a hippy Jesus, arms tattooed, a joint in his lips, giving the peace sign.
Similarly startling, provocative and challenging pictures illustrate our new booklet Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up. To be sure, these are not the conventional portraits, sanctified by the ages, of the respectably saintly young man invented by the medieval masters - glum, humourless, unsexed. But is that the only Jesus we can imagine?
Can we not make room for a hippy Jesus, a revolutionary Jesus, a witty one-liner Jesus, a black Jesus, a gay Jesus, a feminine Jesus, an angry Jesus, a tempted Jesus? If not, we can’t make room for a multi-faceted Jesus who is relevant to all sorts and conditions of twenty-first century men, women and young people.
Our picture was meant to provoke, but not to offend. That’s a thin line to tread. But we can’t avoid treading it if we are to explore the boundaries of our faith - which is what we are about. e e e e Satan’s googly So now we know. Former South African cricket captain, born-again Christian and star of the international match-fixing scandal Hansie Cronje, tells us that he accepted money from bookmakers - because Satan told him to.
This provoked some questions on our SoF email list: What would be the legal implications in a court of law if a defendant pleaded guilty to driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs on Satan’s instructions? Who would be the guilty party, the driver or the Devil himself?
Presumably Mr Cronje imagines Satan to be an objectively real personality, one on to whom the blame can be shifted. Perhaps he expects the International Cricketing Board, which is investigating the affair, to find Satan guilty and ban him from the game...
But Seafarer recognises a certain consistency in Mr Cronje’s position. Since he believes in a real God, why not a real Satan? This is more logical than believing in an imaginary, metaphorical, nonreal Satan, a symbol but no more than a symbol of evil, while insisting that the God in the opposite corner must be a real, objective being.
Why has liberal Christianity found it so easy to believe in a nonreal Devil, and so hard to recognise a nonreal God?
Light relief Madeleine Bunting in the Guardian was one of the few columnists who didn’t go overboard about Tate Modern, the new art gallery which has opened in the transformed spaces of the old Bankside power station on the south bank of the Thames, a stone’s throw from Shakespeare's Globe, and a two-minute pilgrimage from the site of Chaucer’s Tabard Inn.
She worried that our new-found awe and wonder for modern culture - 75,000 people visited the gallery on Bank Holiday Monday - may hide a decline in public interest in and concern for the big issues. “We are no longer interested in great debates. We want a therapeutic culture in an ideology-free zone.” Duchamp’s celebrated urinal has become a preferred icon of our times, displacing the old icons of both political and religion.
But I learnt something about that urinal on my Bankside trip. Duchamp, remember, acquired an ordinary common-or-garden ceramic urinal and submitted it as a work of art under the title “Fountain”. It was much admired. But the urinal/fountain at Tate Modern is not Duchamp’s original: it is a copy - the original having been lost or destroyed.
So (a) was the original urinal a work of art (because it was accepted as such by a reputable gallery), and (b) can a copy be a work of art, and if so, is every Gentlemen’s wc an art gallery?