As ithappens, I actually find myself busier now I’ve taken up the reins again than I was when I let them slip, but Graft Publications are helping out this time, so the burden (a very pleasurable one) will be shared.
The Network owes a debt of gratitude to Antony Freeman, who was persuaded by silken tongues on your steering committee to be guest-editor of one edition, and then strong-armed into producing another three. Since this was on top of his main job as editor of the hugely successful Journal of Consciousness Studies, he is to be thanked by all of us for the time and effort he has dedicated to the Network.
Our facelift Although Anthony changed the mix of contents, he did not change the form of the magazine. But the time does seem ripe for a change now. We hope you will like what we have done to it. Fewer long, academic articles and more short, popular pieces will be the hallmark for a while.
Above all. we aim to produce a magazine which is not so much a house-mag for Network members but a good, stimulating read for those in and outside the churches who are looking for a modem, rational and imaginative faith-structure or world view, one which dispenses with supernatural powers, dogmas, hierarchies and transcendent gods and devils.
Do you know someone ~ a relative or friend, perhaps - who might be helped, amused, stimulated, enthused or enfuriated by what we are doing? Why not take an extra copy of the magazine and pass it on? To put ourselves on a sound financial footing without pushing up the Network sub, we need to sell 1000 copies at around £2. Can you help-— if you think the magazine is worth it?
POSTSCRIPTS Belief and faith Our indefatigable Network Secretary Ronald Pearse took James Wood to task for writing in the London Review of Books that Sea of Faith priests are “merely rationalists who have lost their faith”. Not so, said our Ronald. “I distinguish between belief and faith. Belief implies intellectual acceptance of concepts. Faith suggests ‘a trusting outlook — trusting, for example, that we can create meaning and purpose in life. The story of Jesus, interpreted so variously in different ages and cultures, continues to provide us with a good vehicle for doing this. It offers a spirituality without contracts and with only its own rewards.” Taking leave of Mystic Meg Thinkers from Matthew Arnold to Don Cupitt — not to mention Meister Eckhart — may have helped us take leave of God for God’s sake, but it isn’t any longer God who is making the running in the old magicand-mystery stakes. At the fag-end of the second Christian millennium, his place has been taken by an astonishing motley of New Age (but often age-old) mysticisms, feeding on the credulity of the naive, the under-educated and the wilfully blind.
Richard Dawkins hit out in last year’s Dimbleby lecture at TV programmes like The X-Files, in which the rational regularly loses out to the supernatural. But The XFiles is mere fiction.
It has been followed by a flood of programmes, magazine articles even new magazines — which deal in “true tales of the supernatural”. The appetite for the tawdry stuff seems insatiable.
So-called para-normal phenomena, astrology, spirit-channelling, reflexology, aromatherapy, ghost-busting, communication with aliens, mind-reading, automatic writing, exorcism, exotic varieties of reincarnation and the whole rag-bag of socalled “spiritual” therapies and transcendental mysticisms: it’s all very big business, great for circulation and ratings.
Much of it may be no dafter and no less dangerous than dogmatic mainline religion with its miracles, divine revelations and promises of eternal life, but its devaluation of reason and vulgarisation of imagination is ultimately dehumanising, degrading and reactionary. I suppose that will bring angry letters from SoF paranormalists, sincere believers in hidden energies and nonrealist Wiccans, and if it does, I'll gladly print them. But I’d also like to hear from those who want SoF to take leave of fringe as well as mainstream *. ‘6ecultism and stand for the wholly human spirit rather than the fraudulent holy spirits our magicians and divines have conjured up.
Nobody notices Did you see the Royal National Theatre production of Caryl Churchill’s play Light Shining in Buckinghamshire? If not, you've almost certainly missed your chance: its national tour ends (at Kendal) in mid-March.
It’s that rare thing, a play about radical religious ideas. It’s set in the revolutionary years of the English civil war, the 1640s, when Levellers and Ranters dreamt of a new earth and a new heaven and tried to graft both on to Cromwell’s republic.
Watching and enjoying it at the Cottesloe Theatre on the South Bank, I was reminded once again that many of the ideas we tend to think of as new and radical today were expressed clearly and powerfully by ordinary men and women three and a half centuries ago. God, they said, was in all things. He was Nature, Freedom, Reason. Heaven is here on earth. For them, the long-awaited second coming of Christ was a political and social liberation rather than a divine personal appearance.
When their revolution is crushed, Caryl Churchill’s characters ask why it is that Christ failed to arrive on cue. “I think what happened”, says one, “was, Jesus Christ did come and nobody noticed. It was time but we somehow missed it.” Non-theocratic non-socialism I welcome the following words of Chris Bryant, Chair of the Christian Socialist Movement, writing in Fabian Review: “The Christian Socialist Movement has never thought that the Labour Party should be a Christian party. Nor does it wish to create a “Christian Britain” ruled by a clerical mandate, nor even a New Jerusalem in which we all are required by law to abide by supposedly Christian values. Such a theocracy would be an extraordinary instance of arrogance, for we live in a world of many faiths and none. It is only by accepting the multicultural reality of our secular world that Britain can hope to prosper.” Kosher nonrealism Gail Vine’s article on the Sea of Faith Network in The Times Education Supplement had some interesting reflections on nonrealist Judaism, citing Rabbi Professor Dan Cohn-Sherbock, who teaches at the University of Kent and is visiting professor at the University of Wales and Middlesex University. Cohn-Sherbock spoke of Reconstructionist Judaism, founded in the USA in the 1930s by Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan. “It is now a big move- ment, there is nothing embarrassing about it, it is bona fide Judaism, sort of kosher.
Its followers go to the synagogue, wear prayer shawls, yarmulke, celebrate all the festivals — you would never know they don’t actually believe in God”.
More recently, another nonrealist movement has sprung up within Judaism under the leadership of Reform Rabbi Sherwin Wine. “He is also a non-supernaturalist,” says Cohn-Sherbock, “but he felt reconstructionism was misguided in retaining the traditional liturgy’. In Wine’s synagogue in Detroit, the Jewish festivals-are still celebrated but the word “God” is not used. “This is arguably more consistent. You know what is going on.” But both versions of nonrealism find acceptance in the Jewish community, which has not marginalised its radicals as Christianity has done.
Those godless vicars again Vine’s article also carried a good quote from Murdoch (no, not Rupert: Iris). “I am not a believer in the sense of believing in God the Father or Jesus Christ as divine, but I believe that religion is terribly important in people’s lives because it tries to look at the world not veiled by the obsessions, fears and egoism of everyday life. Various priests now tell me that this is what they believe. If only they work fast enough, Christianity can become like Buddhism, before people forget it entirely.” Animal and Swampy As I add these postscripts, the papers are full of the exploits of Animal, Swampy and their fellow-moles who tunnelled under a motorway construction site, chained themselves to blocks of concrete, and ensured that green opposition to continuing destruction of the countryside made the front page of every newspaper and got top billing on every radio and TV news bulletin. How right the Daily Telegraph was to comment that their actions ran completely counter to common sense! But thank God Animal and Swampy had the guts to tise above the common sense of the rest of us.
I have no idea whether this particular group of roadies were anarchists or Earth-Quakers or libertarian humanists or panentheist pagans. But they did their bit towards creating human values. Of such is the republic of heaven.
Seafarer