Contents
Editorial
- Sacrifice
Articles
- Religion and Atheism: Cupitt Bridges the Divide, Clem Cook
- Rethinking Redemption, Dominic Kirkham
- A Man of Sorrows, Ben Whitney
- Sacrifice, Dinah Livingstone
Poetry
- Dr Brighton, Kathryn Southworth
- Nurses, Cicely Herbert
Reviews
- Margaret Connolly reviews Jesus Followers in the Roman Empire by Paul B. Duff
- David Boulton reviews Seen and Unseen by Peter Jarman
- Danielle Hope reviews Someone Was Here by Kathryn Southworth
- David Paterson reviews Living With The Gods by Neil MacGregor
Regulars and Occasionals
- Letters to the Editor
- Revisiting: Penny Mawdsley revisits The Eve of St Agnes by John Keats
- As I Please: John Pearson Revisits Berlin
Editorial: Sacrifice
This Sofia begins with Clem Cook’s article on Don Cupitt. Clem was surprised there was no Cupitt chapter in the recently published book Religion and Atheism: Beyond the Divide. His article suggests what might have been in it. A BBC Radio 4 programme called Sea of Faith, presented by Giles Fraser, will be broadcasting Don Cupitt himself at 11am on Friday March 15th.
The title of this Sofia is ‘Sacrifice’ and we have four pieces relating to the theme in different ways. Dominic Kirkham unpicks the idea of ‘original sin’ needing a sacrifice to atone for it. In ‘A Man of Sorrows’ Ben Whitney reflects on a dramatised version of Handel’s Messiah which he attended recently. There is another ‘thinkpiece’ by your Editor, this time on human and animal sacrifice. Kathryn Southworth’s poem ‘Dr Brighton’ features the hospital for Indian and Gurkha soldiers, 1.5 million of whom fought with the British forces in the First World War.
A second hospital poem, ‘Nurses’ by Cicely Herbert, written when she spent three months in hospital after a serious road accident in Camden Town, has a comic, delightfully honest ending. Penny Mawdsley ‘revisits’ and revels in Keats’ Eve of St Agnes. She mentions ‘two happy coincidences’: the evening before her copy deadline, 20th January, was indeed St Agnes’ Eve, and the poem itself was written in 1819, so this year is its bicentenary.
Sofia also has its usual Letters to the Editor and Reviews and John Pearson’s As I Please column this time is about a recent trip to Berlin, recalling Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Strange Meeting’: ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend.’
Dinah Livingstone
Letters to the Editor
Sofia 130
In his intriguing essay (‘Hail, Full of Grace’ in Sofia 130) Dominic Kirkham suggested that women in the Ancient Near East ruled equally alongside men until the rise of civilisation, particular literacy, in the Bronze Age. Dominic wrote that in the second millennium BCE, ‘the patriarchal societies of male domination and aggression’ led to the ‘denigration of femininity’ and the emergence of belief in a ‘supreme and solitary male god’. I would like to make two points: first, the interpretation of the inscriptions on pottery found at Kuntillet Arud showing Asherah as Yahweh’s consort is not shared by everyone. Second, the first nine chapters of the Old Testament Book of Proverbs (probably dating from the second century BCE) describe Wisdom as female and as having been with Yahweh from the beginning of time – it is difficult to match this with Dominic’s view of men of this period as claiming wisdom and literacy to be exclusively their own. Having said all that, I really enjoyed the essay.
James Priestman, London
‘The greatest [grace]… is love. A shortfall in love… matters most. Just because we fail to get there and may feel we cannot do so without supernatural aid, that does not mean there is any supernatural aid available. I don’t think there is. There remains natural grace, intermittent and perishable as it may be… Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it and is a powerful incentive not to give up. When it comes, it feels like a gift and a joy.’ Precisely! And that potential for grace is why despite the self-centred proclivity programmed into us by aeons of the struggle for survival we can rise above our lower nature and in some measure transform our lives. I am grateful for Dinah’s article Grace, and for the insight to which it pointed me – and for the serious and genuine re-evaluation it urged upon a rather conservative minister with whom I shared the concept of non-supernatural grace.
Tom Hall, USA
I’m grateful for the generally supportive tone of David Lambourn’s letter (130, Dec 2018) in response to Ben Whitney’s review (128, June 2018) of my book The Christian Middle Way. If readers engage with the book in the way that David recommends – namely, as a stimulus for nudging them into asking new questions about previously settled beliefs – I will be well content. There were also two fairly serious misunderstandings in the review. I try to make it quite clear that I am not interested in what Jesus ‘actually’ said at all. I do treat all the gospels as offering potential sources for understanding the archetypal construction that has emerged in the accepted stories of the Christian tradition. The figure of Jesus is significant for us, not because of what he did or did not ‘actually’ do, but because of the practical importance of the stories told about him as a source of archetypal inspiration or as a practical model. The other misunderstanding involves a failure to recognise the very basic distinction between atheism and agnosticism. I was hoping for a bit more openness to less familiar kinds of arguments in SOF.
Robert M. Ellis