Contents
Articles
- Let's Have a God Who Laughs!, David Bryant
- An Actor's Dream, Jayson Robbins
- Is There Room for a Sliver of Reality?, Chris Gaal
- Hold Me, Daddy!, Anne Ashworth
- Dual Agenda, Elizabeth Reid
- My Faith Today, Mike Smith
Reviews
- Solar Ethics, Anthony Freeman
Poetry
- The Kibeho Carnage, Ifeatu Okoye
Editorial
EDITORIAL n important task of SoF magazine is to provide members of the network with material to help in your own ‘exploring and promoting of religious faith as a human creation’. One type of contribution for which we have been particularly asked is the personal testimony of other members, both how they have come to their present state of un/belief and how they would choose to express it. The article from Mike Smith fills precisely this slot. [The promised piece from Nicholas Smith has been held over to the next issue. ] Another constant request is for material suitable for use in worship by those who embrace a ‘Sea of Faith’ position.
Elizabeth Reid’s response to Don’s ‘Dual Agenda’ challenge takes us into this sensitive area and she offers possible rewordings of two familiar texts. Anne Ashworth comes at the issue from a different perspective — pointing out the harm which hymns in particular have done in the past — but she also ends on a more positive note.
The thoughtful essay by Chris Gaal also takes up an issue raised at the 1995 Conference — and suggests that a dogmatic non-realism is as harmful to reasonable faith as more traditional forms of dogmatism. This is a longer than usual article for this magazine, but the centrality of the subject, and the clarity of the argument, should make it both useful and accessible to readers.
I have been asking for some time for contributions of a visual rather than verbal kind. The delightful cartoon on the front cover comes courtesy of the Sheffield Telegraph, and the editor has kindly given permission for us to use further material from the same source. This particular quartet of pictures seems to me to sum up very neatly the interplay between language and ethics/theology to which Don constantly draws our attention.
Pictures and words come together in the work of Ifeatu Okoye, a Nigerian postgraduate engineer, artist and poet who is currently studying at Loughborough University. His work is largely a commentary upon what he himself calls ‘a terrorised and tormented era’, and he provides what David Hart has termed ‘a realistic and sensitive thermometer on our fevered times’. Please encourage other artists and illustrators to offer their work to the magazine.