Held in Common

Alone, Suburban and Sorted

Richard Beck has a most interesting series of posts on suburban living here. Granted, it’s written from a North American perspective, but he’s very incisive and creative in his thinking. Here’s a taster, but all the posts are worth reading…

Specifically, I want to highlight one major facet of contemporary life in America: We rarely encounter difference in any meaningful way. For two reasons noted thus far. First, we are alone. Our civic disengagement, particularly our lack of bridging connections, gives us fewer opportunities to encounter people who are different from us. Second, we are sorted. The migration patterns of Americans over the last 30 years have sorted us into communities of like-mindedness. Thus, even if I do mix with people in my community they are likely to be people very much like myself. People who share my voting preferences, my religious beliefs, and my skin color. Again, we fail to encounter difference in these homogeneous communities.

My concern with these trends is that we rarely get to practice the skills of welcome, debate, listening, inclusion and hospitality. We begin to find difference shocking, deviant, weird and effortful to live with. Worse, as the research on group polarization showed us, separated from difference we grow more extreme in our views, demonizing difference rather than listening and learning to make room for strangers.

Isn’t church (ideally, at least) just the antidote to this kind of fragmentation? There we may (if we are fortunate, and if the church hosts this possibility): connection, welcome, debate, listening, inclusion, hospitality and difference. And, as Beck suggests, these values promote the very opposite of extremism.

Secular fundamentalism

There’s a really intelligent article by John Gray in the Guardian here on atheist crusaders (Dawkins, Dennett, Grayling).

Interesting that a bastion of Western Liberalism should more and more be carrying articles like this…

Church Alive Launch

We had a brilliant launch to Church Alive today. Lively music, good presentations by Seb and Alan. An excellent meal in church with regulars and new people alike.

I feel really positive and heartened. We are asking for an increase of 22% in planned giving, and for more resourcing in terms of people, energies and time. And during a recession! But I have every reason to believe that Christ Church people will step up to the mark.

If by any chance you missed today, here are the documents we’re sending out to people…

Download Cover letter

Download Church Alive brochure

Download Financial pledge form

Watch out for the downdraught!

Thanks to Jan C for this insight…!

“Why is church a bit like a helicopter?

Because, if you get too close, you’ll get hit by the rotas!!”

“Here endeth the rant…”

A Thinking Reed’s post on theological pet peeves is short, to the point and telling:

When Christian writers do one or both of the following:

1. Posit a simplistic dichotomy between “Hebrew” (or “biblical”) and “Greek” thought. These days the former is invariably portrayed as earthy, holistic, and life-affirming, while the latter is otherworldly, dualistic, and sees matter as evil. (As an aside, I often wonder what Jews think when Christians purport to define “Hebrew” thinking. Bonus question: was Maimonides a “Hebrew” or “Greek” thinker?)

2. Going on ad nauseum about how God cannot be contained in “propositions” and how “propositional truth” and “reason” are irrelevant to the life of faith, which is a dynamic, life-changing relationship that, in some way I can’t fathom, doesn’t involve having beliefs with any specifiable content or truth conditions.

Here endeth the rant.

Well, that would be me, in both cases. I have said both, in sermons and elsewhere. And I stand by them too. So what’s he saying? Probably, that you can push any good idea too far, and turn a insight into a caricature of an insight.

Your own theological pet peeves, anyone?

Mercy Ships (2)

From Wikipedia

As promised, here’s a post by Kevin D on Mercy Ships…

Mercy Ships was founded in 1978 by Don and Deyon Stephens. It was an amazing journey for them when the idea of doing “something different” came to their minds. Oh boy… they certainly did do something different! They went out and bought an 11,701 tonne ship which 4 years later became a floating hospital named Anastasis. THAT was the start of an even more adventurous journey across the entire world.

And here we are today, 31 years later. Mercy Ships is the proud owner of the Africa Mercy, officially today’s largest non-governmental hospital ship in the world. Africa Mercy boats 6 operating theatres and can have up to 78 patients on board at any moment. That’s in addition to a crew of almost 500 volunteers who are on the ship at any given time, such as today when you’re reading this!

Our mission is very simple, yet so powerful and meaningful: “Bringing hope and healing to a world in need, following the steps of Jesus”. We reach out to people by sailing the oceans of this world, going to the poorest of the poorest countries, taking hope to people through medical care. These people had lost all hope of ever being helped until Mercy Ships, a gigantic of the oceans, came to their very doorstep and invited them on board. Same as with Jesus’ calling and invitation to follow him, Mercy Ships makes no discrimination regarding race, religion, creed, skin colour, age, etc. We are there to help all those that we can. Our main areas of expertise are: cleft lip and palate operations, dental care, blindness (due to cataracts or similar illnesses), vesico-vaginal fistula (VVF) or fistula repair for women left incontinent during a difficult child birth and operations to correct other deformities such as tumours, burns and leprosy and congenital abnormalities.

Our achievements are just staggering when you think about it. Since 1978…

Mercy Ships has provided services in developing nations valued at more than £355 million, including the following:

• Performed more than 35,000 life-changing operations such as cleft lip and palate repair, cataract removal, orthopaedic procedures, facial reconstruction and obstetric fistula repair.

• Treated over 238,000 people in village medical clinics.

• Performed more than 194,000 dental treatments.

• Taught over 14,500 local health care and professional workers, who have in turn trained many others.

• Taught 105,000 local people in primary health care.

• Delivered more than £28 million worth of medical equipment, hospital and other supplies.

• Completed over 950 community development projects focusing on water and sanitation, education, infrastructure development and agriculture.

THIS is why I’m so passionate about this charity. It follows Jesus’ example by bringing hope and healing (mental, spiritual and physical) to those who thought they had no hope at all left and who thought they’d live in pain, poverty and forgotten by the world for the rest of their lives.

Just to note: we are planning, with Kevin’s help, to run breakfasts in aid of Mercy Ships on Easter Day, after the 6 am Sunrise Communion on Epsom Common, and at 9 am, after the early Communion and before the 10 am Parish Communion.

New market words: patience, ethics, justice…

Wikipedia

The Archbishop of Canterbury has given a major speech on market ethics in the light of the recession. (Here is an annotated Diigo link, if you wish it.)

The archbishop is as careful and subtle as ever in what he says. He speaks of:

• a culture of short-termism;
• an impatience for results and outcomes;
• an obsession, in our culture and in government, with growth, without asking what that growth is for or towards;
• the illusion that, so long as we head towards growth, we are in control;
• and the vacuity or indeed malignity of a goal of growth simply as an indefinite expansion of purchasing power, because it removes scarcity from us and places it at the feet of those who already have little.

Underlying his exposition is a philosophical or religious question, and indeed a question which can hardly be ignored or bettered. What are human beings for? Or (as he says) less crudely, what is the content is of ideas of human dignity and where do we look for their foundation or rationale?

This is a searching, eyes-open enquiry into the very basis of our public life. It’s good that Rowan Williams places himself prophetically in the arena of cultural comment and critique. Let’s hope he gets heard.

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Stem Cell Research

There’s a thought-provoking post on ESCR [embryonic stem cell research] over at A Thinking Reed.

Here’s what it says:

Even if you don’t think (as I don’t) that a just-fertilized embryo is a human person with full moral standing, it’s not unreasonable to feel a bit queasy about embryonic stem cell research. I think philosopher Bonnie Steinbock, in several articles and books, provides one helpful way of thinking about this. Even if embryos don’t have moral standing, she says, they can still have “symbolic value,” somewhat in the way a dead human body does. We treat human bodies with a certain reverence because of their symbolic value, not because we’re concerned about not harming or wronging the dead person (they can’t be harmed). Likewise with embryos: being non-sentient, they don’t have interests that can be thwarted and so don’t meet the minimum criteria of moral standing. However, because of their symbolic value, they do deserve a certain amount of respect.

What does this mean in practice? According to Steinbock, it would be wrong to use embryos for frivolous purposes (like developing new cosmetics, say), but research with a legitimate promise to save lives would be OK. Again, the analogy with dead bodies, though it has limits, is helpful: most of us think using the organs of a dead person (with their prior consent) to save lives is OK, but other, frivolous uses of the body would be wrong. Following this line of thought, if ESCR does have real promise of saving lives, it is, other things being equal, permissible to use (pre-sentient) embryos for that purpose, even while recognizing that they have a certain intrinsic, non-instrumental value. (This ignores other moral aspects of the issue, such as how the embryos are to be obtained, whether such research would end up creating a “market” for women to sell their eggs, the proper allocation of medical research dollars, the risks of “commodification,” etc.) I don’t know if it’s completely satisfactory, but one of the merits of this view is that it can make sense of the moral complexity many people experience about this issue without affirming the – highly counterintuitive, in my view – position that an embryo has the same moral standing as a conscious, sentient human person.

The comments are worth reading too.

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Hope and fear?

Slow Leadership makes a very compelling case for the idea that hope tends to bring fear in its wake. (See here for an annotated version, with my highlighting, of this post.)

The argument runs:

Hope always engenders fear – hope at a wished-for outcome, fear that it won’t come about.

We cannot break that bond.

We tend to react by over-planning, as if that in itself can make our hopes come true.

Accept the link. Accept the inevitable. Don’t over-plan. Exercise curiosity. Give up on a specific hope when it becomes unrealistic.

Hmm. This seems pretty secure as a set of ideas. Except that, from a Christian perspective, the resurrection is there to break the bond between hope and fear.

Or, more precisely, to connect hope and a certain kind of fear (more like awe, perhaps) up in God’s own self:

“… the Lord takes pleasure in those who fear him, in those who hope in his steadfast love (Psalm 147:11).”

Of course, in everyday life, it’s not as easy as that. We still hope. We still fear. It’s natural.

Perhaps, then, the Way is about letting go of the connection between hope and fear – about learning how to hope in God and others without allowing fear to dominate.

Taking the Tablets...

As an encouragement for finding our church's blog site, here's a sneak preview of my next Sunday's sermon!...

Download sermon in PDF format...