All history as reconstruction of the past is of course myth

Interesting lecture in two parts

Click to watch the video

via Ruth Gledhill

PS: Click this link to read his lecture at London School of Economics. Quite interesting!

Here are a couple of extracts from the video; not! from the lecture!

‘Certainly the way in which western democracies currently operate – one need only look at the enormous time, attention and money devoted to an entire year’s worth of electioneering in the USA, not to mention the fact that, though the new President of the USA will have effective power over the whole world, it’s only Americans who get to vote – calls into sharp question the normal western assumption of recent years, that if only we could export more western-style democracy to more parts of the world all problems would be solved. I believe, on the contrary, that as the Archbishop said about law, human dignity and shared goods and priorities, so it is with democracy. Democracies, like all other rulers, need to be called to account, as Kofi Annan said in his retirement speech, both in what they actually do and in what they actually are.’

‘This stand-off between secularism and fundamentalism takes many forms. There is, for example, the well-known fresh attack on religious belief of all sorts launched in the name of empirical science by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and others. I say ‘in the name of’, but actually the rhetoric used by those three goes way beyond empirical science itself and into the realm of good old-fashioned mud-slinging. Just as the media refused last week to engage with what the Archbishop actually said, so Dawkins and others refuse to engage with real theologians, not to mention real communities of faith that are making a real difference at places where the world is in deep pain, a pain which the great advances of science have if anything exacerbated (through weapons technology and the like) rather than alleviated. Just as European science in the nineteenth century was anything but politically neutral, but must be understood within the Enlightenment-based projects of imperial and technological expansion, leading inexorably to the First World War, so the present anti-religious scientific protests must be understood within the multivalent culture of late modernity.’

‘I now have a threefold proposal. (i) The confusions we have observed are indications of an increasing instability which has generated the present stand-off between secularism and fundamentalism, as the two sides in the Deist divide now perceive themselves as fighting for their lives against a suddenly awakened foe. (ii) The chilly winds of postmodernity, blowing their deconstructive gales through the entire eighteenth-century settlement, are threatening the Enlightenment systems themselves and the secularism and fundamentalism to which they often seem reduced. (iii) Out of this postmodern moment there might yet emerge, as the Archbishop has been suggesting, new paths towards a wise and civil society in which the genuine values for which the Enlightenment was striving can be preserved and enhanced while the excesses to which it has given rise can be avoided.’

‘Establishment’ is a way of recognising that we are still essentially a Christian country, both in the sense that our history and culture have been decisively shaped by the Christian faith and life and in the sense that at the last census over 70% called themselves ‘Christian’. As the Archbishop said last Monday, this means that the ‘established’ church has a special responsibility to take thought for, and speak up for, the small minorities, and to ensure that they are not squashed between an unthinking church and an uncaring secular state. Hence his perfectly proper concern for the particular sensitivities of Muslims, as indeed of Jews and others. And most Church of England leaders would insist today that if some way could be found to share our ‘Established’ status with our great sister churches, we would be delighted. But let’s not fool ourselves. To give up ‘Establishment’ now would be to collude with that secularism which postmodernity has cheerfully and rightly deconstructed. Rather, the challenge ought to be to make it work for the benefit of the whole society. To aim at that would be to work with the grain both of the Christian gospel itself and of the deep roots of our own society and traditions.’

Dear Friends,
The astonishing misrepresentation of Archbishop Rowan in virtually all newspapers over the last few days, and the scorn and anger which this has fuelled, have caused many people within the church to ask what on earth is going on. The issues are complex, but let me try to highlight the key points. Obviously it would be good for people to read the whole lecture, which is available on line at his website together with further clarification.

There will shortly be an excellent summary and discussion of the whole issue by Andrew Goddard available on the Fulcrum website.

I’m sorry that this message will probably get to you too late for inclusion in Sunday morning worship, but I hope it will help the conversations that many of you will undoubtedly have in the next few days.
First, the lecture which +Rowan gave was the start of a series organised by and for the legal profession, about the nature of law. He was not making a public statement about his belief in Jesus (people have asked me ‘why doesn’t he speak about Jesus?’ and the answer is ‘he does, a great deal of the time, but this wasn’t that sort of occasion’). He was addressing some of the most serious and far-reaching questions which face us both in Britain and throughout western culture, and was doing so with the sensitivity and intellectual rigour which the occasion, and his audience, rightly demanded. We should be grateful that we have an Archbishop capable of such work, not demand that his every word be instantly comprehensible by the casual uninformed onlooker. If I ask someone to fix my car, or my computer, I don’t expect to understand everything they say about the technicalities; rather, I’m glad someone out there knows what’s going on and can do what’s necessary.
Second, the fundamental issue he was addressing is the relation between the law of the land and the religious conscience of the citizen. For 200 years it has been assumed that these operated in separate spheres: the law regulates my public life, faith or religion operate in private. This was always a dangerous half-truth, since many of the great world faiths, including Christianity itself, actually claim that all of life is included within religious obedience. As some of us used to be taught, if Jesus is not Lord of all, he is not Lord at all. In recent years various governments, including our own, have pushed the other way, to suggest that the secular state is itself master of all of life, including religious conviction. That’s why we’ve seen an airline worker sacked for wearing a cross, while in France the government has tried similarly to ban Muslim women from wearing their traditional head-covering. Because we haven’t had to address these issues before, our society has tended to slide round them by emphasizing words like ‘multiculturalism’, which often doesn’t actually mean that we celebrate our different cultures but rather that we subordinate them all to whatever the secular state wants. That is as much a problem for Catholic adoption agencies, as we saw last year, as it is for Muslims who want to follow their traditional teaching about (for instance) the prohibition of interest on loans while living within a society where the mortgage system is endemic. +Rowan was going to the roots of these problems and coming up not only with fresh analysis but fresh solutions, particularly what he calls ‘interactive pluralism’. The question of how we live together as a civil and wise society while cherishing different faiths is a deep and serious one and can’t be pushed away just because people take fright at certain misunderstandings. His point was precisely that neither the secular state nor any particular religion can ‘monopolise’.
Third, +Rowan was very clear in his lecture to rule out exactly those points which the screaming tabloids have assumed he was affirming. We all know the standard images of Sharia law – beatings, beheadings, oppression of women, etc. He distanced himself completely from all that, though you’d never know it from the media. He knows, just as well as do his critics, that Sharia is complex, that it varies from place to place, that it demands interpretation, and so on. His point was, rather, that there are some elements of Muslim law which can and should be accommodated within our legal structures. Ironically, Gordon Brown, who was quick to offer a knee-jerk rejection against the lecture, himself altered the law last year to enable devout Muslims to obtain mortgages. That’s the kind of thing +Rowan was advocating in similar spheres.
Fourth, it does now appear that +Rowan was ill-advised to go on ‘The World at One’ before his lecture was given and to say things about Sharia law which only really made the sense they did within the context of the larger, careful argument which he gave that evening. Even within the lecture there might have been ways of saying what needed to be said. Perhaps, as some Muslims themselves have found, it might be better to avoid the ‘Sharia’ word altogether, because of its extremely negative image in this country. (Think, by the way, of what the word ‘Christian’ means in a country that has been bombed to bits by the ‘Christian’ west.)
Fifth, what the whole sorry affair highlights is that our society is extremely touchy not only about Islam (and not only because of terrorism), but also about the whole, normally unspoken, set of assumptions about society, law, culture, freedom and religion by which we have operated. We live at a time of massive cultural change, and we shouldn’t be surprised that attempts to understand what’s going on and do something about it are deeply threatening. This is somewhat like what happens when a couple are having their first session with a marriage guidance counsellor after years of unspoken puzzlement, and find some of the questions threatening. But unless we can ask the difficult questions, and try to address them wisely and maturely, we will drift into worse problems by far.
Sixth, therefore, as you pray for +Rowan through all of this, pray too for wise and reasoned discourse to emerge, in which the key points he made are allowed to stand out and function as signposts in the murky world of our present public life. And please pray for all of us who will be in Synod this week, and for me as I give a lecture at the London School of Economics this coming Thursday night, on ‘God in Public’. I didn’t know how apposite it was going to be.
Warmest greetings and prayers

+Tom

Source

There is a new book by Hans Küng, Islam: Past, Present and Future. More on Hans Küng, read here.

‘When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.’

 Sinclair Lewis

Blackberry Apocalypse

By  *Nicholas Guyatt

• American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America by Chris Hedges  Buy this book

(more…)

From Chiesa.

An open letter signed by 138 representatives from all Muslim schools to Pope Benedict XVI and other Christian leaders.

Indeed, this is a historic statement, and it deserves to get published.

To read the letter, click here (from The Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme).

One of the signatories is Dr Aref Ali Nayed, a senior adviser at the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme at Cambridge University. For more information, click here.

Jazak Allah Khair, Aref Ali Nayed.

Probably the most important contribution of German converts to Muslim life in Germany is their demand for German-language services and lectures in mosques. Today, to my knowledge, only seven of over 90 mosques or praying rooms in Berlin rely mainly on the German language. In these mosques, German converts to Islam are very active.

…

Most practicing Muslims do not like the phrase “German Islam” because they promote the understanding that there is only one Islam. Yet, if German Islam means embracing this religion in a way that fits German culture and daily life, converts to Islam are at the forefront of creating this formula.

….

Apart from their contributions to the life of Muslim communities, German converts are living proof that Germany is moving towards being a well-integrated society. In Germany, many politicians talk about “non-integrated immigrants.” Needless to say, integration is inevitably a two-way street. When two parties have true contact, both of them will find themselves transformed in the process.

Source

In my gymnasium years, we had an untraditional religion teacher, and without question, his influence still has an impact on me, even today.

There was a lengthy article about Nikos Kazantzakis in Harvard Theological Review. I did not paid attention to Kazantzakis since my years in gymnasium. In my opinion, it’s one of the books you should read if you are interested in theology, and I do thank my teacher who introduced Kazantzakis to me. Although, I’d not recommend the movie, unless you read the book first.