Gary Wilton wrote about the European Parliamentary elections in last week’s Church Times. See Don’t let the chance of big decisions pass by.
Grace Davie wrote at Cif belief in answer to the question Is Europe’s future Christian? Her answer was: Christian, but not as we know it.
Alister McGrath writes in The Times that A system of belief should not involve point scoring.
Sunny Hundal writes in the Guardian about interfaith dialogues.
Giles Fraser writes in the Church Times that People need something irrational.
Earlier in the week, he wrote at Cif belief about Why I still have faith in politicians.
Andrew Brown wrote there also, about David Hume’s comment policy.
Justin Lewis-Anthony wrote about Why George Herbert must die.
I’ve not read “The Country Parson” for at least 30 years, and only read it then because my graduate seminar professonr required it. How many people on this list have ever read it? How could a largely unread book be so pernicious?
I’ve continued to read Herbert’s very challenging poetry for at least that long. It continues to nourish me to be an adult Christian.
“The image of the vicar as a kindly, smiling presence, ministering to all the various needs of an ideal community, is one we must ditch” – Justin Lewis Anthony, The Observer – The extant image of George Herbert as the ideal *Country Parson* is a product of the age in which he lived, and as such, is held in reverence by many an Englishman – at Home and abroad. To say that we must ‘kill him off’ is stretching things a bit too far – as far as I am concerned. His poetry alone (‘Love bade me welcome’, for instance)… Read more »
“The threat of social fragmentation is easily worsened if interest groups, secular or religious, lash out against others when justifying themselves. A rhetoric of dismissal and ridicule plays well to a populist gallery” – Alister McGrath, Times Article – Alister McGrath touches a sore nerve in the present culture of oppositional theology in the Anglican Communion. What was once our catch-cry of a Faith based upon Scripture, Tradition and Reason, seems to have been side-lined by a puritanical insistence on either Scripture or Tradition being more important than Reason in the contemporary Church. Where the Church has usually had to… Read more »
I think that much of Herbert’s actual practice would be described as ‘mission’ today, and suddenly become acceptable if seen in that light.
Sorry, Giles, but…there’s a difference between understanding the role of instinct (‘gut feelings’ may be linked to vestigial nerve complexes in the intestines that are actually ‘thinking’) and fostering merely cognitive worlds that spread inhuman bunkum. The search for meaning does not indicate giving licence to nonsense, although that quest can lead you there too, in due course; and just because we can all be prone to nonsense does not mean this activity should be elevated to the position of a higher common human thread. We all need to eat, too – are we going to start therefore worshipping potatoes?… Read more »
Why is British discussion of religion, at least in newspapers, so drab and dispiriting? Surely interreligious dialogue [and even religious-atheist dialogue one might add] is a wonderfully enriching sharing of classics and lifestyles, as John Paul II exclaimed during his Israel trip (in Jordan I think).
Perhaps the “irrational” does result from poor or defective reason, but the “non-rational” (or “transrational,” maybe) need not be irrational. (Aren’t there clear analogs to this in mathematics, and even physics?) Our recent thought culture has not (yet) much developed the transrational side of things — but there are certainly indications that it might. I have a friend who argues that Christianity pushed out its mystics over two centuries ago as a culture of reason gained the ascendancy. If a theophanous science develops in the future, perhaps a broader culture will also develop that will support a Meister Eckhart or… Read more »