The write to be heard!

Yes I do know that I'm not blogging as much as usual apologies, things are busy and a bit complex at the moment and I'm doing alot of non-blog related writing.

Anyway this article by Rowan Williams in the Daily Telegraph has encouraged me to a least drop a line to my blog and get enthused about the right to write! It's all about encouraging young people to write about the big issues of our time and to bring their fresh thinking to those questions:

If you believe that religious faith is one of the things that quite rightly gets people talking, for and against, it is important to help younger people make the connections between the issues of the day and the ideas and ideals associated with faith. They may want to argue furiously against it or they may discover that it has more to say to them than they expected. But it is wonderful when there is an environment in which those connections can be made.

Anyway looking at the titles for the essays sparked my itnerest and made me think that maybe some of us who are no longer under 21 should also apply ourselves these questions and get our grey cells thinking and our pens and key boards to pour out some creative approaches. After all isn't it a biblical call to become like little children?

Here's the list - which title do you want to write about? Maybe I should try one a week to get me back into the discipline of blogging.

Ages 13-15 (800 words maximum)

Must you be religious to be good?

Does God care about global warming?

The Bible says that “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil”. Can money make you happy?

What are school assemblies for?

God cares for the poor. How can people of faith demonstrate this care?

Ages 16-17 (1,500 words maximum)

How can one person improve the lives of the world’s poorest?

Why have chaplains in prisons?

Should politicians “do God”?

What’s the point of different religions talking to each other?

Ages 18-21(2,500 words maximum)

Is believing more important than belonging?

Does God believe in the existence of society?

What is “good news” for the poor? How can we be part of this?

Is environmentalism a new religion?

Who can enter

The competition is open to all people aged 13-21 on September 1 2010.

You should give the name of your school, college or university on the entry form if you have one, but you do not need to be a student to enter.

How to enter

Download an entry form from www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/3110 and send it with your completed essay to:

Faith in the World Competition, Lambeth Palace, London SE1 7JU.

Memories and writing

Our friend John Asling has left the Geneva rat race and is working as a freelance writer in Blackheath, London. I've just been reading a great short story he's written called "The Memory Girl".
I so admire him for trying to follow his creative drive and just get on and write. Maybe I should learn from his example ...

Thanks John for sharing, but most of all for writing.

Bravery, generosity and feminist theology

Yesterday evening I came home and decided to try for something a bit more serious than the previous day's reading on theology and detective fiction (edifying though that had been).
Another of the books that arrived this week from the SCM sale is Controversies in Feminist Theology by Lisa Isherwood and the late Marcella Althaus-Reid.
As I read I was moved to find two writers putting so succinctly things I have not actively tried to express myself. I "recognised" something of myself in what they write. It was like an ache I hadn't realised I had suddenly no longer being there, yet the ache was in some way replaced by a deep longing and also some sadness. The resonance with their thoughts did me good - the life of the mind can be healing even when it rouses painful emotions.
Then this afternoon a colleague came to see me, a person so wonderfully centred and clear about her role and convictions. We talked about a publication project and I mentioned my reading from the previous evening. She had known Althaus-Reid, studied with and been inspired by her. We spoke about difficulties and motivations, about bravery and tears being the source of strenght. We spoke also of future projects, things we wanted to write, people we wanted to get to write and the idea of having a feminist theology lunch. When she left she said "As Marcella said 'our work continues'". It was a strange sort of blessing but I recognise it for the benediction it was - our work continues. Ah the generosity of a conversation.

So here are a few bits and pieces from the introduction to controversies in feminist theology which resonated particularly with me - not even for reasons I can clearly state, they simply "echoed" with me as the French would have it.

"What feminist theologies offer, when we get it right, are a political challenge to a world that believes, or large parts seem to, that democracy once decided on can be exported with bombs and repression for the good of all. Freedom through death is a concept feminist theologies gave up on long ago! For feminist theologies, democracy means that controversy will remain at the heart of what we do and that it will fuel us to greater engagement with a world in need of our passion. Our ability to live with disunity is our greatest strength and our greatest question remains how to have the disputes, not whether to have them.
Feminists have always been brave women; they have and do put their lives on the line for the debate to be opened or to continue. Most of us are never asked to actually lay down our lives but we do have to show bravery in the way in which we continue to question and not hide behind either moral certainty or the morality that calls some not to offend the many. We need to be brave in continually questioning our own thoughts and keeping those too open to the unfolding future; a future that 'takes place every time a possibility is imagined, a collective self reflection takes place, a dispute over values, priorities and language emerges' ...Feminist theologies arise from the the lives of allwomen and are aimed at expanding those lives through justice-seeking and right-relation, this is an embodied activity which loses all credibility when confined to the page."

I cried, perhaps with recognition or something else, as I read that last night and tears fell this evening again as I typed these words.

If Christian theme park is to offer "live resurrection" what on earth was resurrection before?

I've just read this report in the Guardian about Europe's first Christian theme park offering "live resurrections". And I just thought - that is just weird! Resurrection is about being alive, about the triumph of life - it's not about "enactment" or pretence. I started wondering what a dead resurrection would look like?

Anyway just a passing thought I suppose, as I get cross about themepark religion and realise how totall behind the times I am.

Anyway, I'm sure the person writing the headline about "live resurrection" had fun.

on blogging and generosity and all that

Apologies for my repeated absence from blogging here over the past month. Let's just say life has been complex and rather busy and I gave my "élan" (what a lovely French word that is and how I hate to have to try and translate it) to other work. It has also been very hot and for anyone with MS this means you get a bit slow now and again.

Meanwhile I have finally found a bit of time to get back to reading other blogs - for a while I thought that everyone I enjoyed reading seemed to have given up on blogging. Fortunately J.K. Gayle hasn't stopped but seems to have become a multiple personality with several blogs including Mind your language. Not sure I shall have time to read everything but I'm relieved he's still out there giving me ideas about what I should read. Over on Facebook he's also encouraging folk to donate blood to the local blood bank. Obviously a multilayered, engaged, intellectual sort of guy who loves his family and friends. If it weren't for blogging I wouldn't know he existed.

Today I've been reading reviews of Clay Shirky's book Cognitive surplus: Creativity and generosity in a connected age. Charles Leadbeater's review in the New Statesmen ends:

The web still has vast untapped civic potential. But that potential will be snuffed out unless we stand up for a free, public, open web against the encroachments of companies and governments. Cognitive Surplus tells us why that battle is worth fighting.

I love the way his review begins with Songs of Praise and moves through his son teaching him something he's just learned from the internet.

One of the reasons I like blogging and tweeting etc. is that there is an enormous amount of generosity in the systems, the fabulous amount of information and opinion out there. It's fun simply to be part of it, maybe it just gives me the illusion of being part of something - and it's interesting I notice even just typing this - blogging make me happy - I've been depriving myself of that in recent weeks and it hasn't been good for me. Perhaps it's like that for loads of other folk out there too - blogging facebooking and all the rest of it unleashes a little bit of our creativity and gives us an outlet for musings and humour.

Anyway more passing thoughts from me soon as I get back to finding my voice.

Unity of the Spirit in the Bond of Peace

Well I have briefly held one of these lovely little books in my hands, but I don't have a copy yet - though I actually contributed one of the Bible studies. (You'll have to guess which one!)
Meanwhile if you're interested you can download the booklet in pdf format here.

Neither of us is in any way an athlete but my husband has just won a part share in two gold and two siver medals

On the stranzblog he is known as Dr B. However in real life he is called Stephen Brown. Late on Sunday evening he learnt from his colleague Peter Kenny that the small news agency they run has won two gold and two silver awards at the Associated Church Press awards.

Anyway, congratulations to Peter, Stephen, David and Jean-Michel at ENI News. you can read more about the award here you can also subscribe to ENI headlines here.

The posters pictured here were put together on our dining table while I was at feminist theology last week. The things men get up to when the women are away.

Here's part of Dr B's article from today:
Ecumenical News International has won an Award of Excellence as the "best in class" religion news service from the Associated Church Press.

"What impressed me about ENInews is the breadth and depth of the reporting," said award judge Leon Alligood, a journalism professor at Middle Tennessee State University. "The writing was well edited and engaging."

The award for work done in 2009 was presented on 8 May to Peter Kenny, editor-in-chief of Geneva-based ENInews, at the annual ACP awards ceremony in Arlington, Virginia. ENInews also received a second award of excellence and two awards of merit for its reporting.

The Award of Merit in the "Best in Class: News Service" category, went to Washington-based Religion News Service, which works in partnership with ENInews in distributing news to other media. An honourable mention was shared by Baptist Press, which was noted for its coverage of Kyrgyzstan and El Salvador, and Presbyterian News Service.

In the "Editorial Courage" section, ENInews won the Award of Excellence for its coverage of the World Council of Churches, one of the four founding member organizations of the news agency (www.eni.ch/featured/article.php?id=3047).

"This is editorial courage at its best - great journalism in the watchdog tradition. Great risk for the writers, but the audience wins," commented judge Andrew Herrmann, the managing editor at the Chicago Sun Times.

A poem by Elizabeth Jennings for Good Friday

It always seems to me that prose is not enough for some days, for some events, yet I've never really be able to write poetry - or not poetry I think much of or that says what I would like it to ...
On Good Friday I turn to poetry, and this year as last to Elizabeth Jennings

Friday
We nailed the hands long ago,
Wove the thorns, took up the scourge and shouted
For excitement's sake, we stood at the dusty edge
Of the pebbled path and watched the extreme of pain.

But one or two prayed, one or two
Were silent, shocked, stood back
And remembered remnants of words, a new vision.
The cross is up with its crying victim, the clouds
Cover the sun, we learn a new way to lose
What we did not know we had
Until this bleak and sacrificial day,
Until we turned from our bad
Past and knelt and cried out our dismay,
The dice still clicking, the voices dying away.

Elizabeth Jennings Collected Poems

Bits and pieces of inspiration

Sometimes it is not so bad to get older and to begin at last to know oneself a bit. Today I have had some time to catch up on a bit of reading, thinking and pottering around. It has been a very busy and emotional week in many and various ways and it has been good to have some normal time, sleeping in after a party for a friend, going to the market, shopping and drinking tea. Time to let go of some strains and stresses and live with some of the happiness and hope the week has brought - as well as the desperate tragedy unfolding in Haiti. No words really suffice for that, even though I tried.

Reading Ben Myers splendid Faith and Theology I realised that I shall never write a thological monograph (or even an article) but that I get enormous pleasure and inspiration from reading what others write and from encouraging them to write (I'm having some fun getting a group of young theologians to write about ecumenism at the moment - well actually getting them to deliver is really the issue currently!) It's good to encourage others to unlock their creativity. It was Ben's post about the spirituality of theology that triggered this realisation in me. Mine is a bits and pieces theology. The theology of the practioner, communicator, translator, liturgist and preacher not really of the lecturer or writer.

It has been of more theological importance this week to write "Pray for Haiti" on large strips of paper than to write a treatise on the future of ecumenism. Yet oddly this week of deeply practical editing, translating and liturgical work has also been one of totally gratuitous inspiration. Pure grace. Suddenly, while I was doing something else, a sermon called "mother tongue - foreign land" came into my mind and strangely it seems to be a bit about the future of ecumenism. As I now start to write it of course it doesn't seem to be quite so beautiful and luminous as it was during those first moments of perceiving how it could go, but it still excites me. This kind of inspiration hasn't really happened to me before - not quite so obviously anyway. No doubt by the time it is finished the sermon will even have a completely different title, but it will still have its origin in the moment in fron of my computer when I was checking the VAT!

That links to my final bit of inspiration for this evening. The role of language and mother tongue in inspiration. The sermon came to me in English and is about a far away land called home. When you spend your days playing and struggling with language it's interesting to see which langauge the Holy Spirit is speaking in today. I often say I have a mother tongue (English), a father tongue (German - my 3rd language) and a foreign language (French) which is my working language and my love. Twelve months ago I realised very painfully that I cannot bear to leave a context where I can speak French most of the time. So why if I dream in French does inspiration come this time in English?

Anyway, a bits and pieces theology is where I am and will remain I dare say. Bringing together prayers and Bible translation, song and academic reflection, inspiration and hard labour, thanksgiving and lamentation, spirituality and action. It's a fine place to be I just won't be writing any ground-breaking theology ... however I do still harbour some delusions about maybe writing a bit of detective fiction. We'll see how much older I have to get before I give up on that illusion as well!

Congratulations to Andreas Zumach for the Göttinger Peace Prize

Yesterday our friend Andreas Zumach was awarded the Göttinger Friedenspreis - the Göttinger peace prize - for his reporting and campaigning journalism about the wars in former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Andreas is the TAZ correspondent at the UN, does some radio and tv journalism, and has written the book pictured here. He has repeatedly warned against preventative wars over raw materials and also argues for a greater role for the UN given the global challenges.
The Göttinger peace prize was founded by Roland Röhl a scientific journalist who died in 1997.

Called to One Hope in Christ - invitation to those under 30 to write essays on hope

The Conference of European Churches has launched an essay competition for young people the theme is: Called to One Hope in Christ: The relevance of Hope in Europe Today.
So if you're under thirty and have hopes for the future and for the here and now, start writing, start hoping and encourage others to as well, full details here. Closing date February 15th.

Pope Benedict XVI in France

You can follow Pope Benedict XVIth's visit to France via Bernadette Sauvaget's blog updates on the Réforme website. And of course La Croix also has updates and it's own blog here called un Pape, un blog - a Pope, a blog ...

Meanwhile Tom Heneghan at Reuters FaithWorld blog has made several interesting posts about the Pope's visit including one about the Pope's speech warning against fundamentalism and literal readings of the Bible.

Crepúsculo - Pequenos Escritos Ecumênicos

My hardworking and very discreet colleague Odair Pedroso Mateus has brought out a book of some of his writings in Portuguese.
The articles have intriguing titles like A Reforma Protestante em uma frase - The Protestant Reformation in one sentence, or Metafragmentos intercontextuais - Intercontextual metafragments.
Even though my Portuguese is as good as non-existant (I can order a caipirinha) I can see that these essays are written with care and conviction. It takes real discipline to write so concisely and clearly that even someone with just a vague memory of Latin can begin to see what you're hinting at.
It's a small book but the thinking is strong. Crepusculo is twilight, the time when the stars begin to come out. This star burns brightly.
I think if you go here and click on contato you might even be able to order a copy.

A dissenter's satirical prayer

I had never thought of the genre of satirical prayers before reading the prayer below from the 18th century by Anna Laetitia Barbauld in Janet Wootton's excellent article on a Dissenter's view of Anglicanism and Disestablishment - about which more at a later date.

‘God of love, father of all the families of the earth,
we are going to tear in pieces our brethren of mankind,
but our strength is not equal to our fury,
we beseech thee to assist us in the work of slaughter . . . .
Whatever mischief we do, we shall do it in thy name;
we hope, therefore, thou wilt protect us in it.
Thou, who hast made of one blood all the dwellers upon the earth,
we trust thou wilt view us alone with partial favour,
and enable us to bring misery upon every other quarter of the globe.’
(From: An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, 1790)

In 1811, at the height of the war with France, Barbauld paid highly for her satire, never writing again after the publication of her poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven drew wounding and harsh criticism from Wordsworth, Coleridge and much of the literary and political establishment.
Until the advent of feminist literary criticism Barbauld was almost forgotten, or remembered as writer of books for children.
She adopted the pen name "A Dissenter" which Wootton is proud to take up again in the title to her article. As her satire shows, to dissent is not to destroy or be unconstructive, but it is to say that the cosy world view of the establishment or the established church does not represent the whole truth.

May has been the month of press freedom

May has been the month of press freedom and the UNESCO Courier has marked this with a series of articles about finding our way to information there is an interview with Lydia Cacho Ribeiro, a Mexican freelance journalist who is the laureate of the UNESCO World Press Freedom Prize. Ribeiro, who is also head of a centre that helps abused women in Cancun makes this powerful declaration of faith:
“I believe the role of journalism is to be a lantern, allowing society to exercise its right to know and understand; I believe human rights are non-negotiable. As long as I live, I will continue to write and writing will keep me alive.”

In a different article Susan Moeller notes the paradox that "Media have never been more vital for the nurturing of civil society but freedom of expression is now in retreat. No society can be free, open and fair without a diversity of voices. To remedy this situation, students of journalism must first be taught to develop a critical mind."
There are also excellent accounts of the challenges of journalism and access to information in Lebanon and in Africa but this comment on the western media is also a complex challenge.
"[The threat to the media is]The deterioration of press quality. The laziness of journalists, readers or television viewers who want everything reduced to sound bites. What the French economist and politician Jacques Delors calls “fast food information”.
Although I live with a journalist I suppose I too am that lazy reader, much prefering these days the lifestyle sections to the hard news. I want to know the background to the crisis in Burma but I also fill my attention span with restaurant reviews, quick crosswords and entertainment journalism. Thanks goodness for my early morning cup of tea with the BBC World Service radio news.
Yet the sort of journalism that Ribeiro practises is very much about a spirituality of resistance, it's about conviction and belief in what she's doing. It's also about fear, living on the margins and yet daring to be free and to speak freely come what may.

Picture © UNESCO/Aleksandar Džoni-Šopov
Investigation often resembles navigating through a labyrinth.