Today

"Expect nothing. Today: that is your life."

Rather unexpectedly we came across this postcard yesterday morning in the theological bookshop. This morning on the train to Rostock Dr B has been reading other choice bits of Tucholsky out loud to me. Food for the mind is also food for the soul.. More as we move towards one of the goals of our interrail journey.
For now we enjoy today, the glorious northern sky, the flat pond of the water, the wonderful black pepper in the gratin and the fast approaching horizon. Very soon I shall be in Denmark for the first time in my life.

Thoughts about "Finitude" at the beginning of a journey

In various moments today we have been looking at the wonderful European Interrail map - should we go here, might we have time to get to there ... dreams of a vacation spreading before us and of discoveries yet to be made. Yet our time is finite, we can think that we might try and do some of the other things another time, perhaps but maybe we will never do anything like this again and will just have to live with the remembrance of the dream of what we had hoped and planned to do.
Sitting in the corner of a Berlin Kneipe this afternoon drinking a delicious cup of tea I read Fulbert Steffensky's short essay "Mut zur Endlichkeit. Sterben in einer Gesellschaft der Sieger."
"The Courage to embrace finiteness. Dying in a society of winners." This little pamphlet has been sitting in my "to read" pile for over 18 months and I'm glad it made its way into my suitcase for this journey.
In 44 short pages he covers alot of ground. He speaks about how little the skills and virtues of paliative care are valued in a world obsessed with doing, making, effectiveness, winning, making money, impact ... all those things which Steffensky refers to as Machbarkeitswahn - obsession with producibility, or perhaps a better translation would be our obsession with reducing everything to a commodity. Against this he tries to clearly set the Protestant value of grace - when Steffensky does this it is not at all in an anti-ecumenical spirit. He converted to Protestantism in the late sixties and has tried to prophetically "evangelise" both Protestant and Catholic spirituality - encouraging more interplay between tradition, discipline and engagement. I smiled in acknowledgement of some of the words he uses to describe our societies "There is a stupidity at the highest level, it is the weak thinking of a highly informed society whose knowledge is highly detailed yet holds absolutely no ethical power." Later on he cites Christa Wolf's Kassandra (a figure from mythology I hAve been thinking about a great deal in recent months) who at the gates of Troy says, only if you give up wanting to always win will you be able to build and keep the city. Steffensky goes on to say that in the world of winners there is no room for successful losing. I love that idea - successful losing. Brilliant!
Of course I am reading this essay on finitiude at a very particular point in my life, one when I sometimes feel I have lost almost everything (And it's all right I do know very clearly that i haven't but feelings will not always be reasoned with!). Turning the pages in the Kneipe today was like receiving a gift. One subheading reads "Ganzheit im Fragment" - wholeness, oneness in a fragment, later he says that "thinking about grace means having the courage to act in a fragmentary way." This sounds rather more meaningful and clear in German, but given all my own pondering on fragments and bits and pieces in recent months I found it very helpful.
I also found it challenging to the way we so easily as ecumenists trot out things about unity and wholeness. Often the only wholeness we will see, even that which we work towards, is but a fragment. Yet Steffensky would say there is enormous grace simply in that.
I suspect that this essay was written originally for people working in Church run hospices, to encourage those working with the ill and dying that their work is truly valued and meaningful.
He speaks movingly towards the end about the final 10 years of his wife's life, (he was married to Dorothee Sölle), speaking about how her brush with death, her discovery of the finitude of her life, meant that both of them were able to savour very simple pleasures as the true gift these things were in her final years.
I first read Steffensky over 20 years ago in East Germany, my copy of Feier des Lebens is still covered with pencil jottings and underlined quotes. I then read Die Hinreise by Sölle not knowing at all that they were married. I think I should perhaps tomorrow treat myself to Steffensky's recent book which is called "Black bread spirituality". Such a shame we are staying two minutes walk from a theological bookshop!
Anyway Fulbert thank you so much for writing and thanks for the fragments of grace. A splendid idea. I think I now know that I have to continue to find the courage to be a successful failure. Perhaps we will make it to the arctic circle, perhaps not, in any case we will travel onwards in discovery. I just hope we don't lose the timetable!

Read more by Steffensky here.

Where next for peace? How do we take the #IEPC forwards

The Peace Convocation here in Jamaica will draw to a close tomorrow and already people are beginning to think about what they will take back with them and how this experience can help motivate and drive forwards the peace work in our churches and well beyond our church landscapes.

Dr B has written a commentary piece for Protestantnews.eu which he begins by saying:

The International Ecumenical Peace Convocation in Jamaica symbolizes the emergence of a remarkable consensus among Christian churches on issues of war, peace and justice. Yet the task facing the ecumenical movement in the 21st century is now to work for a consensus on justice and peace that transcends cultural and religious boundaries.

The WCC's general secretary Olav Fykse Tveit is also setting out the way forwards more in terms of the Christian values of justice and peace being the core and truly fundamental values of Christian faith:

“I hope that from here we will have an understanding that we have some Christian values together that can be described in terms of justice and peace, and that these values unite us.”
Many churches are interested in clarifying the concept of how we as churches are peacemakers. I hope that we all can take back a renewed understanding of how the call to work for peace and justice is a Christian calling. This is actually what Christ has called us to do – to be peacemakers.”
The IEPC has been about gathering new ideas and a new sense of hope that is strong enough to help participants realize it is possible to make justice and peace a reality, not just a dream and a wish.

One of the things that I observe here is that the peace-making churches and groups undertake is on the one hand very grassroots based and orientated towards deep reconciliation between former enemies. As soon as we start working for peace we begin to see the inter-relatedness of all things, even local work for peace has to be global in its consciousness. Perhaps it is this renewed global consciousness and local rootedness which is in some ways renewing peace movements across the world.
On the other hand, though, at an international gathering there are also expectations and questions to the institutions, to the churches, the United Nations and the World Council of Churches itself. In the age of post modernity we often hear that this is not the time of institutions. Yet I sense a new breeze blowing, coming in part from the grassroots, from the way international institutions are using local information networks, twitter and crowd-sourcing information. This by-passes the national level sometimes and shows how the local and the global can mutually inspire and inform one another. The challenge then for any institution is how to be at the same time strong and organised but also open to the breath and energy coming from the grassroots. Bureaucracy meeting activism is always a bit of a challenge. However, here at the IEPC it does seem to be working rather well.

Stephen puts this rather differently and sets out the challenge for the WCC particularly in taking peace and justice issues forwards:
It is no longer enough to forge and to promote a consensus on justice and peace within Christian churches. Nor can issues of interfaith dialogue and cooperation be matters only for a few specialists, important as such expertise is. Neither is it question of simply seeking areas of common ground on which members of various faiths can already agree. Taking seriously the search for “just peace” in the 21st century means promoting authentic dialogue, one that may be marked as much by debate and disagreement as was the emergence of the ecumenical convergence seen now in Jamaica. In this process, alongside others, the World Council of Churches has a major role to play.

Meanwhile, at the back of the plenary tent in Jamaica there is a piece of net which people are encouraged to weave threads and fabrics through - weaving peace with justice. It will be taken back to Britain as a tapestry of our commitment and involvement. I've heard it said that the age of post-modernity will be followed and has to be followed by the age of creativity. As Margot Kässmann says in her opening essay in Ecumenical Review, peacemaking needs creativity. So perhaps each of us brought both our set ideas and stories to Jamaica, now the creative challenge is to take away some of our own story woven together with the story of many others. In the age of Twitter and Facebook perhaps this is easier than ever before as our walls are ways of weaving other people's stories into our own and ours into theirs.
So let's get weaving our take home souvenirs.

IEPC photo galleries

IEPC videos

Ugly Stories are human stories ...

This morning a package arrived addressed to Dr B but containing a present for me of the book Ugly Stories by Enrique Mayer. It was a wonderful surprise to get the book because I had been looking at another book of Enrique's online in recent weeks but hadn't even spoken to Stephen about that. I'd been looking at a book called "The articulated Peasant" and wondering about how a similar sort of title could work in urban and semi urban settings. The subtitle "Household economics in the Andes" triggered some passing thoughts on oikos, oikoumene and economics - how might economics or ecumenics be articulated in our different secular and ecclesial contexts? Perhaps I'll even have a chance to return to these passing thoughts one day.
Mayer is professor of anthropology at Yale University where the site says he:
specializes in Andean agricultural systems and Latin American peasantries. His work has shown that regions characterized by diversity (such as mountainous environments, small islands, and "marginal" lands), not suitable for agribusiness, are exploited by peasants in strikingly similar ways. Worldwide, peasant forms of production predominate and persist in these environments. These agricultural systems are important to those concerned about world genetic resources, or about environmental conservation, and to scholars who seek an understanding of ancient and yet also very contemporary Non Western rural life-ways.

I have never travelled to Peru nor have I ever met Enrique Mayer (yet), though it did make me smile that in some of the reviews of "Ugly Stories" he's described as "of Peruvian ancestry". I grew up looking at pictures of my parents wedding and being shown a good looking young man on my father's side of the family, someone I never saw at family parties, "that's Enrique" I would be told and his name always sounded splendidly exotic compared to the other members of the family. I suppose he is my second or third cousin and I did manage to engineer a meeting between Stephen and this part of my family when Dr B was travelling to Peru in 1996. By chance Enrique was also there, in part researching for what would eventually become "ugly stories". Over the years news of my family in Peru would reach me through both expected and unexpected routes - an Oxfam worker lodging with my landlady in Oxford who had worked with Maria Scurrah née Mayer - their aunt Lotte Carrive telling me my own mistakes in German mirrored those of Renate Millones née Mayer - and also regaling us with exploits of buying handbags when visiting (and embarassing) the family in South America.
Anyway it is wonderful to have a copy of Enrique's book for so many reasons. I've already devoured the introduction, acknowledgements and first chapter over breakfast. I was moved by his desciption of the painstaking way the book finally came into being - discarding much that was written more than a decade ago and then finally writing approximately a chapter a year each summer, relying on the encouragement of others, feedbook from those he read some of the stories to. It spoke to me of how things can come to fruition even after a long germination and growing time. Ugly stories are both human and deeply political, the book meshes together oral stories with scholarship. I'm looking forward to devouring more of it on my travels in coming weeks. And through reading I in some way get to meet the young man on my parents wedding photos as well as discover new areas of history.
I do also have to admit that the gift of a book at breakfast did not stop me buying further books from the Librairie Centrale at our trip round the market this morning.

Do no harm, leave a lingering trace ...

Bits and pieces of our lives interact in the living room piling system and the fragments of life made up of old newspapers, new books and things waiting hopefully for attention.
One of the reasons I still prefer real newspapers to the online variety is the serendipity of reading while (not) tidying up. So it was yesterday evening in my desultory attempt to look as if I might be cleaning up the sofa I got side tracked into reading Michael Billington's interview with Peter Brook. I found Brook's idea about a pared down Magic Flute which concentrates on the music, on character, story and situation rather wonderful. Even if I never get to see it, just reading about it inspired me to think about opera and also my own "performance art" liturgy in new ways.
However, what moved me and offered me some sense of meaning about my life was Brook saying this at the end of the article when asked about his legacy:

"What does touch me is when people come up to me in the street, as they sometimes do since they mistakenly think I've retired, and talk about some experience that has remained with them. That for me is the only real legacy: the idea that one has left a lingering trace in people's memories. In the end, that's all a director can hope to do."

Brook's humility of ambition - coupled with brilliant artistic vision- impressed me and moved me because it challenged me - I suspect that I would hope to leave rather more than a trace and yet I also know that at the end of my life probably the most I shall be able to say about my achievements is that I will have managed to offer grieving families meaningful funerals and joyful couples happy weddings. Fragmentary traces.
So I began pondering "impact" - our desire, my desire, to "make a difference" to "have a legacy" - and I thought about two women working in development I interviewed earlier this year. They were working according to the "do no harm" development principles - make a positive difference but don't just try to have impact for the sake of being seen to do something. "Do no harm" takes longer but tends to become the work of the people, of whole communities much more, and as a result of that it tends to be much more sustainable. In terms of providing rural communities with water say, that has to be a good thing. I have no idea whether it can be applied say to mission or ecumenism or church life but I like its conscious humility and desire to work with rather than dominate and impose. Yet I know how much, like Psalmist in Psalm 90, I am motivated by wanting my work to have a lasting result (Donne à nos travaux un résultat durable).
Meanwhile a further fragment of a lingering trace is Andrei Makine's latest book, (the entrance to my new place of work is framed by bookshops, this is not good and I succombed when visiting Paris this week) which beautifully evokes how even in a life of suffering brief eternal loves can be transformative.
So rather than having impact I shall hope to linger and to seek to be ambitious with my vision rahter than with my impact. Yet as I reflect on my carbon footprint and on the plastic bottles I will have used in my lifetime I shall also have to face up to the fact that be it impact or lingering, it will sadly not have been as sustainable or without harm as I might aspire to. So I shall focus on the hope of transformative eternal love.

Eschatology - some extracts from John Polkinghorne

On New Year's Day I started reading the chapter in the Polkinghorne Reader on eschatology ... my reading was in part triggered by our post-party new year's day brunch discussion with friends about faith and science.

I don't often quote large chunks of writing like this but reading this moved me - perhaps in part because this extract ends by quoting "Many waters cannot quench love" which was the theme for our marriage.

I like that things make sense for Polkinghorne - I don't entirely agree with him - about the active and powerful God. But reading what he says about the power and steadfastness of God's love made me realise that I feel a long way from such a sense at the moment - caught between desolation and the hope for perhaps unreasonable consolation.
Anyway it has been a joy to feed my mind by reading some of what Polkinghorne writes - now I shall have to read what Sarah Coakley writes about eschatology and see how it compares.

"Hope is the negation both of the Promethean presumption, which supposes that fulfilment is always potentially there, ready for human grasping, and also of despair, which supposes that there will never be fulfilment, but only a succession of broken dreams. Hope is quite distinct also from a utopian myth of progress, which privileges the future over the past, seeing the ills and frustrations of earlier generations as being no more than necessary stepping stones to better things in prospect.
If eschatology is to make sense, all the generations of history must attain their ultimate and individual meaning. Christianity takes the reality of evil seriously, with all the perplexities that entails. It 'refuses the premature consolation that pre-empts grief, the facile optimism which cannot recognize evil for what it is.' As part of its unflinching engagement with history, Christianity will recognize that episodes like the Holocaust deny to it any shallow conception of what hope for the future might mean, as if it could be divorced from acknowledgement of the horror of the past.
Holding in mind such a clear-eyed view of the woes and disappointment of history, one must ask what could then be the ground of a true hope beyond history? There is only one possible source: the eternal faithfulness of the God who is the Creator and Redeemer of history. Here Christianity relies heavily upon its Jewish roots. It is only God who can bring new life and raise the dead, whose Spirit breathes life into dry bones and makes them live (Ezekiel 37.9-10). Hope lies in the divine chesed, God's steadfast love, and not in some Hellenistic belief in an unchanging realm of ideas or an intrinsic immortality of the human soul. Christian trust in divine faithfulness is reinforced by teh knowledge that God is the One who raised Jesus from the dead. Only such a God could be the ground for that hope against hope that transcends the limits of any natural expectation.
This means that a credible eschatology must find its basis in a 'thick' and developed theology. A kind of minimalist account of deity, which sees God as not much more than the Mind behind cosmic order, will not be adequate. Nor will a kind of minimalist Christology, which sees Jesus as no more than an inspired teacher, pointing humanity to new possibilities for self-realisation and with his message living on in the minds of his followers, provide a sufficient insight into the divine purposes for creation beyond its death to be the ground of an everlasting hope. These concepts are too weak to bear so great a weight of expectation. To sustain true hope it must be possible to speak of a God who is powerful and active, not simply holding creation in being but also interacting with its history, the one who 'gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist' (Romans 4.17). This same God must be the one whose loving concern for individual creatures is such that the divine power will be brought into play to bring about these creatures' everlasting good. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is just such a God. To be persuasive, eschatological hope requires more than a general intuition that something must survive death. The problems that beset the realistic hope of a post mortem destiny are complex and demanding. They call for a corresponding richness and depth in our understanding of the power and steadfast love of God.
The question of eschatological hope is also the question of the fundamental meaningfulness of human life within creation. Are those moments of our deep experience when we glimpse that reality is trustworthy and that all will be well, intimations of our ultimate destinay or merely fleeting and illusory consolations in a world of actual and absolute transience? Moltmann says, 'Our question about life, consequently, is not whether our existence might possibly be immortal, and if so what part of it; the question is: will love endure, the love out of which we receive ourselves, and which makes us living when we ourselves offer it.' If God is, as Christians believe, the God of love, then love will indeed endure. 'Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it' (Song of Solomon 8.7) - not even the waters of cosmic chaos nor the tumultuous breakers of human evil."

Hope sleep and laughter - speech by Stephen Brown at the farewell to ENInews staff

'Hope, sleep and laughter'

Remarks at the farewell to ENInews' staff, 16 December 2010

First of all, my apologies. By the end of my remarks you will probably be asking yourselves what I have learned about post-colonial and gender perspectives during my 16 years at the Ecumenical Centre. For, as you will hear, my comments seem to revolve around the 'dead philosophers' society' - all the members of which, in this case, are white, male and European!!

Karl Marx, the German political economist, once wrote, "People make their own history but not in circumstances of their own choosing". It is no secret, I think, that the circumstances that we are marking today are not ones that I, or many of us here, would have chosen.

Rather than dwell on the circumstances, I prefer to concentrate on the first half of the sentence - the opportunity offered in whatever circumstances to make one's own history. Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher whose name has sometimes been confused with that of our current president, Anders (Gadegaard), put it like this: "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward."

Nevertheless, at an occasion such as this I also need to cast a glance backwards and give thanks for the enormous opportunities I have received over the past 16 years. I am and remain immensely grateful for these opportunities, and immensely proud of what we have achieved at ENInews. I owe an immense debt of gratitude to all those people and organizations who have allowed me these possibilities.

The danger of beginning to single out people for particular thanks is that either you read out a long list of names or that people who should be on the list are not there. So, I have decided to thank several categories of people, but these thanks should be understood as inclusive thanks to all of you.

Firstly, I want to thank the colleagues at ENInews I have worked with over the past 16 years: Eddie, Desirée, Danielle, Samia, Laurie, Peter, Valerie, Jean-Michel, Mylah, Doris, and David. Anything and everything that has been achieved is because we have worked as a team. Secondly, I want to thank the moderators and presidents of ENInews governing boards: Margot Kässmann, Jean-Jacques Bauswein, Robin Gurney, David Lawrence and Anders Gadegaard, for their advice, support - and belief in ENInews. Thirdly, the treasurers that I have worked with: Marianne Ejdersten and David Lawrence.

I also want to pay tribute to Jan Kok, who many of us still miss and who died much too young, for his vision and foresight in believing in ENInews and taking the action that made it a possibility (and Libby (Visinand) who did much of the actual work to prepare for ENInews). I want particularly to thank my current colleagues - Peter, Jean-Michel and David - for being such a great team. Particularly in the last weeks and months, we have been able to pull together, make sure the work gets done and support each other in what have not always been the easiest of times.

If I single out one organization, then it is the World Council of Churches. Without the opportunities I received from the WCC I would not be here today: attending the 1983 Vancouver assembly and a receiving a WCC scholarship to study in East Berlin in the early 1980s.

It was in Berlin that I first came across the saying of another 'dead philosopher', Immanuel Kant: "Three things help to bear the hardships of life: hope, sleep and laughter."

Those who know me know of my proclivity to be able to fall asleep anywhere, and almost at any time. But what I want to wish for all of us for the future, is not sleep, but much hope and laughter.


Stephen Brown

So what do you produce today? Or were you just a busy bee?

I have been practising at being a "poseure" today, sitting around reading Philosophie magazine which has a great dossier all about Voltaire but also a fun set of interviews about "une journée réussie" - what would constitute a perfect or successful day for you?
However what really caught my eye and attention was a very short notice about a book by economist Yann Moulier Boutang called L'abeille et l'économiste - the bee and the economist. What set me thinking was the idea that the actual contribution of bees to the economy does not come through what they produce - honey and wax, prized though these may be - but through polination. Through the activity of bees the whole of nature is fertilised, polinated, made fecund ... essential for the whole of life.
Boutang then uses this image of the bee to formulate ideas around cognitive capitalism and to illustrate the possibilities of moving from an economy of exchange and production to what he calls "an economy of polination and contribution".
I think what appealed to me about this image was how it could also offer an approachable for how indefinable things like trust, confidence and respect can be seen to work in systems and organisations. It's also a way of valuing the unseen work of relationship building and making life happen. So much for my passing holiday thoughts.

In an interview here, and the extract below in French, Boutang talks about the reasons that he chose the bee including that it features in Mandeville's fable of the bees. The bee also symbolises the destruction of the biosphere - uniformisation of crops is having a huge impact upon their health and survival.

J’ai choisi l’abeille pour trois raisons. Tout d’abord parce qu’elle est, avec la cigale et la fourmi, l’insecte qui a servi largement de parabole fondatrice de l’économie politique classique. Dans sa Fable des abeilles (1714), Mandeville a osé dire : les vices privés font les vertus publiques, alors que l’économie de matrice grecque et chrétienne affirmait que les vertus privées font les vertus publiques et qu’un bon prince fait le bien de ses sujets. Nous avons ensuite découvert que la valeur économique réelle des abeilles ne réside pas dans leur production – le miel et la cire –, mais dans leur rôle dans la pollinisation. Cette dernière vaut entre 100 et 350 fois plus que le produit marchand. En ces temps de crise écologique, l’abeille symbolise la destruction de la biosphère et notre intervention barbare dans l’environnement ; la destruction des jachères mellifères, les insecticides, l’uniformisation des cultures la touchent terriblement. Or sans abeilles, plus de pollinisation, sans pollinisation, plus de vie.

Being edified by thoughts about evil ...

Thanks to Nick Baines I recently came across Terry Eagleton's book On Evil and until a copy arrives in our household I've been posting some of the quotes that Nick has on his blog to my facebook page. For starters here's a bit from the blurb:

For many enlightened, liberal-minded thinkers today, and for most on the political left, evil is an outmoded concept. It smacks too much of absolute judgements and metaphysical certainties to suit the modern age. In this witty, accessible study, the prominent Marxist thinker Terry Eagleton launches a surprising defence of the reality of evil, drawing on literary, theological and psychoanalytic sources to suggest that evil, no mere medieval artefact, is a real phenomenon with palpable force in our contemporary world. In a book that ranges from St. Augustine to alcoholism, Thomas Aquinas to Thomas Mann, Shakespeare to the Holocaust, Eagleton investigates the frightful plight of those doomed souls who apparently destroy for no reason. In the process, he poses a set of intriguing questions. Is evil really a kind of nothingness? Why should it appear so glamorous and seductive? Why does goodness seem so boring? Is it really possible for human beings to delight in destruction for no reason at all?

As I was reading Nick's original post I realised that I hadn't thought much about evil - perhaps not something a theologian should admit. However the parts Nick Baines quoted really brought a smile of understanding to me. I felt strangely edified by thinking about evil in the way Eagleton seems to be suggesting - oddly heartening. Beginning to think about evil also led to a friend sharing an interesting quote from Karl Barth with me:
‎

"Die Torheit des Toren verbirgt sich mit sicherem Instinkt und Griff in ihr Gegenteil, sie gibt sich als Weisheit aus." Karl Barth, in KD IV/2 §65 Des Menschen Trägheit und Elend 2

Anyway for now here is part of what Nick Baines originally posted - I think these quotes are just brilliant!

[Evil] is boring because it keeps doing the same dreary thing, trapped as it is between life and death. But evil is also boring because it is without real substance. It has, for example, no notion of emotional intricacies. Like a Nazi rally, it appears spectacular but is secretly hollow. It is as much a parody of genuine life as the goosestep is a parody of walking.

Isn’t that perfect? He goes on:

Evil is philistine, kitsch-ridden, and banal. It has the ludicrous pomposity of a clown seeking to pass himself off as an emperor. It defends itself against the complexities of human experience with a reach-me-down dogma or a cheap slogan.

Wonderful! And then:

Hell is not a scene of unspeakable obscenties. If it were, it might well be worth applying to join. Hell is being talked at for all eternity by a man in an anorak who has mastered every detail of the sewage system of South Dakota.

I think I’ve met him!

But Eagleton, taking in Aquinas, Augustine and Blake, goes on to conclude:

…evil is a kind of spiritual slumming… The evil, then, are those who are deficient in the art of living.

You can find further reviews of Eagleton's book here, here and here - that final one is a review both of Eagleton's book and of one on Pessimism by Roger Scruton.

Is it ever right to torture?

On this morning's Sunday programme there was an excellent moral discussion on the rights and wrongs of torture between Philippe Sands and Alan Derschowitz, both professors of law and practising civil rights lawyers.
Derschowitz argued in favour of legislating for torture in democracies as a necessary evil and doing this openly, claiming that the choice between harm to an individual and possible prevention of mass loss of human life from information gathered justifies the use of torture in the age of terrorism.
Sands clearly affirmed that use of torture by democracies just helps terrorists recruit and that it is wrong and counter productive. It is also not proven at all that torture produces reliable or useful information.
You can listen to the Sunday Programme again for the next seven days, the discussion runs from minute 24 for six minutes. It's good radio and thought-provoking stuff.
You can guess from my choice of book to picture here that I took Sands' side - finding his arguments both more convincing and more in line with my own convictions. Find out more about Torture Team here. You can raed some of his commentary of the recent UK Iraq enquiry here.
You can find link to Derschowitz's prolific output here.

Forget whether wisdom is male or female, is it a sad or a happy virtue?

If you read that someone left an event "sadder and wiser" does that ring true for you? Would you be more likely to say they left "happier and wiser"?
Wisdom is sometimes celebrated as the female attribute of the Godhead in the Hebrew scriptures but until a slightly silly exchange of emails between colleagues today I had never really thought about whether wisdom was sad or happy. If you become wise would you imagine that you were happy, or would wisdom come at the price of sadness?
My sense is that wisdom is of the Spirit, it is inspiration and not an ontological state. Wisdom is not achieved once and for all. For me at least it is experienced and glimpsed fleetingly, a momentary state, because I am wise at one moment does not mean that I won't be delusional the next. Fleeting or not I tend to feel that wisdom should be a joyous, happy virtue, after all wisdom is about insight. Perhaps it is understanding and comprehension that bring sadness; seeing the world as it truly is and feeling a certain depression as a result.
Perhaps laughter is one way to wisdom.
So are you happy or sad? Are you sadly or happily wise?

Calvin and Hobbes - international symposium

When I first saw the announcement for the Calvin and Hobbes symposium organised by the French Protestant Faculty of Theology in Paris I had to do a bit of a double take. It is about looking at links between the thought of the English philosopher and the French reformer and lloks very interesting.

However when I first saw it, in my rather uncouth way I thought it was about the cartoon characters Calvin and Hobbes. theyare not so well known in France but I would have thought that would have made for a really interesting comparison! Perhaps someone will present a paper about that!

Resistance - the price of saying no and the springboard of virtue

On this Advent Sunday I have been reading more about resistance as I wait for the coming of God's republic of justice and joy.

Jacques Tarnero in the final essay in the book pictured here recalls Marc Bloch citing how Hitler in Rauschning said "We are right to speculate on human vice rather than human virtue. The French revolution appealed to virtue. We should rather do the opposite..."
Bloch comment on this is "That a French person is to be forgiven for preferring the teaching of Montesquieu's revolution to this message: the popular State needs the springboard of virtue".
Tarnero points out that of course many have also been
killed in the name of virtue. Nevertheless, and despite virtue seemingly being an unfashionable term, he claims that it is the (pre)condition for the very idea of resistance. Without the demands of virtue what would the limits be between what is acceptable and what is intolerable.
He ends his essay with this quote from Adam Michnik written from prison in Poland in 1984:
"Dans la vie de chaque homme vient un moment où pour dire simplement: ceci est noir et ceci est blanc, il faut payer très cher. Ce peut être le prix de la vie. À ce moment le problème principal n'est pas de connaître le prix à payer, mais de savoir si le blanc est blan et le noir noir. Pour cela il faut garder une conscience."


Les éditions autrement have brought out a series called "our values" - there are various titles on justice, friendship, citizenship and the one pictured here on resistance.
The series received support from the French mutual insurance company Macif's cultural foundation.

Religion gives you fever - and plenty to read

The much awaited issue of Philosophie magazine on the gospels, Paul and revelation has made its way to our household. It's a splendidly eclectic selection of short articles by philosophers on biblical themes. Stanislas Breton says that Western religion gives you fever "the Bible which is the book of humanity also justifies holy wars".
I was really attracted to the title of Vladimir Jankélévitch's article which is "Felix Culpa!" - how can joy be born out of sin. It's an interesting reflection on guilt.
I shall also open up some of the Paul Ricoeur on our shelves upstairs having read the short extract here called "tales of normality" referring to the new testament parables and saying how these normal stories open up the extraordinary.
I'm also looking forward to reading Rosa Luxemburg writing about John Chrysostom and looking at why Christianity failed to bring about the revolution.
Anyway lots of great bits and pieces here to make me think I might one day have time to follow up on some of this ... perhaps there will be time for philosophy if I make it to retirement!

Aristotle, leadership, communication, self-seduction, story-telling and transparency in the postmodern organisation

"The leader of tomorrow will be the communicating leader," says one of the reviews of the final book of my recent orders for my leadership diploma which arrived today - not a moment too soon. There is even more food for thought in this than in the previous books. The Expressive Organization seems in many ways to be about using imagination as a tool to unlock multi-disciplinary and holistic approaches to understanding the problems and potential answers facing contemporary organizations.
In the final part there is even a bit about using Aristotle's "on Rhetoric" to forge links between strategy and communication (Not sure what JK Gayle over on Aristotle's feminist subject would make of that).
The opening chapter in the Rethinking Identity section is called "Scaling the tower of Babel: relational differences between identity, image and culture in organisations". Some of the other sections are: The symbolic marketplace, Reputation as strategy, Organisations as brands, the Value of storytelling and Communicating Organizations.
The two chapters I'm most looking forward to reading are: "Valuing expressive organizations: intellectual capital and the visualisation of value creation" and "Identity lost or identity found? Celebration and Lamentation over the Postmodern view of identity in social science and fiction". That last one almost sounds like one of my more pretentious attempts to find a title for one of my sermons - or maybe a crime novel!
Now I just need to decide which chapter to read on the bus tomorrow morning as a preparation for morning prayer hmmm... perhaps "Organisational identity as moral philosophy: competitive implications for diversified corporations."

The philosophers' Bible part one

As befits the beginning of a week of holiday Dr B started it at the newsagent's. He came home with a fascinating array of reading matter, much of it about 1989 but more about that over on Holy Disorder.
He also brought back a special Philosophie magazine on the philosophers' Bible. You can read the table of contents here.
The issue brings together some original interviews with shorter extracts from various (mainly male) philosophers re-readings of parts of the Hebrew scriptures.
There have been some complaints that the articles don't go into enough depth but what I like about this approach is that it gives you a taster and sets various philosophical insights down next to one another, it's not pretending to be an academic journal. In France where all young people taking the baccalauréat have to study philosophy it also provides useful and attractive material for work with young people, linking the Bible to their academic work.
I'm particularly enjoying reading Eco, Benjamin, Trigano, Lévy and Barthes on the story of Babel. I'm already looking forward to the New Testament issue which will be out soon. Meanwhile the final extract in the magazine is by Jean Jaurès, the famous French socialist orator, pacifist, journalist and teacher. He also fervently defended the separation of church and state. there are roads named after him in most French cities. The extract quoted here celebrates the Bible as a book that teaches people to think if it is translated into people's own languages:

C’est dans la lecture de la Bible, traduite partout en langue vulgaire, que les peuples apprendront à penser, dans la Bible batailleuse et âpre, toute pleine des murmures, des cris, des révoltes d’un peuple indocile dont Dieu, même quand il le châtie et le brise, semble aimer la fierté, dans cette Bible où il faut que les chefs, même prédestinés, persuadent sans cesse les hommes et conquièrent, à force de services, le droit de commander, dans ce livre étrangement révolutionnaire où le dialogue entre Job et Dieu se continue de telle sorte que c’est Dieu qui a l’air d’être l’accusé, et de ne pouvoir se défendre contre le cri de révolte du juste que par le tapage grossier de son tonnerre ; dans cette Bible où les prophètes ont lancé leurs appels à l’avenir, leurs anathèmes contre les riches usurpateurs, leur rêve messianique d’universelle fraternité, toute leur ferveur de colère et d’espérance, le feu de tous les charbons ardents qui brûlèrent leurs lèvres. C’est ce livre farouche que la bourgeoisie industrielle a mis aux mains des hommes, des pauvres travailleurs des villes et des villages, de ceux-là mêmes qui étaient ses ouvriers ou qui allaient le devenir, et elle leur a dit : Regardez vous-mêmes, écoutez vous-mêmes. Ne vous abandonnez pas aux intermédiaires. Entre Dieu et vous la communication doit être immédiate. Ce sont vos yeux qui doivent voir sa lumière. C’est votre esprit qui doit entendre sa parole.

Le Bac Philo - sit down with an exam question and wax philosophical

Last Thursday all those taking the baccalaureate in France sat the philosophy exam with which the "le bac" traditionally begins. It provides some diversion for conversation at dining tables around the country at this time of year and tends to be seen as one of the more difficult parts of le bac.
Marc Vernon over on Philosophy and Life provides these translations of the choice of questions from this year's philosophy baccalaureate in France

• What is gained by exchange?
• Does technological development transform mankind?
• Is it absurd to desire the impossible?
• Are there questions which no science can answer?
• Does objectivity in history suppose impartiality in the historian?
• Does language betray thought?

Not sure I quite agree with this rendering of number 2 on that list - I tend to think that "les hommes" sexist as it is in French - should probably be rendered by a plural into English and I would probably choose human beings. There is a subtle but important difference between humankind (l'homme) and human beings (les hommes) which may be quite important in a philosophy exam, perhaps so as to argue that because technological development can transform human beings it may also transform humankind.
However all this goes to show that I would almost certainly have chosen to try to wax philosophical on Does language betray thought? All of these discourses on "l'homme" couldn't possibly betray any layers of sexism could they now, rendering "la femme" invisible linguistically betrays nothing at all.
You can read the full list for the sujet du bac by clicking on the link, one of the alternatives is to comment a text by Schophenhauer - translated into French of course.

Orhan Pamuk on Walter Benjamin

It is now well documented that the Stranz-Browns are waiting for another conversation about Walter Benjamin. Things keep offering us the idea that this might be possible. Today by chance I began reading Orhan Pamuk's wonderful book Other Colours. The preface is only two and a half pages long but full of wonderful quotes, of which more later, it ends with this which made me smile and may be part of another conversation about WB once I get back to Geneva:

I am hardly alone in being a great admirer of the german writer-philosopher Walter Benjamin. But to anger one friend who is too much in awe of him (she's an academic of course), I sometimes ask, What is so great about this writer? He managed to finish only a few books, and if he's famous, it's not for the work he finished but the work he never managed to complete." My friend replies that Benjamin's oeuvre is, like life itself, boundless and therefore fragmentary, and this was why so many literary critics tried so hard to give the pieces meaning, just as they did with life. And every time I smile and say, "One day I'll write a book that's made only from fragments too." This is that book, set inside a frame to suggest a center that I have tried to hide: I hope that readers will enjoy imagining that center into being.

What I love about this idea is that the fragmentary can truly become an "oeuvre". Of course that fragmentary writing needs in the first place to be of a slightly higher order than my own sermons sometimes scribbled on the paper tablecloths of the local pizzeria (really sermon writing is no longer so much fun since they went in for proper tablecloths). Leaving the oeuvre to one side though I think what appeals to me is that of course none of our lives will ever fully achieve, fully write all that they could. And yet in some ways they will also achieve so much more too, leaving meaning to be pieced together long after we are gone. Reminds me of a bit from Middlemarch which I've probably quoted before (yes I have -how boring am I?):

But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know.
Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Gardening is the way forwards ...

Volltaire is the one who said "il faut cultiver son jardin" - he meant it of course as much philosophically as practically, though he did drain the marches and plant vineyards and gardens around the château in Ferney. The philosophical finding expression in the practical.
Asked where she saw hope for transformation underway today Vandana Shiva replied that she found great hope for transformation in biodiveristy itself. "Things will emerge even if you do not have a meta pr ject. Even five years ago who would have predicted how many people throughout the world would be turning to gardening. Everyone used to say Oh I don't have time to garden. It's a key way of reconnecting ourselves spiritually with the earth, of grounding ourselves. We also learn to grow our own food."
I like gardening as a model for transformation - mind you my own is in a rather slow process of being transformed. Not quite sure what that says about finding new economic models. When I get back to Ferney i shall have to listen to Voltaire a bit more and cultivate my inner and outer garden a bit more.

Finally the beginnings of another conversation about Walter Benjamin

We have been waiting for another conversation about Walter Benjamin for over 25 years so Friday's Le Monde des Livres has given us much food for future conversation with an article entitled "WB, un rebelle en exil" reviewing both Bruno Tackels' Walter Benjamin. Une vie dans les textes and Antonia Birnbaum's Bonheur Justice Walter Benjamin.

The reviewer senses that "rather than interpreting Benjamin's writing through his life Tackels shows how his work was in many ways Benjamin's way of questioning his own existence."

It is a beautifully written review

[Les deux livres] nous permettent de mieux prendre la mesure d'une pensée aussi intempestive qu'inépuisable, qui irrigue - par des canaux parfois secrets - le plus vif de notre modernité.

and one word in particular from the review of Antonia Birnbaum's book sticks with me. Her book is based on a "shard" - une écharde - of an idea in Benjamin's doctoral thesis. One idea, two words, leading to a whole book. I think that is wonderful. It reminded me of Simone Sinn's preaching on Maundy Thursday on the idea of fragments, somehow I am finding great consolation in the philosophical, theological and linguistic potential of shards and fragments.
Now as for that conversation about Walter Benjamin, I rather feel we were too busy reading, writing, translating and packing to talk much about him - we really must set a date for a café des philosophes!