I will be at that little piece of heaven on earth, St Deiniol’s Library, Hawarden, this coming week, leading a course on Kill George. Details at the St Deiniol’s website.

If you are in the UK and haven’t already discovered St Deiniol’s, then why not? The national memorial for William Gladstone, it is the UK’s only residential library, with an amazingly comprehensive collection of history, theology, political economics and Victorian studies: “the most important research library and collection in Wales after the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.” The food is great, the accommodation is first rate, and the ambience is sublime. Plus, this week only, you get added Kill George for free (once you’ve paid the conference fee!)

It would seem appropriate to offer an attention deficit reflection on the biggest attention deficit Christian festival in the country. So, what did I make of GB10?

Remember to set aside the momentary panic that comes with arriving at GB. The search for a pitch for the tent; receiving the programme, and panicking about “what to see, what to do, when to do, what will I miss, is it all going to overwhelm me?” This too will pass. Brother Lawrence should be the patron saint of GB, or at least, the patron saint of arriving- the sacrament of the present moment is the only thing that will get you through Friday afternoon.

Friends: old, new and unexpected. This is the most important part of the GB experience. Eventually I fall into a rhythm: event, one hour off with friends, event, and so on. That’s how it should be.

Specific events and impressions:

Stanley Hauerwas is a lot ruder (and funnier!) in person than you can possibly imagine from even his most polemical writing. However, the format of reading from his memoirs didn’t really work; there was too much I wanted to digress from (what are the implications of that throwaway remark?), or needed more context (who is Fred?).

However, the evening session on “America’s God” was a remarkable presentation, critiquing the fascination (unquestioned) by most Americans that “civil religion” is the apotheosis of Christianity and civilization (especially on a weekend in which Glenn Beck was committing all kinds of heresy). Some apercus: “the American middle class is the best bought off peasantry in history”; there is a difference between saying curse words and using curse words; the English are the most uncivil people in the world (but in a good) way; the bishops of the Church of England are more interested in protecting their privileges than condemning the evils of nuclear weapons (one suffragan bishop squirmed in his seat at that one).

Cole Moreton (“award winning journalist” for The Guardian) was especially disappointing. His jaunty, inaccurate, broad-brush and incoherent history of the spiritual and religious life of Britain over the last twenty years was, and this is a technical word, rubbish. He wanted to hand major spiritual shifts on the passing of “minor” pieces of legislation (never making it clear whether the legislation was cause or symptom of said shift). So, for example, when the government changed Sunday trading laws, the Church of England surrendered its moral authority by investing in retail parks, including the Metro Centre. Why should we take any notice of what they say in future? At the same time, in the next paragraph, when the government loosed the country from the Church’s dead-hand monopoly on weddings (silly me! I thought that had happened in 1753 and 1948!), the Church of England refused to capitulate to the consumerist mood which was unleashed, by insisting that people attended church to hear their banns being called, and refusing to allow confetti in the churchyard, whereas the hotel down the road allows you everything you want, and gives you a glass of champagne to boot.

Which is it Cole? The Church follows the mood of the age (shopping centres) or the Church refuses to follow the mood of the age (weddings)? Or would you prefer to criticise for both approaches? I am always grateful when journalists write about religion: it makes me aware of how many half-truths are being peddled in the economics, sport, politics and international sections of the paper as well. (There was also a number of snidey “Unlike the Church of England, I belong to a church which actually believes something…” questions.)

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove: if you attended his talk on “does God want you to be rich?” expecting the answer “yes”, you would be disappointed. But not with the content and delivery of his talk, which, beginning with teaching an Anglo audience how to sing spirituals unaccompanied (“clap on 2 & 4 not 1 & 3), and going through the most touching and provoking stories, won the prize for “talk most likely to challenge my complacency” at GB10.

Giles Fraser on the Church of England and the English Civil War. There are some films which are made with such brio and panache that you are willing to overlook the plot holes. There are some films which, although tightly plotted, are made in such a lumbering, repetitive and unbelievable manner. Fraser’s talk combined the worst of both worlds: it was repetitious in its delivery, with digressions and cul-de-sacs where he obviously had just thought of something and wanted to shoehorn in it (John Locke sat next to Christopher Wren at school? Who knew?); it was fatally flawed in its analysis of the Restoration Church of England as the “peace treaty” for the long wars of religion from Henry VIII onwards— if the Restoration Church and the Book of Common Prayer was a peace treaty, it acted as the Versailles Treaty of peace treaties. It was victor’s justice, imposed with an iron hand, and crushing social and legal conformity. If it was a peace treaty, then why was it accompanied by Test Acts, Five Mile Acts, and Conformity Acts, and why do the non-conformist churches in England all date their founding from the reign of Charles II? (and it is no excuse to complain about the closed shop of the Guild of Historians, as Fraser did, either. History is interpretation, but it is based upon a number of agreed facts. Interpretation doesn’t trump reality). I have to say that the the audience loved what he had to say. I, on the other hand, think the talk might be worth listening to when Fraser finishes it.

All in all, GB10 was another excellent festival. The combination of intellectual stimulation and musical happenstance (which I haven’t even mentioned, but Megson and the Fancy Toys both deserve to be much more widely known), and the continual running into friends makes Greenbelt the oasis of the year, and water for a thirsty soul.

… will the same happen in the parish church?

… it appears that Kill George will be going in to reprint!

Poor Mrs “obioma Elechi”, widowed and made destitute by those rampaging Muslims. Her home and butchery business have been destroyed, and she is presently “and taking shelter from local shade made of palm leave over wood, which is submerged with flood whenever it rains”

Amazing palm trees in Nigeria: everyone wired for broadband so Mrs Elechi can email me with a plea for a “benign devotion” to “feed my (yawning) kids”.

Go into business selling broadband access, Mrs Elechi.

It was once a powerful expression. It once said something new, and exciting, and dangerous, and true. Now it is hackneyed.

How many times have you heard the exhortation to “speak truth to power”? In how many inappropriate situations have you heard applied the exhortation “speaking truth to power”.

It once meant standing up to those people and institutions who could directly and physically harm you. Think of Martin Luther King in Selma in 1965; Nelson Mandela in Rivonia in 1963; Mohandas Gandhi on the Salt March in 1930.

Now it merely means saying something irritating and self-righteous to those with whom you disagree. It is an expression of the ‘victim-culture’ of our day: Monty Python pinned it neatly with the “don’t you oppress me” sequence in The Life of Brian.

Every time you claim to speak truth to power you make a claim about your own powerlessness.

At the same time, you assert that your powerlessness actually adds to the truthfulness of what it is you say: I am truthful because I am powerless.

And very often, the people who are making these claims are Western, middle-class, university-educated, and wealthy beyond the dreams of 90% of the rest of humanity.

Let’s leave “speaking truth to power” to one side for a time, and think about our own complicity in the structural injustices of the world. It’s harder work than student posturing, but it is more grown up.

“No!” the usual answer goes. “Why should we vote for the man or woman who remains faithful to their spouse? How does that help the deficit down and the aeroplanes back into the sky?” Alasdair MacIntyre would beg to differ:

Managers themselves and most writers about management conceive of themselves as morally neutral characters whose skills enable them to devise the most efficient means of achieving whatever end is proposed. Whether a given manager is effective or not is on the dominant view a quite different question from that of the morality of the ends which his effectiveness serves or fails to serve. None the less there are strong grounds for rejecting the claim that effectiveness is a morally neutral value. For the whole concept of effectiveness is… inseparable from a mode of human existence in which the contrivance of means is in central part the manipulation of human beings into compliant patterns of behaviour; and it is by appeal to his own effectiveness that the manager claims authority within the manipulative mode.¹

Of course, to believe MacIntyre, you’d have to accept that our politicians belong to the genus “manager”, and who would believe that?

1. Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After Virtue: a study in moral theory, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth, 1985), p. 71 [↩]

An interesting passage from the “Sage of Concord” about the whiphand of conformity, and how we have to “act nice”, even if we don’t “feel nice”:

Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression. There is a mortifying experience in particular which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean “the foolish face of praise,” the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved, but moved by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face with the most disagreeable sensation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Essays: First Series, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson, vol. 2, 5 vols., The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1979), 32.

Today the Pope will issue a pastoral letter on the seemingly never-ending sex-abuse scandals in the Catholic church in Ireland.

As part of his preparation in writing the letter, last month the Pope summoned the bishops of Ireland to the Vatican for a meeting to discuss the allegations, the convictions, the cover-ups and the attitudes that led to such a sorry state of affairs.

The meeting did not go well, but not for any reasons you might have thought. There was little sense of shame, or contrition, or repentance, or reconciliation reported in the media, secular or catholic. Instead, The Tablet reported that a number of bishops were angered by the ceremonial formality of the meeting:

The Bishop of Killaloe, Dr Willie Walsh, said people in Ireland had been “rightly angry at the apparent pomp and ceremony and the kissing of the Pope’s ring” by bishops when they greeted Benedict XVI.¹

Really, Dr Walsh? Were the people of Ireland really angry that the Vatican palace is a formal and ritualised place? Were the laity of Killaloe pained on behalf of your hurt amour-propre? Was diplomatic and ecclesiastical protocol the major issue of the meeting? Tell me, Dr Walsh, how is life in the eighteenth century?

This was a meeting at which the chief pastors of a church, having utterly forgotten their responsibilities to pastor and care for the most vulnerable and trusting, were to be called to account. And you didn’t like the seating plan.

It seems that there are bishops, in all churches, who are men of strong and certain principles, chief of which is they are a very senior and important people², and should be treated as such. A friend of mine, who once trained baby cathedral clergy, told them the greatest challenge they faced in their ministry was the confusion between working in a big and important building and thinking themselves to be big and important people. Willie Walsh (obviously distracted by the BA strike) has succumbed.

Today the Pope will issue his pastoral letter. What’s the betting some big and important bishops will complain about the typeface?

1. ‘Vatican formalities anger hostile Ireland’, The Tablet, 13 March 2010, p. 42 [↩]
2. h/t Clayboy [↩]