Author Archives: Justin Lewis-Anthony

About Justin Lewis-Anthony

A priest in the Church of England, who, either, has a "cocky" and "knowing" tone (Church Times), or is "a bold, idol-smashing thinker" (Catholic Herald). I masquerade as the 3 Minute Theologian (words about God for the Attention Deficit Generation) and evangelist for the "Killing George Herbert" movement in the Church of England.

Archbishop warns against ‘hero leader culture’

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… or so goes the headline on the BBC news report of the Archbishop’s first Easter sermon.

As well as fear a false view of people leads to hero leaders, who always fail. Put not your trust in new leaders, better systems, new organisations or regulatory reorganisation. They may well be good and necessary, but will to some degree fail. Human sin means pinning hopes on individuals is always a mistake, and assuming that any organisation is able to have such good systems that human failure will be eliminated is naïve.

I wonder if he has been reading an advanced copy of this?

Now here!

Meanwhile, in local news…

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There is a dispute about opposition to a proposed airport to be built in the Thames estuary. A local council has earmarked £35,000 as a “fighting fund”. Most people in Medway, possibly, are opposed to the building of the airport, but some people have called for a referendum to test the extent of the opposition, and to see whether £35,000 would be spent according to local will. The Deputy Leader of Medway Council (Conservative led), Alan Jarrett, doesn’t see the point of a referendum. First of all, it would cost too much (he says): anything up to £250,000. Second of all, and most impressively:

The assumption which we are correctly making is the vast majority of people are in favour of what we are doing.1

Stuff the Ballot!Read that again… ”The assumption which we are correctly making is the vast majority of people are in favour of what we are doing.”

I am really, really impressed, that the satire of Bertolt Brecht is alive and well and living in Tory-run Medway Council

  1. From here
    BBC News Thames Estuary airport: Row over Medway ‘fighting fund’
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Bryan Appleyard on “Dark Wealth”

“Shocking” is too soft a word to describe the crimes of the financial sector. They are almost thrilling in their creative abundance – laundering money for drugs cartels; defrauding old people, small businesses, investors and shareholders; rigging markets; sugarcoating dud loans to look like good ones; loading the world economy with ever greater levels of risk and throwing millions of people out of work. And so on. All the time, they were enriching nobody but themselves. The banks and their buddies have been on a crime spree that would have glazed over the eyes of Al Capone.

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The Triumph of the Therapeutic II

[Jung, Reich and Lawrence] tried, in their disparate ways, to go so far beyond psychologising that it would become a way of life, that culture would be destroyed as a system of controlling consolations and reconstructed as a system of more immediate releases of impulse… They did not so much seek some new consolation as that culture of release which would render the many consolations of high culture unnecessary. However, what they achieved was new consolations, locked forever in a struggle against defensive cultural ideologies.

Philip Rieff, ‘The Analytic Attitude’, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, (2006), p. 29

The Triumph of the Therapeutic

from Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn’s 2006 introduction to Philip Rieff’s seminal work:

Ephebe NarcissusWith nothing shared beyond a commitment to the self, which turns out to be a commitment to nothing, the individual lacks essential resources for flourishing in ordinary times and for solace in periods of great need. The anything goes mentality of niche marketing prevails, driving what qualifies as reading and thinking downward to new lows.

Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn, “Introduction (2006),” in Triumph of the Therapeutic: uses of faith after Freud, by Philip Rieff, 40th Anniversary Edition. (ISI Books, 2006), vii–xxvi.

 

SBNR (Hah!)

Here at the Beaker Folk, we are very keen to embrace people who claim to be “spiritual but not religious”. I find they tend to have very high discretionary spending levels, on things like self-help books, rosaries, tea lights and aromatherapy oils. Importantly, they aren’t often involved in regular standing-orders to religious organisations – which can be so tedious to transfer across – especially without asking them.

Exactly!

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