Journal

Newcastle Herald Op-Ed

“Recent census data in the United Kingdom and Australia indicates that rates of religious observance remain low. However, from marriage equality and reproductive rights to political radicalism and terrorism, religion remains ever visible in political life. So too, a quick pass through the cinema presents us with a popcorn of paranormal activity. The ghosts of religion haunt our secular societies, and this has prompted new research at the University of Newcastle.”

"Opinion: State of Religion in Politics" - http://bit.ly/17W0NaB

RIPL Public Forum

The New Institute is promoting a public forum on Religion in Political Life this coming Wednesday, 22 May, 7-8.30pm in the Newcastle Civic Hall's Hunter Room. The format will be a panel discussion with myself, Kathleen McPhillips and Terry Lovat discussing our work in the University of Newcastle's Religion in Political Life Research Program. Further details on the event can be found here.

Modal Religion

“In Australia, religious rhetoric in the political sphere seems designed almost specifically not to speak first, or most directly, to the religiously committed, who are likely to be already quite politically engaged and to have fixed their vote fairly firmly to one side of politics or the other.

Instead, its appeal seems aimed mostly at what Mol called the “modal” Australians who identify vaguely with tradition, do not go as far as to declare themselves atheist (like Gillard) or agnostic (like Hawke) but for whom religious categories speak of a nostalgic sense of safety and security.”

Marion Maddox, "God under Gillard: Religion and Politics in Australia," ABC Religion & Ethics - http://bit.ly/10aVOik

On Shipwrecks

I sometimes liken studying humanities at Newcastle to engaging the ocean beaches here. In the beginning of your studies you learn to swim, avoid riptides, and maybe start to body surf a bit in the waves. More advanced students eventually learn to make surfboards with wood lying about and some become quite acrobatic. Later even boats can be made and whole crews join massive research vessels that take off to sail the ocean blue. However, it seems to me that advanced studies in philosophy, religion and theology are something more akin to scuba diving. We study those ships that sink, interrogating their integrity under extreme conditions. Our task includes the various disciplines that surf and sail, maybe even sublating them to draw on Hegel's terminology. However, our aim is to look beneath the waves. It might be called an interest in substance, but probably best to leave it vague given how many ways we've come to think of being since Aristotle first identified metaphysics as such.

To some surfers it's hard to tell what we're doing, as we're invisible below the water. To others who care to peak, it seems rather odd that we might be interested in such de(con)struction. Still the passion for scuba is so strong that I've even known some of my colleagues to sink old ships intentionally and wait for the coral to grow. It's messy at first, but soon, whole new ecosystems develop. New schools of fish come to swim and eek out an existence (new sharks too). I've come to think that some of the new things we're doing in religion and theology at Newcastle require some sinking and settling. But there's a reef waiting for us if our wreck catches those age old ocean currents.

Spectacle of Possession

“There are a lot of monster-stories that express anxieties about what it means to be human. Vampires and zombies and werewolves are eloquent allegories about the fear of losing one’s humanity, but they aren’t terribly complicated. The 1970s movies about demonic children, however, are not just stories about losing yourself but about losing control over yourself. They are horrors of agency, meaning your capacity to be truly in charge of your actions. Don’t Look Now is so terrifying because it mixes the fear of losing a child with the fear of the supernatural, and shows how similar those fears are. Parenting means surrendering control—you get taken over by your responsibility and love for the child. Demonic possession is not so very different, if you believe in it. The devil and children are both scary because they rob you of your autonomy, so the devil being inside your child is a double-whammy of primal terror.

These films help explain Levack’s central argument, just as Levack’s book illuminates what makes these films so good. The key to the “popularity” of possession in early modern Europe, he says, is that it was a great spectacle. This is why films about possession work: possession is about agency but also humankind’s tendency to put on a show. Possession, in short, is very watchable.”

Generous Atheism?

“No matter how they answer the God question, generous-minded people could profit from adopting an attitude of critical sympathy towards religion and maybe even taking the odd dip into it – provided they heed Canon William Vanstone’s warning that the Church is like a public swimming pool, where most of the noise comes from the shallow end.”

"After God: What Can Atheists Learn from Believers?" New Statesman -http://bit.ly/10tPe3D

Religion in a Chinese MBA

“The executive M.B.A. curriculum at Cheung Kong includes classes on philosophy, Eastern and Western religion, global history and literature. ‘We hope our executive students can strive for enlightened lives — it may not be attainable, but it should be strived for,’ Mr. Xiang said.”

"In China, Executives Flock Back to Graduate School" - http://nyti.ms/XIAeRS

On Anti-Judaism

“It would be churlish to end on such a note. A good book—and Anti-Judaism is a very good one indeed—raises more questions than it answers. Nirenberg makes perfectly clear, with good reason, the questions that concern him most. Martin Luther’s onslaughts on the Jews were even more violent and destructive than those of his Catholic predecessors. Nirenberg shows that they arose in the first place from biblical interpretations hammered out in controversy with Luther’s theological antagonists. This, not actual conversions for which little real evidence exists, was the basis of his anxiety that the world was converting to Judaism. Nirenberg concludes, ‘I am not interested in contributing to arguments, so often dominated by apologetics and anachronism, about whether Martin Luther was an anti-Semite or an architect of the Holocaust. My point is that Luther’s reconceptualization of the ways in which language mediates between God and creation was achieved by thinking with, about, and against Jews and Judaism.’ Generalized to embrace the whole of Western intellectual history, this becomes a point of great importance. It will take some time to absorb its implications.”

"The Quarrels of Others: On Anti-Semitism" The Nation -http://bit.ly/YwqvQf

RIPL Seminars 2013

The Religion in Political Life Research Program continues its seminar series in 2013 with the following speakers:

  • 28 March, 2013, Dr. Russell Blackford, University of Newcastle, “Freedom of Religion and the Secular State”
  • 18 April, Dr. Catherine Byrne, Macquarie University, “Religious Education in Secular Australia”
  • 23 May, Dr. Tod Moore, University of Newcastle, “Calvinists and ‘Democracy’ in 1640s English Revolutions”

Venue:       Auchmuty Library Cultural Collections
Time:         Thursdays 3-4.30pm, All welcome for tea, coffee and nibbles
Contact:    Linda.Hutchinson@newcastle.edu.au, Executive Officer of the Humanities Research Institute, +61(0)2492 17915

How Movements Recover

“Like most of the world, I don’t know much about Pope Francis, but it’s hard not to be impressed by someone who says he prefers a church that suffers ‘accidents on the streets’ to a church that is sick because it self-referentially closes in on itself.”

David Brooks, "How Movements Recover," - http://nyti.ms/Xh8YVS

Handles on the Hereafter

“UC Riverside philosophy professor John Martin Fischer won a $5-million grant to study something that, in the end, is probably unknowable: immortality... ‘These questions have been great traditional questions in human literature, religion and philosophy for millennia,’ he said. ‘We do not think we are going make revolutionary advances that completely solve these problems. What we hope to do is to make progress toward understanding these issues better even if we can’t completely answer them.’”

"Using the Here and Now to Get a Handle on the Hereafter," LA Times - http://lat.ms/15PLpZP

Paradoxical Pope

Pope Benedict XVI resigned today and a few news programs in Australia wanted to discuss what it means. The first was a national radio program The Wire. The second was the local television network NBN, which aired a short comment on the 6pm news. Two things of note:

1. They were interested in the likelihood of a south american or african pope. On the one hand, the demographics support this. According to the numbers compiled recently by the Pew Forum, christianity is now a majority southern hemisphere religion. Pewforum.org has an excellent interactive map which compiles the numbers and allows you to easily see where the tradition is located. For instance, roughly 48% of roman catholics live in the americas, with 17% in the north and 31% in the south. Roughly 16% live in Africa (only 0.5% of those in the north), 12% in Asia Pacific, and roughly 24% live in Europe. So, if leadership represented the constituency you'd expect to see the americas play a part, and particular South America. But the actual politics of the Vatican can't be understood by the demographics. So, while some may speak of an Obama effect, where the leader represents a growing multicultural constituency, the likelihood is that it will be more of the Justin Welby effect, the new rather mainstay Archbishop of Canterbury in the Anglican Communion.

2. The other interest concerns Benedict XVI's legacy. I tend to think that he is likely to be remembered as a rather paradoxical pope. That is, he was a strange set of contradictions in a single person. For instance, he maintained all the symbolic power of the medieval papacy in a way rather out of sync with the modern age, e.g. the silk and gold vestments, the relics, and St. Peter's Basilica. At the same time, in the past few months he was seen tapping the first papal tweet into an iPad. The media became as interested in how many followers he had on Twitter as he did in the church at large. Whereas John Paul II integrated the media into the symbolic power of the papacy, Benedict XVI seemed to hold them apart. Another example is the 2006 Regensberg Address, on "Faith, Reason and the University." Here, he made a compelling argument for the relation between faith and reason. At the same time, he fumbled a negative citation from a 14th century Byzantine Emperor, deeply offending Muslims around the world. Lastly, whereas John Paul II integrated suffering and death into the papal witness itself, Benedect XVI seems to have held the office in tension with his frailty as an eighty-nine year old man, breaking with 600 years of tradition in his resignation. 

In short, Christianity is fast becoming a southern hemisphere religion. How these demographics will play out in the next leader of the roman catholic church remains to be seen. In any case, the legacy of this particularly paradoxical pope may be the contradictions he held in tension. This, in the end, may be a vital lesson for the future of this institution. 

Presence after Why

Trending on the NY Times this week is Maureen Dowd's posting of a priest's response to the recent shootings in Newtown. To the question, "Why, God?" he offers the following: 

“Implicit here is the question of how we look to God to act and to enter our lives. For whatever reason, certainly foreign to most of us, God has chosen to enter the world today through others, through us. We have stories of miraculous interventions, lightning-bolt moments, but far more often the God of unconditional love comes to us in human form, just as God did over 2,000 years ago.”

Two scriptures always come to mind at these times. Firstly, before the book of Job unfolds into a debate about justice and theodicy, Job's friends respond in silence, presence and empathy: "They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great" (Job 2.13, NRSV).  Secondly, notable both for its powerful echo of Job, much more its brevity: "Jesus wept" (John 11.35, KJV). Maybe more theology should begin in tears. 

Rowan Williams on Contemplation

“… contemplation is very far from being just one kind of thing that Christians do: it is the key to prayer, liturgy, art and ethics, the key to the essence of a renewed humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world with freedom – freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive habits and the distorted understanding that comes from them. To put it boldly, contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit. To learn contemplative practice is to learn what we need so as to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly. It is a deeply revolutionary matter.”

Archbishop of Canterbury's address to the Synod of Bishops in Rome - http://bit.ly/Q3kErr

Prison is like a monastery

“Prison is a good place to learn to really listen to your own mind and your own body. I’ve learned to read much more deeply, for instance. For four months, I had nothing to read but the Bible, so I read it for all four months—diligently, picking everything apart. Prison is like a monastery—it’s a place for ascetic practices. After a month here, I became a vegetarian. Walking in circles for an hour in that tiny dusty yard gets you into a pretty meditative state as well. We don’t get much in the way of the news. But enough to get inspired.”
— Nadezhda "Nadya" Tolokonnikova

"Pussy Riot: The Jailhouse Interview," GQ, http://gqm.ag/QswJuo

HEFCE Funds Free Religious Literacy

“While there is a widespread public awareness of religion there is a limited public vocabulary for the constructive exploration of issues and opportunities that religion and belief can raise.

Being religiously literate means knowing what questions to ask, how to ask them and understanding why they are important. By realising how religion, as a given or a chosen identity, is lived in a variety of ways by many thousands of staff and students, we can improve the quality of the learning experience and enrich the daily life of universities and colleges.”

Waiting for The Master

Waiting for the latest from Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master.  The Atlantic provides a recent recap of the development of his filmography: http://bit.ly/SPYijO

“After returning from the Second World War, having witnessed many horrors, a charismatic intellectual creates a faith based organization in an attempt to provide meaning to his life. He becomes known as “The Master”. His right-hand man, a former drifter, begins to question both the belief system and The Master as the organization grows and gains a fervent following.”
— http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1560747/

The Truth about Lying

“It’s all about rationalisation. If we can rationalize to a higher degree, we will be able to cheat more and think of ourselves as good people. And if we can rationalize less we would be more honest... We went to UCLA in Los Angeles and we asked about five hundred students to try and recall the Ten Commandments. But after trying to recall the Ten Commandments, when we gave them the same opportunity to be dishonest nobody was dishonest. In fact, when we take self declared atheists and we ask them to swear on the bible and give them the chance to cheat they don’t cheat. So this suggests that there is something about reminders that the moment we think about morality, even if it’s not our own moral code, all of a sudden we are kind of supervising ourselves to a higher degree.”
— http://www.youtube.com/user/theRSAorg

Pussy Riot's Theology

Timothy Beal writes on the Russian protesters Pussy Riot's theology on The Chronicle, - http://bit.ly/PgUqU5

'Yekaterina Samutsevich's statement explains succinctly that the band's "punk-rock adventure" was a creative, seriously playful engagement in the battle over the role of religion vis-à-vis state power. She describes an official state-media project that works to marry Putin's regime to the Russian Orthodox Church, with its traditionally strong "mystical connections with power," in order to establish "more convincing, transcendental guarantees of his long tenure at the helm."... Pussy Riot's religious opponents, Alyokhina says, treat the Gospels "as static religious truth ... that can be disassembled into quotations to be shoved in wherever necessary." On the contrary, she argues, "religious truth," including biblical tradition, "is a process and not a finished product," and it is given meaningful life not in the static institutions and dogmas of church authority but in the ongoing, creative processes of art and philosophy... Taken together, these statements are nothing less than a radical theological apologia for Pussy Riot's media altar crash.'
'About a week after the court's sentencing, Tolokonnikova sent a letter from prison to the cultural critic Slavoj Žižek, thanking him for his support and reporting, in a spirit of rejoicing not unlike that of Paul in his letters from prison, that "this has proven to be the continuation of the political liberation miracle-movement. ... The inmates are learning 'about the violence.'" To which Žižek replied not only with praise and encouragement but also with prayer: "It may sound crazy, but although I am an atheist, you are in my prayers. Prayers that you will soon see your family, children, friends. Prayers that you will at least have some time to read and reflect in peace while in prison!"'