Category: culture

mystified

wonderfulexchange15 Comments

Today has been the day of un-writable blog posts.

I wanted to write about the various links on Thinking Anglicans (here and here) about the escalation of the rhetoric of abuse against gay people in Nigeria, but I find I am lost for words at the inhumanity of what is being done in Christ’s name.  (Notice the suggestion that we should indoctrinate fear and hatred, and take action to rid the world of (and I quote)  ‘homos’.)

So, I went browsing to distract myself, and followed a link from a blog I know to a blog I don’t know, to a blog that person recommended, where I found this post arguing that a male pastor should never speak in private to a woman.  You will need to read the first half of the comments too.   The paranoia, the objectifying of women, and the  easy assumption that we cannot control our actions (except by excluding the one we’re afraid of) again leaves me speechless.

So there you have it.   You can go read about the things that make me too angry to speak, and perhaps find words where I have failed.

fish net

wonderfulexchange4 Comments

One of the books I forgot to mention in my list of partially read books was Jonathan Rosen’s The Talmud and The Internet.  The title is the best of it, I’m afraid, but as I trawled for ideas for an assembly, I stumbled on this:

The promise of the Talmud, I suppose, is that it isn’t a book– it’s a sort of drift net for catching God, stretching out through time and space in ever-widening spools.  The fact that just about everything else swims into the net — legal questions and sartorial questions and culimary questions and agricultural questions and calendrical questions and apistemological question, the Talmudic equivalent of porpoises and turtles and old boots — becomes part of the lesson the Talmud teaches.  It is the humble interruptions as well as the lofty aspirations that matter.  In that regard, the Talmud is a net for catching God, but it ensnares men and women in the process.

This is the Judaism I grew up with and encountered through classmates, neigbours, friends.  What happens in Gaza and the West Bank is as far removed from this — from the best of Judaism–  as the proposed bill in Nigeria is removed from common decency and any semblence of Christian love.

(oh dear, an innocent and lovely quotation seems to have turned into an excuse for buzzy bees.  still…)

too clever by half

wonderfulexchange9 Comments

The Archbishop of Canterbury has had a hard time today. Now, there have been plenty of days when I’d have liked to give him a hard time, but this was not one of them.

There are three reasons I do not want to pester him over what he said about Sharia law:

  1. I know very little about Sharia law
  2. I have not yet read all that said
  3. I have not yet had time to come to terms with why he said it.

Which I suspect puts me in a similar position to most of the country — in my knowledge base, if not in my reaction to the archbishop.

From what I have read, +Williams was making his usual fine distinctions: recognizing that aspects of Sharia law are already at work in Britain, suggesting that that is a reality we may need to live with, questioning whether therefore we should do so deliberately in terms of British law. More specifically, he was suggesting that there might be aspects of Sharia law which could be held within British law in the same way the law makes space for aspects of Jewish law, and even Church law.

That does not seem to me deeply offensive. Even if he is wrong, it does not seem offensive. He is simply asking for clear thought and debate.

The problem is, +Rowan Williams doesn’t talk in sound bites. His sentences are carefully weighed and balanced, with lots of clauses and qualifications along the way. Which means he is an easy target for the media.

And doesn’t the BBC love a battle? On their web-site they have excellent links explaining sharia law which put +Rowan William’s comments in perspective. But on the radio, they have given lots of time to people who seemed determined to misunderstand him, even quoting a listener who suggested that we should do what Williams suggested so that said listener could form his own religion and his own laws based on his own made up God (which shows just how little our culture understands about faith communities and the nature of truth claims).

We live in a very silly media culture and have a very clever (but not always savvy) Archbishop of Canterbury. Sometimes the two clash horribly.

See what Rowan Williams actually said here.