Time for church to start again?

By Ian Harris               Otago Daily Times              October 14, 2016

JJ Murphy & Co is a pub in Wellington with features that remind one of a church. Amid its recycled gothic-style windows, stained glass and snugs suggestive of confessional boxes, customers drain their glasses, chat, play pool or slip into the gaming room. Not quite the atmosphere worshippers would ever have imagined.

There we gathered one evening last month to hear a panel of four ministers and academics give their views on what is happening in church life. The organisers, St John’s Presbyterian Church in Wellington and Victoria University’s religious studies department, noted that though the church today is much critiqued and frequently written off, it was also proving surprisingly durable — "vitality and innovation abound".

Hence their topic, The Church in Question. It sounded promising, and the pub was crowded with people thirsty for answers. In the event, however, that proved too much to expect. For one thing, two Presbyterians, a Baptist and a Pentecostalist don’t reflect the whole church. Other denominations would bring different perspectives. All harbour a range of viewpoints within them and all would no doubt assume other churches would do better if only they were more like their own.

The Pentecostalist certainly left that impression. .For me, the most forward-looking comment was that the church needs to re-think its theological content. Dr Susan Jones, of St Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, said the community had moved beyond infantile and old-fashioned assumptions still current in many churches, and asked: "Are we brave enough to look again at the content of what we are offering?"

Content of faith was the detonator for the great explosion that split the Western church at the Reformation, whose 500th anniversary falls next year. New forms of church emerged after 1517 in protest at a corrupted Catholicism. Circumstances today are far different. The church that was once the bedrock of society is now very much in question.

One reason why pressure isn’t building towards another explosion is that secular reality is chipping away at church membership, leaving no great energy for change. Another is that many who see change as necessary have abandoned their unresponsive churches. On the churches’ inadequate response to societal change, Bishop Richard Randerson said from the audience clerical conservatism was a problem.

Also, many ministers were either not equipped to engage openly with people who were not church members, or were fearful of doing so. That is in marked contrast to a challenging definition of the church as "the only institution in society that exists for the benefit of the non-member". The churches’ social service arms do splendid work for many who are not members. If they suddenly ceased, many vulnerable people would quickly notice the difference. At least that aspect of the church should not be in question — but the churches have to have the people on hand to carry it out.

Theological content, social services — what else? Even to insiders, church forms, structures, rules and processes sometimes seem more important than what Christian faith is supposed to be about. Innovation is curbed and opportunities go begging under the weight of ecclesiastical bureaucracies that should instead be enabling them to proceed. Structures should certainly be in question.

Then there are the hallowed buildings. Places to meet are essential, and local churches are centres of identity rich in their associations. But if they were under less pressure to build, strengthen, maintain and insure, might the churches be freer to engage more openly with their local communities in spaces they can share — and thus exist more obviously for the benefit of the non-member?

Standing back from such practicalities, it’s worth pondering what the church might be like if it were to take its central symbol of death and resurrection so seriously that it ruled off and started again. An insight by Irish-American John Dominic Crossan, a former monk, would be an excellent place to start. There’s an essential distinction between Jesus the man of history and the Christ, best seen today as Christianity’s archetype of love, grace and transformation.

Crossan says: "I presume there will always be divergent historical Jesuses, that there will always be divergent Christs built upon them. But I argue, above all, that the structure of a Christian will always be, this is how we see Jesus-then as Christ-now. Christianity must repeatedly, generation after generation, make its best historical judgement about who Jesus was then and, on that basis, decide what that reconstruction means as Christ now." That’s not quite the church in question. But it is the fundamental question for the church.
https://www.odt.co.nz/opinion/time-church-start-again

Desmond Tutu: I want right to end my life through assisted dying

Harriet Sherwood      Religion correspondent       Guardian/UK     7 October 2016

Just as I have argued firmly for compassion and fairness in life, I believe that terminally ill people should be treated with the same compassion and fairness when it comes to their deaths,” he added. “Dying people should have the right to choose how and when they leave Mother Earth. I believe that, alongside the wonderful palliative care that exists, their choices should include a dignified assisted death.”

Tutu had changed his mind over assisted suicide two years ago after a lifelong opposition but had remained ambiguous about whether he personally would choose such a death. He said: “Today, I myself am even closer to the departures hall than arrivals, so to speak, and my thoughts turn to how I would like to be treated when the time comes. Now more than ever, I feel compelled to lend my voice to this cause.”

He believed in the sanctity of life but also that terminally ill people should not be forced to endure terrible pain and suffering, he wrote. Instead they should have control over the manner and timing of their death. He added: “I have prepared for my death and have made it clear that I do not wish to be kept alive at all costs. I hope I am treated with compassion and allowed to pass on to the next phase of life’s journey in the manner of my choice.”

Tutu pointed to laws in California and Canada that permit assisted dying for terminally ill people. But “there are still many thousands of dying people across the world who are denied their right to die with dignity”.

Desmond Tutu: ‘For those suffering unbearably and coming to the end of their lives, merely knowing that an assisted death is open to them can provide immeasurable comfort.’ He said: “For those suffering unbearably and coming to the end of their lives, merely knowing that an assisted death is open to them can provide immeasurable comfort.”

He concluded: “In refusing dying people the right to die with dignity, we fail to demonstrate the compassion that lies at the heart of Christian values. I pray that politicians, lawmakers and religious leaders have the courage to support the choices terminally ill citizens make in departing Mother Earth. The time to act is now…”

Tutu, who won the Nobel peace prize in 1984, has been admitted to hospital several times, most recently in September, for recurring infections as a result of surgery for prostate cancer.Assisted dying is legal in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Albania, Colombia and Japan as well as Canada. Several US states have enacted measures on assisted dying, including Washington, California, Oregon, Vermont and New Mexico.

In September last year, the UK parliament rejected a bill to allow assisted dying for the terminally ill, with 330 MPs voting against it and 118 backing the measure, despite an opinion poll showing it was supported by 82% of the public. The same poll suggested that 44% of people would break the law to help a loved one to die, risking a jail sentence of up to 14 years.

Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, who sits in the House of Lords, urged MPs to reject the bill along with other faith leaders. Former archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey has argued for assisted dying to be lawful, saying such a move would be “profoundly Christian and moral”. Tutu wrote: “His initiative has my blessing and support – as do similar initiatives in my home country, South Africa, throughout the United States and across the globe.”

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/oct/07/desmond-tutu-assisted-dying-world-leaders-should-take-action

Pope Francis rejects rightwingers with US cardinals' appointment

Talk of ‘seismic shift’ in US catholic church with trio who have spoken out for women, immigrants and gun control
Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Rome             Guardian/UK              10 October 2016

Pope Francis has put his progressive stamp on the American Catholic church with the selection of three new like-minded cardinals – including one who has sparred with the Republican vice-presidential nominee, Mike Pence – in a clear rejection of bishops who have advocated for the church’s exclusion of divorced and LGBT Catholics. The American choices were among 17 new cardinals named by Francis. He has chosen more from the developing world and only one from Italy, reflecting his desire to decentralise power away from the Vatican in Rome.

In choosing these new cardinals – the “princes of the church” who serve as the pope’s primary advisers – Francis has made it more likely that his successor will be a moderate or progressive. It also partially balances out the influence of the cardinals chosen by his far more conservative predecessors, Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.

The choices could create a “seismic shift” in the Catholic hierarchy in the US, according to John Allen, a commentator from Crux, a Catholic news publication. While the selection of Joseph Tobin of Indianapolis, Kevin Farrell of Dallas and Blase Cupich of Chicago could not be considered liberal by conventional political standards, Allen wrote that each was considered to be part of the “centrist, non-cultural warrior wing of the country’s hierarchy”.

Of the three, Tobin was the surprise choice, in part because cardinals are usually chosen from the main centres of power in the biggest Catholic countries, and Indianapolis does not fit the bill. He has sought a greater voice for women in the church and was involved in a high-profile battle with Pence last year, after the Indiana governor – a former Catholic who converted to evangelical Protestantism – fought Tobin’s efforts to resettle Syrian refugees in the state, claiming they posed a security risk. The archbishop prevailed.

Cupich is also seen as an advocate for Francis’s agenda and has encouraged other archbishops to be a voice for workers and immigrants. Irish-born Farrell has been a vocal supporter of gun control laws.

“The picks show Francis wants the church in America to be more focused on issues like immigration, the role of women in the church and the need to bypass traditional centres of power in order to find leaders who smell of the sheep, as the pope has put it,” wrote Michael O’Loughlin, a journalist for America Magazine, a Catholic publication.

Only 13 of the 17 cardinals Francis has elected will be eligible to vote in the next conclave because of age restrictions. Three of the new “electors” come from Europe.

The choices were noteworthy in part because of who Francis passed over for promotion, including the staunchly conservative archbishop of Philadelphia, Charles Chaput, who presides over one of the largest Catholic archdiocese in the US. Chaput made headlines this summer when he released his own interpretation of a document that had been written by Francis that was meant to encourage priests to show more “discernment” in their treatment of Catholics who had divorced and remarried, as well as other practices that fall outside church doctrine.

Instead of emphasising the latitude Francis seemed to encourage in Amoris Laetitia (Joy of Love), Chaput set out his own rules, including that remarried Catholics who wanted to receive communion needed to abstain from sex and live as brother and sister, and that lesbian and gay Catholics could still opt for heterosexual marriage with children notwithstanding “some degree of same-sex attraction”.

There was only one Italian among the new cardinals: Mario Zenari, the pope’s ambassador to “loved and tormented” Syria. Calling the promotion a “surprise”, Zenari told Vatican radio that the honour was a gift to the victims of Syria and all those who suffer in the conflict.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/10/pope-francis-rejects-rightwingers-with-us-cardinals-appointment-archbishop-blase-cupich

Saudi Arabia is being attacked by both Sunni and Shia leaders

Robert Fisk                    Independent/UK                   22 September 2016 

The Saudis step deeper into trouble almost by the week. They are now reeling from an extraordinary statement issued by around two hundred Sunni Muslim clerics who effectively referred to the Wahhabi belief – practiced in Saudi Arabia – as “a dangerous deformation” of Sunni Islam. The prelates included Egypt’s Grand Imam, Ahmed el-Tayeb of al-Azhar, the most important centre of theological study in the Islamic world, who only a year ago attacked “corrupt interpretations” of religious texts and who has now signed up to “a return to the schools of great knowledge” outside Saudi Arabia.

This remarkable meeting took place in Grozny and was unaccountably ignored by almost every media in the world, but it may prove to be even more dramatic than the terror of Syria’s civil war. For the statement, is as close as Sunni clerics have got to excommunicating the Saudis. Although they did not mention the Kingdom by name, the declaration was a stunning affront to a country which spends millions of dollars every year on thousands of Wahhabi mosques, schools and clerics around the world.

Wahhabism’s most dangerous deviation, in the eyes of the Sunnis who met in Chechenya, is that it sanctions violence against non-believers, including Muslims who reject Wahhabi interpretation. Isis, al-Qaeda and the Taliban are the principal foreign adherents to this creed outside Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The bad news kept on coming. At the start of the five-day Hajj pilgrimage, the Lebanese daily al-Akhbar published online a database which it said came from the Saudi ministry of health, claiming that up 90,000 pilgrims from around the world have died visiting the Hajj capital of Mecca over a 14-year period. Although this figure is officially denied, it is believed in Shia Muslim Iran, which has lost hundreds of its citizens on the Hajj. Among them was Ghazanfar Roknabadi, a former ambassador and intelligence officer in Lebanon. Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has just launched an unprecedented attack on the Saudis, accusing them of murder. “The heartless and murderous Saudis locked up the injured with the dead in containers...” he said in his own Hajj message.

Yet the Iranians have boycotted the Hajj this year claiming that they have not received Saudi assurances of basic security for pilgrims. According to Khamenei, Saudi rulers “have plunged the world of Islam into civil wars”. However exaggerated his words, one thing is clear: for the first time, ever, the Saudis have been assaulted by both Sunni and Shia leaders at almost the same time.

The presence in Grozny of Grand Imam al-Tayeb of Egypt was particularly infuriating for the Saudis who have poured millions of dollars into the Egyptian economy since Brigadier-General-President al-Sissi staged his doleful military coup more than three years ago. What, the Saudis must be asking themselves, has happened to the fawning leaders who would normally grovel to the Kingdom?

“In 2010, Saudi Arabia was crossing borders peacefully as a power-broker, working with Iran, Syria, Turkey, Qatar and others to troubleshoot in regional hotspots,” Narwani writes. “By 2016, it had buried two kings, shrugged off a measured approach to foreign policy, embraced ‘takfiri’ madness and emptied its coffers.” A “takfiri” is a Sunni who accuses another Muslim (or Christian or Jew) of apostasy.

Kuwait, Libya, Jordan and Sudan were present in Grozny, along with – you guessed it – Ahmed Hassoun, the grand mufti of Syria and a loyal Assad man. Intriguingly, Abu Dhabi played no official role, although its policy of “deradicalisation” is well known throughout the Arab world.

The conference itself was opened by Putin, which shows what he thinks of the Saudis – although, typically, none of the Sunni delegates asked him to stop bombing Syria. But since the very meeting occurred against the backcloth of Isis and its possible defeat, they wouldn’t, would they? That Chechenya, a country of monstrous bloodletting by Russia and its own Wahhabi rebels, should have been chosen as a venue for such a remarkable conclave was an irony which could not have been lost on the delegates. But the real questions they were discussing must have been equally apparent.

Who are the real representatives of Sunni Muslims if the Saudis are to be shoved aside? And what is the future of Saudi Arabia? Of such questions are revolutions made. [Abridged]

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/saudi-arabia-attacked-sunni-shia-leaders-wahhabism-chechenya-robert-fisk-a7322716.html

Donald Trump on terror is just McCarthyism for a new age

imon Jenkins                          Guardian/UK                       21 September 2016

The Republican candidate for the presidency, Donald Trump, now reacts to any terrorist incident with crude cynicism. While the incessant killings of Americans by Americans prove only that America needs more guns, a failed killing by an American Muslim is “a terrible thing that is going on in our country … an attack on America”. The hamfisted New York bombing suspect, Ahmad Khan Rahami, was to Trump not just guilty before trial but a “foreign enemy combatant”, to be detained indefinitely until the end of hostilities.  

Trump complained that the United States “will now give [Rahami] amazing hospitalisation, the best doctors in the world, and probably room service”. Worst of all his “punishment will not be what it once would have been”. As for Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, he accused her immigration policy of being directly responsible. He said: “We now know why terrorists want her so badly to be president.”

In the potential leader of a great democracy, this is alarmist drivel. We should also be careful, since the exploitation of existential fear has long been a feature of America’s isolated political culture. In 1950, a little-known American senator, Estes Kefauver, achieved national fame by holding televised hearings into America’s “organised crime”, drawing on blood-curdling fantasies of a Sicilian-American “mafia”. 

The televised hearings were at times ludicrous. The search for “a mafia” was subcontracted to Hollywood.  

Two years later another senator, Joe McCarthy, decided to exploit a different “existential” scare. His committee investigated what he claimed was the “massive” penetration of the government and military by communists and homosexuals. Fear of a spurious threat to the state was turned into a witch-hunt by McCarthy and his aide, a certain Richard Nixon. There was a red under every bed – and a blackmailer in it. McCarthy, until his mental collapse, became a national celebrity.  

Likewise with Trump. The New York bomber was no more attacking America than, in Britain, Lee Rigby’s killers were “attacking Britain”. Why lend them such glory? These are pathetic groups, sometimes just individuals, committing nasty crimes. For better or worse, it happens every day. That the criminals occasionally yell, “Allahu Akbar” should be neither here nor there. That they may have travelled to the Middle East or downloaded jihadi tracts is a legitimate concern to the police. It is not a threat to the stability, let alone the existence, of the state.  

The west’s response to jihadi terrorism since 9/11 has been wholly counter-productive. Under the pretext of “public reassurance”, it has sown the seeds of fear in the hope of harvesting votes of gratitude. If one harvest has come in votes – George Bush and Tony Blair did very well from 9/11 – the gourmand at the feast has been terrorism itself. Osama bin Laden’s tiny cabal has been turned into a global movement, drenched in blood, retribution and violent glamour.

Clinton’s reaction to the New York explosions may have seemed pedestrian, but it was correct. It was to counsel responsibility, “smart law-enforcement and good intelligence in concert with our values”. This was the opposite of Blair’s response, which was to declare that 9/11 “changed the world” and “rewrote the rules of the game”. I could hear Bin Laden cheering.

Violence in a political cause is as old as history. Civil terror is a classic tool of the weak against the strong. In the case of modern jihadism, brutal mayhem has yet to deliver it a stable caliphate. But it has laid its groundwork in ethnic and religious polarisation between Muslim and non-Muslim. It has undermined the tolerance of western democracies. From America’s detention without trial to Theresa May’s snooper’s charter, it has slit open the soft underbelly of liberalism.

Such a gain for terrorism is the result of foolish politicians looking for cheap votes – and the media looking for cheap headlines. Scaremongering, the search for a foe against whom to pretend to defend the state, may be as old as terror itself. But given the absolute security of modern America and Britain, it is a dangerous self-indulgence. It should be excoriated. It is not the bomb that is the terrorist’s accomplice but the response to the bomb. It is not Rahami but Trump’s response to Rahami that we should fear. [Abridged]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/21/donald-trump-on-terror-mccarthyism-for-new-age