Pluralism

Some Recent Watering Holes

Brenda L. Croft, ‘shut/mouth/scream’ (detail), 2016. Source.

I haven’t posted one of these for a while. Here are a number of pages I’ve appreciated visiting this past week or so:

Damion Searls on how psychiatrists used Rorschach tests to examine Nazis during the Nuremberg trials.
George Monbiot’s piece on being ‘Screened Out’.
Julian Cribb on why ‘coal will kill more people than WWII’.
Frank Brennan, Tim Costello, Robert Manne, and John Menadue reckon that ‘we can stop the boats and also act decently, fairly and transparently’.
The announcement about the National Gallery of Australia’s ‘Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial’ coming up later this year!
Chris Green’s Ash Wednesday reflection – Christ’s Death Lives in Us.
Steve Wright’s Ash Wednesday reflection – To dust.
Mary Beard is simply awesome: check out her piece on Seneca and her lecture on women in power, delivered at the BM.
For those within cooee of Melbourne, this looks good – Thomas Crow, Anne Dunlop, and Charles Green talking about theological originality in art.
Matthew Sharpe on Montaigne’s Essays.
Jane Hutcheon talks to Reg Mombassa.
Michael Hobbes on the epidemic of gay loneliness.
Jonathan Sacks on the architecture of holiness.
Rick Floyd has been looking for light in the shadow of death.
Jason Guriel on Christian Wiman and ‘kind of faith that a poet had better not lose’.
Queensland, a part of the country where most locals seem to espouse the philosophy that two wongs don’t make a white and which is not especially well known for a radical brand of Christianity, sees some religious fanatics charged for beating swords into garden hoes.
A funeral homily by Kim Fabricius, plus his good little introduction to Christianity.
Raimond Gaita on Donald Trump’s America.
John Milbank on the problem of populism and the promise of a Christian politics.
Scott Jackson asks, ‘Was Niebuhr a “Real” Theologian?’
The University of Divinity is seeking a Director for its Centre for Research in Religion and Social Policy (RASP).
Swee Ann Koh asks, ‘Is there racism in the church?’
Paul Collier reviews a couple of recent efforts to understand the logic and opportunities of, and challenges to, capitalism. Along the way, he has some insightful things to say about nationalism, ‘nationhood’, multiculturalism, and global citizenship too. (However, given the reality of religion, for example, it would be very difficult to defend the claim that ‘nationhood is the only force that has proved to be sufficiently powerful to bind millions of people together in a sense of shared identity’.)
Why students hate peer review, and how to make it work better for them.
Watching Umberto Eco and his books and books and books and paintings and books and books and ladders means that I will tolerate no more complaints on this subject, from anyone.
Speaking of no complaints, Doug Gay’s third public lecture on reforming Scottish Presbyterianism is now available here.

And this:

Gavin D’Costa on a Theology of Religions

In this video, Gavin D’Costa talks about his ‘move to the right’ from Rahner to the nouvelle théologie and Barth (‘the one key influence in this move … who [got] to the truth more than most Catholic thinkers’), about inclusivism, exclusivism and pluralism (which is ‘a type of exclusivism’), about soteriological universalism, and about post-mortem conversion.

The finality of Christ in a pluralist world

During a recent visit to the Diocese of Guildford, Archbishop Rowan Williams gave a lecture (based on John 14:5-6 and Acts 4:8-13) on the finality of Christ in a pluralist world. The whole piece is well worth reading, but here’s how he concludes:

‘[B]elief in the uniqueness and finality of Jesus Christ — for all the assaults made upon it in the modern age — remains for the Christian a way of speaking about hope for the entire human family. And because it’s that, we are bound to say something about it. We are very rightly suspicious of proselytism, of manipulative, bullying, insensitive approaches to people of other faith which treat them as if they knew nothing, as if we had nothing to learn and as if the tradition of their reflection and imagination were of no interest to us or God. God save us from that kind of approach. But God save us also from the nervousness about our own conviction which doesn’t allow us to say that we speak about Jesus because we believe he matters. We believe he matters because we believe that in him human beings find their peace. Their destinies converge and their dignities are fully honoured. And all the work that we as Christians want to do for the sake of convergent human destiny and fullness of human dignity has its root in that conviction that there is no boundary around Jesus — that what he is and does and says and suffers is in principle liberatingly relevant to every human being; past, present and future.

The challenge is partly re-connecting our christology (what we say about Jesus and the Trinity) with our anthropology (our sense of what belongs properly to human beings); and rightly understood, I think that the belief in Jesus’ uniqueness and finality allows us to do this. And, rightly understood, I believe it also allows us to encounter both the religious and the non-religious other with the generous desire to share, and the humble desire to learn, and the patience to let God work out his purpose as is best in his eyes’.