Beyond Religion

Sometimes it’s the little sentences that are the giveaway.

Inspired by my recent German visit, I picked up Peter Watson’s The German Genius, which I last abandoned near the beginning of chapter 5 (p.139 out of more than 900). It is a difficult kind of chapter about Immanuel Kant and German Idealism. Watson extols Idealism as an important attempt to integrate all knowledge and understanding in new ways.

Then adds

Ultimately, Idealism saw “culture” and “nations” as “higher” moral communities, stretching beyond individualism, the wholesome reflection of Christian duty. It went beyond religion and incorporated politics.

Only someone who believes religion is a private, individual matter, a consumer choice, could write that last sentence without embarrassment, or read it without bursting out laughing (or crying?) For a believer, you would have to say it the other way round: that a particular thing went beyond politics and incorporated religion.

Kirchentag 2013 in Hamburg

Kirchentag, or to give it its full title, Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchentag, is a gathering of all the German Protestant churches, which has been held every two years almost since the end of the Second World War.

The first thing you have to say about Kirchentag is that it is BIG. In terms of English comparisons, it’s as if every major Christian event we have in this country were rolled up together: Greenbelt, Christian Resources Exhibition, Spring Harvest, New Wine, and all the diocesan conferences and events at once. But this is not a collection of sectional interests, it’s mainstream. Each Kirchentag is held in a different major city: this year in Hamburg. It needs a whole city, too. In the course of 5 days, there may be up to 300,000 visitors of whom perhaps 100,000 have signed up for the whole thing, the rest as day- or occasional visitors. The 600-page programme booklet lists events in numerous venues throughout the city, in churches, open spaces, exhibition and conference centres. Lectures, bible studies, worship services, concerts, discussions, films and shows. The themes covered include not just theological ones, but every imaginable social, political, environmental, economic, ecumenical or cultural issue.

For something like 90 Euros, you can buy a ticket for the whole Kirchentag. This gives free admission to all the events, as well as travel on all the city’s public transport systems, throughout the Kirchentag. Then, hospitality is a great tradition of the Kirchentag. Many groups travel from all over Germany to take part, and they often share basic accommodation, for example in one of the city’s schools. (Because of this, all the schools in Hamburg were closed for a week’s extra holiday.) For those who prefer more comfort, and especially the many overseas visitors, accommodation in a private home is available; and in Hamburg last week, 12,000 visitors were welcomed into people’s homes. Hosts provide bed and breakfast free of charge, and often give much more of themselves besides, providing other meals as well as guided tours of their localities and church communities.

Nick Baines writes in his blog

The Kirchentag has to be experienced to be understood. The sheer enormity of scale is mitigated by an organisation that marries efficiency to intimacy. It is estimated that around 300,000 people will come through Hamburg for the Kirchentag in the next three days, but somehow it never feels hassled or crowded.

How does this work? Well, in addition to months of back-room organization, there’s also the presence of hundreds if not thousands of young helpers: scouts and guides and members of other church youth groups, who give up their week to ensure the smooth running of events. And have a great time into the bargain. For those of us who mostly know only the complete absence of teenagers in church, this army of young people is a huge surprise and joy.

Going to Kirchentag is bewildering, thrilling, exhausting. How can you even begin to try and go to everything you’d like to? Even if you choose from the programme the things you most want to see, there’s a good chance that others will want to see the same ones. The signs Saal überfüllt, or sometimes even Kirche überfüllt (ever seen that in England?) are strictly enforced. If the hall’s full, no way are you going to get in. I was so perplexed by the huge choice that I decided to let serendipity or the Holy Spirit guide me. I headed for the general area of the city I thought I might like to be in, and then just looked in wherever anything seemed to be happening. It probably worked as well as planning: this way I got to hear a masterly and deeply spiritual exposition of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, by a member of the Taizé community, and joined in various classical singalongs of Bach chorales and Mozart’s Requiem. (Note to self: listen to lots more Bach!)

Above all, the experience of Kirchentag is mindblowingly mind-broadening. The German church is so much further on than we are, in the complete acceptance of women’s ministry, including women bishops. They are much more at ease with the full inclusion of gays and lesbians in the life and ministry of the church. They are socially and politically engaged to a greater degree than the Church of England, for all our vaunted supposed voice in the affairs of State. Hey, politicians go to speak at Kirchentag because it’s important for them to be there: they value the views and support of the Church and Christians. (Ever heard of that in England? The land where there may be an Established – sic – Church, but most politicians “don’t do God”.) And it was challenging to be brought face to face with such a different view of Europe. A, well, EUROPEAN view. We are so insular, so little-Britainish. We only get the view of Europe that our politicians or tabloid press want us to see. There IS another, bigger continent out there. Do we still think that we can be an island, entire of itself? What would it be like to know that we are, after all, a part of the main?

I return home with a deep sense of repentance about my small-mindedness. My need to rediscover that we are actually a (tiny) part of Europe.

That’s just what I wanted to ask

Michael Cohen asks in the Observer, Why does America lose its head over terror but ignore its daily gun deaths?.

Reading about the ‘lock-down’ in Boston, when law-abiding citizens were more or less forced to stay in their homes, businesses ordered to remain closed, and the rest, I wondered how ‘free’ I would feel the society I lived in was, if it happened here. And Cohen makes this comparison between the lock-down, and the freedom that is supposed to be being preserved by the Sacred Second Amendment:

If only Americans reacted the same way to the actual threats that exist in their country. There’s something quite fitting and ironic about the fact that the Boston freak-out happened in the same week the Senate blocked consideration of a gun control bill that would have strengthened background checks for potential buyers. Even though this reform is supported by more than 90% of Americans, and even though 56 out of 100 senators voted in favour of it, the Republican minority prevented even a vote from being held on the bill because it would have allegedly violated the second amendment rights of “law-abiding Americans”.

And he reminds his readers of the real statistics: more than 30,000 Americans die in gun violence every year – compared to the 17 who died last year in terrorist attacks.

Thirty. thousand. a. year. Can that figure really be true? (I checked it on the Web – it was more than 30,000.) That is more than 82 people every day. Compare Afghanistan, surely one of the most dangerous places in the world right now. In 2010, the deadliest year since the fall of the Taliban government, there were 2,777 civilian deaths, 79.8% of them caused by insurgents and anti-government elements.

People of America! You know it makes sense: for your safety’s sake, emigrate to Afghanistan.

I’m going to Kirchentag

Every two years the Protestant Church in Germany, the EKD, holds a mega-church gathering. The only thing you could compare it with in English terms might be something like Greenbelt, Spring Harvest, New Wine and every other conference imaginable all rolled into one – but it’s mainstream as well.

It takes over a whole city: this year it’s in Hamburg, Germany’s second largest city, of 1.8 million. It’s attended by about 100,000 people from all over Germany and further afield, with many international visitors not only from Europe but from Africa and elsewhere. (And even from Britain…)

I went to the Kirchentag in Frankfurt on 2001, and I’m going again this year supposedly as part of this year’s Ministerial Development, but actually just because I want to, and I’ve been putting it off the last several times. I haven’t been to Hamburg since August 1966, when I was one of those very foreign language students that I now so roundly curse in Oxford. True, on that summer school in Buxtehude, we were about two classfulls – nothing like the millions who roam the streets of Oxford.

Buxtehude is a kind of joke in Germany: they call it the place where “die Hunde mit dem Schwanz bellen” – where the dogs bark with their tail. We Brits sometimes blame the Germans for having no sense of humour. But, you see, it’s just different from ours. Oh, so, very, different.

Mac and Back Again, from LinuxInsider

Mac and Back Again | Community | LinuxInsider.

Last but not least, Mac OS is “too costly if one factors in the cost of the hardware on which it runs,” blogger Robert Pogson told Linux Girl. “I recently costed a system comparing a Mac OS workstation versus GNU/Linux on better hardware, and the GNU/Linux solution was half the price.”

So, “if price/performance matters, then GNU/Linux is the way to go,” Pogson opined. “Developers need a lot of hunting and pecking, but they also need brute force to build software with parallel processing. No one needs Apple guiding/restricting them in the process.”

Coming Home To Linux

The desktop and the laptop are both getting a little old and slow, and so (with the alleged coming of spring) my thoughts turn to replacements.

I’ve been an Apple devotee for several years, but really, they are so expensive nowadays it doesn’t look like I’m going to be able to buy new ones any time soon. Are they really more expensive than my present ones, that I bought 4 and 5 years ago? I don’t know – but they certainly feel more expensive, when other techy things have been getting cheaper. Not only that, but I’ve been feeling a bit disillusioned about the locked-in aspects of MacOS – more drawn to Google and its syncing across numerous platforms – more at home with Android.

Perhaps it’s time to have another look at Linux? I was so pleased with myself when I used Linux some ten years ago. I only changed to Mac because for that little window of time I could afford to, and back then it ‘just worked’ in a way that Linux didn’t always.

So when I was browsing the sites, and especially OMGUbuntu, I was interested to see a review of the HP Pavilion 20, which you can get preloaded with Ubuntu – and it’s £100 cheaper than the model that comes with Windows 8. So here it is, my new desktop

Linux has changed quite a bit since my last adventures with it. Ubuntu especially is much more friendly, and recognises more of the hardware: wifi router, printers, etc. I dare say there will still be frustrations and headaches – this is technology, after all – and reasons why I just have to keep one of the old Macs going to sync with an iPod or whatever. But for the time being, I’m still enjoying a bit of a second honeymoon with the Penguin.

Women’s Stories The Lectionary Doesn’t Want Us To Hear

The lectionary for today has us starting to read Exodus, with the story of how there arose a new Pharaoh who knew not Joseph, and who subjected the Israelites to bitter slavery, building his treasure cities. And then growing afraid of the people he was oppressing (sound familiar?) and decreeing genocide by the expedient of infanticide of all males.

Tomorrow, we’ll be going on to hear about the birth of Moses and his first trip on the Nile in a basket.

Wait a minute! What about those missing verses between the two? Well, it turns out to be another one of those stories the lectionary doesn’t want us to hear. And – surprise, surprise – it’s another story about women, too. The faithful Israelite midwives who disobeyed Pharaoh and allowed the male babies to live. Here it is:

The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, ‘When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live.’ But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, ‘Why have you done this, and allowed the boys to live?’ The midwives said to Pharaoh, ‘Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.’ So God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and became very strong. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families.

Why, why, why? Surely someone who is part of the decision-making process about what goes into the daily lectionary has got the sense to ask, What is this saying about the Church’s attitude to women? Wouldn’t you think?

Father Brown

We’re working our way through recorded episodes of Father Brown. What a strange notion it was, to make 10 episodes and show them on consecutive weekday afternoons over a fortnight. Were they trying to reach the smallest audience they could imagine?

On the whole, we’re quite enjoying them. Apart from the part which the producers presumably thought was the main selling point: translating the stories from Chesterton’s late Victorian or Edwardian original, into that nostalgic Cotswold-y 1950s England that never was, the England of Miss Marple and the like. In spite of all the sub-texts of post-War austerity, consensus and xenophobic prejudice, it’s all too often just tacky. Not to say bizarrely impossible, e.g Father Brown celebrating Mass week after week in the plainly Anglican parish church.

It’s driven me back to read the Chesterton originals, of which I’ve only (I think) read The Innocence of Father Brown. I don’t remember thinking they were that great at the time, but they are much, much better than the TV version. I don’t say this as one who always does say that kind of thing. For example, I’d be prepared to listen to an argument that TV’s Sherlock is better than Conan Doyle’s original, even if you do have to know the original in order to appreciate it fully. But Chesterton’s originals are so much wittier, cleverer, and altogether more interesting. Perhaps they are slighter, too, and there isn’t really enough material in them to make an hour’s drama? But it is the very slightness – this is a truly Chestertonian conceit, perhaps? – that makes them truly substantial, deep and satisfying.

SwiftKey 3

So I’m playing with SwiftKey 3 on my phone and my tablet. Don’t know if I’m going to like it. It doesn’t always seem to predict my key strokes quite as well as it claims it does. Also I don’t always use just my thumbs for typing on these devices the way it seems to expect you to do. Ah well. Anyone else use it and have experience or wisdom to share?