My 2009

Excuse an even more self-centred post than usual, but it’s that time of year. I don’t do the round-robin letter, but I do find myself trying to take stock.

What was 2009?

At home…

In 2009, we didn’t move house, change jobs or have a baby. That makes a change. (Actually when I thought about this I realised that we didn’t do any of those in 2004. Or 2002, when we got married instead. But in all previous years we’ve been “about to” do some or all of those). Also in 2009 on the domestic front, a Really Bad Thing About To Happen Any Time turned into an Ongoing Inconvenience.

So, sometime in 2009 Gavin and I looked at each other and realised we had something called normal life.

This has taken more getting used to than I had expected. Living from crisis to crisis, in slow motion, becomes a way of life. One gets used to there always being some large unresolved Issue sitting in the corner glowering, and one keeps a corner clear for it and throws it a biscuit occasionally. I think by the end of the year I had just about reached the point where I swept out the Issue corner so it could be used for something more productive.

And agreed to be co-clerk of our Quaker meeting, which might fill the space just nicely.

At work…

I got back into things. It took time. It took longer than I’d expected, and was stranger than I’d expected. I learned a bit more about sin through the experience of a large institution; and I realised that quite a lot of the time it’s the students who keep me sane. Who would have thought it?

And…

I acknowledged that I had become tired of focusing on Being Good (being green, being right); and did not quite work out what to do with it.

Most of my worries now are on behalf of my children and my students. Very big worries, about the unsustainability of the life for which we have educated them. Perhaps this is the real sign of entering middle age.

New atheism

Just read a thought-provoking article by Michael DeLashmutt in the Expository Times about the challenge posed by the “new atheism” for the teaching of theology and religious studies. DeLashmutt focuses, not on the arguments of the new atheists qua arguments, but on the power of their discourse to affect the starting assumptions, the “naive” beliefs, of students of theology and religious studies. He makes the interesting point that many lecturers in TRS (particularly, let’s say, T) have grown up with the working assumption that their major challenge is to enable students to think critically about their uncritically-held – naive – religious beliefs. Now, however, we are likely to have to deal with another challenge – enabling students to think critically about their naive atheistic beliefs-about-religion. (Note that neither he nor I would assume that all atheism, any more than all religion, is naive or uncritical, nor that our goal in life is to make students change their minds). It is unlikely, I think, that the best way to do this is via direct engagement with the arguments of leading “new atheists”, since the problem is often not so much the “arguments” as their starting assumptions. My own hunch is that we still need to do much more plugging away at “religion does not equal belief-system” (and that goes for theologians as well as religious studies scholars).

Will to live

Another little chip was taken out of mine when I looked at the “style guide” and “tone of voice guidelines” [sic] circulated to all staff in the University of Leeds today. Read them, noting that this comes at a time when academics in the (internationally renowned) School of English are threatened with compulsory redundancies, and weep.  (Incidentally, there should, I think, be a prize for the person who spots the most grammatical and punctuation errors in the style guide. I found three on the first page, without trying very hard).

Can we fix it?

I watch quite a lot of Bob the Builder and (ironically, given my height or lack of it) often empathise with Lofty the crane. As you will, of course, recall, it is he who responds to the cry of “Can we fix it?” not with a resounding “Yes, we can!” but with a distinctly unconvinced “Er… yeah, I think so”.

That’s rather how I feel at the moment about the whole climate change thing – please excuse the inelegant expression, but you know what I mean. I know I should be shouting with the team that’s convinced that we Can Fix It (and therefore committed to putting all their efforts into attempting to do so). I know that the best way to ensure that nothing changes is to assume that nothing can change. But I can’t muster a resounding “Yes, we can”, and I remain bothered about what we do if we can’t. Really quite bothered. Accompanied in my daily life by “this way of doing things can’t last, and there is no obvious way out”.

One thing I’m pretty sure about, though. I am not going to talk to my children (well, make that my older child, the one who’s old enough for it to be relevant) about climate change. It is not his problem; it is mine. Children are not the people who need educating on this. I am not going to scare or upset him with dying polar bears (which I know is the bit he’ll remember if someone tries to explain climate change to him), unless anyone can convince me that there is some benefit in doing so.

My version of education for sustainability is as follows: I am going to continue to do my very poor best at bringing him up to know himself to be loved, to care about other living things, to think about the consequences of his actions, to enjoy simple things, and not to assume he can have whatever he wants. Oh, and to understand that we can’t fix everything. On the basis that I can think of few future scenarios in which this will not be a useful education.

Education, education, education

I watched part of the film that came free with Saturday’s Grauniad, last night (until a phone call took priority). Slightly higher pundates’-opinions-to-evidence ratio than I like in a documentary, and some lazy cinematic cliches (polar bears on melting ice for “the challenges the world faces”, etc), but still thought-provoking. Some of it we (Grauniad readers) already know. Yes, of course, the education system (by which they seem to mean the school system; in the bit I saw there was no mention of higher education other than some establishing shots of Cambridge looking pretty, as scene-setting for the Germaine Greer interview) is often training people to pass tests, not to think; and the more you test them, the more incentive there is to learn to pass tests, rather than to think. The moment at which I cheered at the TV was when one of the teachers interviewed said words to the effect of “sometimes the [pupils] I worry about are the ones who succeed; they learn how to succeed by being really good at doing what we tell them, and how do they cope when they leave school and don’t have that safe framework for success?”

Of course if I were really cynical I’d say “well, perhaps they go and work in one of the many jobs that used to be professions, and are now surrounded by people telling them exactly what to do and how to succeed – like teaching…” (Incidentally, there was one throwaway comment with which I couldn’t agree – that the education system seemed to be designed for future “university lecturers”. The education system, up to age 16, may have liked me, but I strongly disliked it).

The point still holds. And it gives food for thought. The film also shows one young man’s struggle with the school system and its struggle with him, and depicts very effectively (this being its point) an enormous and sad waste of time, energy and human potential.

As someone who both takes from and puts into the education system (teaching undergraduates many of whom go on to be teachers), I am worried about the”do what it takes to pass” culture, the anxiety about “getting it right”, and the ways in which it kills learning. I’m not particularly happy, either, about the way the larger system of which I am part selects for, and labels, success and failure.

I do, I think, still believe (see a previous post on my other blog) that an arts/humanities degree gives people important skills, attitudes or virtues (hat tip to Mike Higton there) that make a difference to their ability to contribute to the greater good, and that are worth devoting time to. I am not always sure, to be honest, how the capacity to develop these skills, attitudes or virtues meshes with the capacity to do well in the education system.

Impact

The word of the day in UK academic research is “impact”, which means, roughly, research being noticed or making a difference outside “the academy”. (They don’t appear to count research-led teaching, which is the main way most of us have an “impact”. Nobody said this was all fair or logical). I object to the term “impact”; the image is very macho, very top-down, very important-scientist-saves-world-and-rest-of-us-look-on-in-awe, very inappropriate to subjects where human beings are studied. Still, it’s what we’re stuck with.The fashion in arts and humanities is to talk the even-more-horribly-named “impact agenda” (who invents these things?) down; and with many, many good reasons, mostly to do with the fact that we have as yet seen no good definitions of “impact”, its nature and its measurement, that would remotely do justice to the way research and its reception actually works.

I do not, however, have a problem with the idea that public servants ought to be able to give some kind of public account of the value of their work. And I have even less of a problem with the idea that my colleagues who give talks and write articles and offer advice for all sorts of “non-academic” groups should finally start getting some credit for this, rather than having to do it in their “free time” and feel vaguely guilty about not spending that time doing real academic work.

Research ideas

OK folks, so I have two-and-a-half reasonably clear ideas of what I could do for my next research project. That is two more than I had two weeks ago, so I am pleased. However, it’s clearly also one-and-a-half too many. So, what do you think; which should I do?

A. Book of which at least half the title is “Theology in Quaker Terms”. In which I take some key “terms” and phrases for Quaker thought and practice – terms that carry the weight of tradition and of ongoing reflection and action, and that also link us to wider traditions of thought and biblical interpretations -  unpack them descriptively (what is the “weight”, in terms of thought & practice, that they carry among Quakers; how do they illuminate what Quakers are about), and discuss how they relate to more familiar/conventional (for non-Quakers) theological “terms” – and hence how they, and the community that values them, represent a distinctive contribution to theological thought and indeed a distinctive interpretation of scriptures. (Preliminary list of terms includes: [the] Light; testimony; right ordering; answering that of God in everyone; Friend[s]; concern; etc). This doesn’t aim to be “a Quaker systematic theology”, nor “an explanation of why Quakers are an OK sort of Christian really”, nor a “history of Quaker thought” (the former two are I think deeply problematic, the latter is done better by other people). But with a bit of work it could be useful both for Quakers who are interested in understanding themselves, and for non-Quaker theologians (and people with an interest in theology).

B. So I wrote this book about “theological ethics for future generations”, and I think it’s OK but hardly anyone will read it.  Meanwhile I’m still getting quite bored with the kind of ecotheology that says “we should all look after the planet and here’s why”.  In the book I suggested that the interesting question is not “why should we look after the planet?” nor “is religion green?” but “when we all know there’s a problem, why is it so difficult to do anything about it?” (Theologically, the interesting issues on environmentalism are, in my humble and possibly unread opinion, not about creation but about sin). I have since added to that the question “where are the religious resources to deal with guilt, powerlessness, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it terror, and other human side effects of the environmental crisis? How, really, do we cope with this, and what in our religious inheritance lets us look it properly in the face? Not “what tells us to go and Do Something?” but “what enables us to cope with what we can’t Do?” ” And I don’t see a lot of theologians addressing that question directly – though I think there are some; but I am aware of responses emerging among people of faith who are environmentally concerned. And I’d like to do some work that develops some ideas from the book (eg about how to read “end of the world” texts and why they might be useful), and engaging in dialogue with people who’ve thought about this a lot (eg through the Good Lives project at Woodbrooke) and ends up perhaps by writing something more people would read.

C. Half an idea – I have a bit of a book already written, on rethinking theology through motherhood. It’s the maternity leave project that never happened. Perhaps I should go back to it before my children grow up… but it was never going to be an “academic” book, so, sadly, there are disincentives to spend too much time on it.

Other organisations running low on cash…

… include both the Society of Friends (Quakers) and the Church of England. I had a lot of conversations about the latter at the American Academy of Religion, and was almost surprised by how upset I got.

Quaker heresy: I realise that I care a lot about the Church of England continuing to be there. Partly, of course, because it employs some of my friends and provides a religious “home” for many more of them, but more importantly because of what my friends do; being the church people can go to when, for the first and perhaps only time in their lives, they need a church. And being there for them.

I mean, we’re there for anyone as well, but (because of what we’re like for lots of other good reasons) ”anyone” doesn’t find us, and we don’t have the resources (of all kinds) to deal with everyone. We don’t, in general, for example, bury just “anyone”. (And actually if all that the more “findable” church did was - be there for bereaved people, whatever their religious beliefs, who find they need to do something at the end of a life – that would itself be an enormous gift).

Well, I think about this, and other reasons I care a lot about what happens to the Church of England, and I keep coming back to what I realised while I was studying theology (in a majority-Anglican context): viz. that some of my friends were called to be Anglican priests (I mean, not just sincere in thinking they were called, but really called), and I, as far as I could make out, was equally called to be something that’s supposed to exclude a separate priesthood and (historically at least) an established church. 

So, as far as I can make out, there are in the world not just different-and-complementary vocations, but, apparently, contradictory vocations. And that’s just on one example (though my blogroll honours a range of different vocations - you should read these people ) and before we’ve even begun to talk interfaith. And the contradictions, for me at least, are not just puzzles but also profound and ongoing sources of blessing. (Incidentally: I receive blessings at communion services. It seems to acknowledge the “this-doesn’t-make-sense-yet-but-God-brought-us-all-here-and-here-we-are” aspect of the situation).

Added on rereading: Looks like this ties up to the Graham Swift post, below. I didn’t realise I had so few ideas.

More bad news from the academy

The University of Gloucestershire is cutting posts in Biblical Studies on a rationale that looks rather dubious; more about it here.

The future for higher education, and for the arts and humanities in particular, is, I have to say, looking pretty bleak from where I sit.  At the American Academy of Religion conference all the talk, from both sides of the Atlantic, was of austerity measures, hiring freezes, redundancies, pay cuts. We, in my line of work and those like it, are unprofitable. We are hard to manage. We are hard to explain. We are, especially where there’s no such thing as tenure, relatively easy to get rid of. Ho hum.

I’m running through ideas for other things I could do with my life, not because I think I’m about to need them but because it’s good to have a parachute. Suggestions welcome…  we don’t need me to earn lots of money, but I need me to have lots to think about.

Graham Swift on justice and love

Before the flu hit I read Graham Swift “The Light of Day” (overall verdict: if I’d read it before I read “Last Orders” I would probably have thought it was AMAZING and told everyone to read it; as is, they might as well read “Last Orders”, which does a lot of the same stuff plus much much more; but this is still better than most).

One passage jumped out at me, where the narrator muses on what his ex-wife retained from the Christian faith she abandoned, and then moves to his own ’secularisation’ of a half-remembered piece of teaching about God:

“I remember some passage being read out somewhere, that there’s no sinner so bad, so worthless, that God will ever let them slip through the net of his love… And whether he’s up there or not, and whether he’s got a net, I don’t know. But I think that’s how it ought to be, just among us. There ought to be at least one other person who won’t let us slip through their net. No matter what we do, no matter what we’ve done. It’s not a question of right and wrong. It’s not a question of justice. There ought even to be someone for [the violent criminal whose case he was involved in as a police officer], even [him]. I don’t know who it is. I know it’s not me”.

This strikes me as fascinating on many levels – not least within the story and the development of the narrator’s character (he’s constantly negotiating the space between questions of “justice” and questions that, as he puts it at another point, go “beyond the law”(!) without abrogating the law).  There’s something about the moral division of labour; justice has to be executed and the “net” has to be spread out, and both are the right thing to do, and usually they simply cannot be done by the same person.(On a trivial level, I remember the first and only time I “eldered” someone in a Meeting, and was of course terrified about the upset and hurt that this would cause while still pretty clear that it had to be done, and was told very directly by a much more experienced Friend “that was fine, you did the right thing, and now you leave him to the Meeting to look after, other people will deal with it). I think much of my dissatisfaction with “ethics of care” thinking arose from a sense that anything at all about justice was being portrayed, not just as limited, but as Bad (masculinist, rationalist, etc etc etc). Increasingly I feel we run short of ways of talking usefully (which also means e.g. without patronising anyone) about the non-systematisable range of different moral tasks.

Oh yes, and I’ve always been keen on the tradition of Torah-interpretation that has one divine name for the “attribute of justice” and another for the “attribute of mercy”. And yes, I suppose I could write a lecture on atonement starting from here (might work better than starting from the novel of that name).