Author Archives: Bashir S.

Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness

21 Thursday Mar 2013

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Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness. Ashgate, 2012.

Pamela Sue Anderson has just published her second full-length book on the feminist philosophy of religion and I would argue that it has been well worth the wait! The ruling metaphor of the book is taken directly from an essay by poet/feminist Adrienne Rich (“When We Dead Awaken,” 1971) who wrote about the necessity of ‘re-visioning’ the past. Re-visioning indicates the vital life-giving work of looking back at the traditions of the past, ‘seeing with new eyes,’ entering from a new critical – in this case, feminist – direction. Only by confronting powerful past assumptions about women contained within their styles and stories can we hope to move on from the distortions all of us – men, women, the transgendering – have suffered on the account of sexist or misogynistic structures and systems.

In this spirit of re-visioning Anderson provides us with a range of meticulously worked through examples. Feminists of course have been discussing the issues for a while – in 1998, the year in which Anderson’s first essay into this area – A Feminist Philosophy of Religion phil, Blackwells – was published, another feminist philosopher of religion, Grace Jantzen proposed her own solution – Becoming Divine, Manchester University Press – to the problem of sexist or misogynistic structures in ‘religion’ by suggesting that what women needed was a parallel concept of the feminine divine, that could contest the violent, death-obsessed stories of masculine divinity in the Christian west. Now as then Anderson resists this path on the grounds that divinity is not a free-floating concept, but one already caught up in a web or gendered interpretation. Yet for those who think the issue is ‘over and done with’ Anderson’s book shows clearly that she thinks a kind of scepticism and complacency about gender still very much exists, not the least in discussions that take place under the heading of the academic study of the philosophy of religion. It is a kind of scepticism or complacency made apparent, for example, in the words of a theologian like, T J Mawson, who claims that ‘“no sensible theist has ever thought that God really does have a gender”’ or in the view that provided one is ‘clear-headed’, patriarchal bias can be avoided (Anderson, 2012, 176). As Anderson patiently but quite relentlessly, persists “the point is to question whether ‘clear-headed’ thinking can avoid any gender-bias in the traditional philosophical arguments for Christian theism, especially when such terms as person, action and love, along with adjectives like personal, incorporeal, loving and the pronouns he, his and him are all applied to God’ (Anderson, 2012, 176). There are also many references in this book to the work of French philosopher, Michèle Le Doeuff and to her idea – the ‘philosophical imaginary’ – that whilst gender bias and sexism are not very often on display in plain sight in our civilised western society, they invariably inform the spaces behind or inbetween, where we find ‘stories about men and women, myths about divine and human, imagery and asides about male omniscience and female humility’ (205-206). In other words, the fact that someone like Mawson can afford to ignore his own ‘epistemic locatedness’ has as much to do with the philosophical imaginary that is sustaining his unacknowledged privilege as a male academic theologian – the assumption of male neutrality – as it has to do with any genuinely universal validity to his argument, philosophically interrogated.

And this is what Anderson dares to do in a field that is notoriously challenging for women, defying in a spirit of love and justice, any suggestion that women cannot be philosophers of religion or that they cannot enter and offer insight to any philosophical discussion they might choose. She is rigorous, tenacious and undaunted, equally at home with the broad traditions of analytical and continental philosophy and always ready to challenge, on reasoned grounds, the implication that ‘here at least’ there is no ‘gender issue.’ So for example, in citing a discussion held in 1999, between the ‘continental’ philosopher Jacques Derrida and the Oxford ‘analytical’ philosopher, A.W. Moore on the ineffable – already a rich and lively philosophical debate touching on knowledge, truth and the infinite – she does not dismiss the discussion but neither does she flinch from making the point that these considerable thinkers do not make reference to gender when it would be philosophically appropriate to do so:

There may be a common core concern in the variety of masculinist, feminist and other philosophical attempts to show what is ineffable. Yet when we add gender to the mix it suddenly becomes clear that values are added to the task: philosophy is called to be serious or playful, sense-making or nonsense-producing, effable or ineffable, rational or corrupt; the values of these terms and their gender seem initially arbitrary; but they matter when it comes to ethics and justice, if not a sort of truth, that is worth having. Certainly, if we follow Moore an urge to orientate our finiteness, in knowing how to be finite, exists and it seems most valuable. However, to exploit this urge, in order to establish a (more) common concern: to better orientate our finiteness, we do perhaps need to admit the gendering of our relations. (Anderson, 2012, 85-86).

Critically speaking, whatever ‘religion’ might be in this philosophical context – and Anderson recognises other kinds of assumptions about the use of the term, aside from those relating to privileges of gender – this re-visioning or rich philosophical probing of epistemic locatedness in relation to traditional so-called ‘religious’ stories about love, reason and truth, provides us with an impressive model of how to ‘come at’ the philosophical imaginary, not simply destroying or dismissing the texts and discussions of the past, but having the courage to take them on from new perspectives – and therefore being able to ‘live afresh’ (“When We Dead Awaken’’).

Critical Religion and Female Genius

10 Monday Dec 2012

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What are some of the implications of the discussion of critical religion for feminist and gender theory making?

If part of the rationale for critical religion is to explain the ways in which the terms ‘religious’ and ‘religion’ frame and perpetuate forms of colonialist or western-centred thinking and acting in the world, then there is a clear connection: the nature of colonial discourse and the manner of its practices, have commonly been aligned with forms of Christian theological authority, carried in wide ranging missionary activity throughout the world.  The gendered binaries of spiritual/material or spirit/flesh, derived from or supported by Christian theologies, still haunt us in the tendency to regard women and the female as better fitted for certain roles that tend to be less well rewarded in terms of money and influence.  Recent analyses of the colonial subject/other strongly resonate with feminist and gender analyses of the hegemonic, patriarchal subject/other; woman like the non-westerner continues to be viewed as hostile, constantly in need of control or repression as they threaten the structures and boundaries that colonial, heteropatriarchal societies set up to maintain their privilege and security.  The force of male normativity, often still difficult to detect, continues to hinder and hamper attempts to level the playing field.

In this context, it seems that a sizeable proportion of western feminists have also found the binary categories of ‘religion’ and ‘the secular’ – i.e. what is critiqued within discussions of ‘critical religion’ – useful, on the grounds that it allows women to dissociate themselves from powerful ‘religious’ – i.e. arbitrary – justifications of male authority. In a hopeful manner, they have  put their faith in the autonomous exercise of reason that produced this distinction at the beginning of the European enlightenment, because here at least in the realm of so called ‘secularity’ they believe there is some chance of proving themselves the equal of men.

But of course forms of hegemony are resilient and deeply rooted.  Even when the idea of a divine warrant for female culpability – and thus for the blameworthiness and moral inferiority of all women as daughters of Eve – began to lose its hold  on the popular imaginary, there were still plenty of other ways to challenge a woman’s free access to what might be called equitable female subjectivity.  In my book, Because of Beauvoir, I look, for example, at the notion of ‘genius’ as one way in which the idea of male superiority has been sustained from the earliest years of European Romanticism right down to the 2010 Channel 4 series, Genius of Britain.  In this series about key British scientific figures, four male and one female commentator – physicist, Kathy Sykes  – present the ‘genius of Britain’ in relation to a series of exclusively male figures: Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke. Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and Edmond Halley.  The fact that such an obvious gender imbalance provoked little if any disquiet at the time – are there really no British women in the field of science worthy of the title, ‘genius’? – seems significantly to support my argument; male hegemony cannot be neatly isolated within so-called ‘religious’ entities like ‘the Christian Churches.’

At the same time, is it just or fair to represent all women who call themselves Christians, for example, as either victims of, or collaborators with patriarchy?  In my book I focus on four women writers, who might qualify as female geniuses all of whom have strong connections with English Christianity; drawing on ideas proposed by Julia Kristeva and Christine Battersby amongst others, that our western idea of ‘genius’ has been overwhelmingly gendered as male in the past and that this needs to change.  Kristeva boldly claims that the achievement of an equitable subjectivity within the context of an unavoidable male hegemony, is itself a matter of genius.  She herself nominates three notable women – philosopher, Hannah Arendt, psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein and writer, Colette – but her definition of genius in each case, stresses the sense in which they bring their creative ideas and actions to birth without denying those things that make them female – pre-eminently in the value they apportioned to the desire and embodiment of the non hegemonic fe/male which are discounted in definition by the male.

In other words, this redefinition of genius, opens the title up to a much increased range of women and forms of creative activity by going beyond the disembodied and god-like, and frequently also melancholic and isolated configuration of  towering masculine genius, whose work contributes to a normatively male culture and economy; it can include both women scientists working with mixed gender teams and women giving birth to children and educating them.  And of course, it can include women who are inspired as visionaries as well as by revolutionary or highly critical movements of all kinds.  What comes into being as a result of this female genius can have just as profound an impact for one person or many of different genders, but more significantly, it is, above all, the joyous achievement of forms of female subjectivity in unpromising circumstances that are not usefully divided up and evaluated as either ‘secular’ or ‘religious’.

The Bible and Homosexuality – Guidance for the Perplexed

16 Monday Jul 2012

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Recently I came across a new book that I thought shed some useful light on the issue of homosexuality from a Hebrew Bible perspective. The book is The Bible Now: Homosexuality, Abortion, Women, Death Penalty, Earth, by Richard Friedman and Shawna Dolansky. In fairly short space it sets out a summary of most of the major arguments about specific Biblical references to homosexuality in the Hebrew Bible, those Jewish scriptures which overlap to a considerable extent with the Christian Old Testament.

Firstly they are very clear that the law in the Biblical book of Leviticus (notably, Lev 18:22 and Lev 20:13) cannot simply be wished away (p. 26). So for those who regard the Hebrew Bible as their moral pole star, the prohibition on (male) homosexual behaviour in the Hebrew Bible has to be addressed. But at the same time, they argue that we cannot ignore the context of these references either. It is a very different context to that of most contemporary western readers. For one thing, people in the ancient near east did not make the distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality as if it were a distinction between equal concepts. Heterosexuality was the norm across all these cultures. Homosexuality was not – as it is today in many parts of the world – a life-style choice or a marker of individual identity.

What these biblical prohibitions on homosexual behaviour seem to reflect in fact, is a widespread construction of sexual relations as relations of power; sexual encounters position each partner hierarchically according to whether their role is active or passive. So, for example, women are suitable sexual partners for men because their active domination by men has already been mystified in terms of their essentially inferior status. For the same reason, Friedman and Dolansky suggest, some encounters between men have also been socially condoned by association with this active/passive polarity.

The form of socially sanctioned homosexuality we know most about in the Western world – pederastia (boy-love) – existed as a more or less formalised system in Athenian society in the 6th to the 4th centuries BCE (p. 32). In this case, an older aristocratic male would court a young man of good family “much in the way a man might court a future wife” (p. 33), becoming his mentor and teacher, drawn by an attraction that was erotically charged even if not always acted upon. But tellingly, according to Plato (Symposium, 8,21), the young man – the eromenos – while respectful of his mentor – the erastes – was supposed to remain detached from his sexual passion. And once he reached adulthood and became his social equal, any continuation of a (passive/feminine) sexual relationship became shameful. In a similar way, Friedman and Dolansky look at references to homosexual acts between men in a number of other near eastern contexts containing similar associations between social status and sexual acts between men. (It is also interesting that Friedman and Dolansky insist that there is no prohibition on female homosexual acts in the Hebrew Bible.)

In other words, homosexuality, before the modern era, was always framed by considerations of social status and this forms the wider cultural background to the prohibtions on male homosexuality in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament. However there is also an important difference; male homosexuality is absolutely prohibited in Leviticus 18 and 20. Friedman and Dolansky suggest that this has to do with the fact that the legislative text of which these prohibitions form a part – the Holiness Code (p. 34) – reflects a particular theology of the land. All the people who settle on God’s land, both Israelites and aliens, are bound by its ritual and moral law: “In the Holiness Code, there can be no homosexual acts at all in Israel, since by cross-cultural perception such intercourse would necessarily denigrate the passive partner and violate his equal status under God’s law” (p. 35). Even the servant and the foreigner in Israel are equal in God’s land. And, of course, it remains the case that what is seen as immoral in homosexual acts between men is not the nature of male homosexual desire in itself, but the potential violation of a social equal – an act that would pollute God’s land (p. 35).

In relation to the issue of homosexuality, the authors of The Bible Now, come down fairly and squarely in favour of reading the biblical text carefully and in line with principles of critical biblical scholarship. These principles are derived from the so-called ‘higher criticism’ developed first by European, principally German, University scholarship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These principles have formed the basis of most reputable western biblical scholarly interpretation since then – whether it is Jewish, Roman Catholic or Protestant. In other words, they are concerned with scientific approaches to history – what here is mythology and what can be cross checked with other evidence and source material from the same period and region. They take due care to learn and understand the original languages of the Bible so they can answer the question, what did the words mean in the original context and how does that differ from the translation? They discuss the genre and style of writing, conscientiously distinguishing, for example, between poetry, prose and law: “It is is one thing to tell a story about something. It is another to write a poem about it. And it is a very different thing to write a law that says ‘Thou shalt no do it!’” (p. 1). And finally, they recognise that all readers come to the text with an agenda, a desire to know God’s truth or to find the basis of a moral norm or to reveal the gendered, colonialist assumptions of previous readers. No reading is neutral; hermeneutics or the interpretation of scripture must scrupulously attend to the who, when and where of all readers.

This useful treatment of homosexuality in the Hebrew Bible ends on a timely note of caution “Our purpose is not to talk you into one side or the other in these matters. Our purpose is to reveal that this is not a matter for amateurs, and it is not easy. You cannot just open a Bible – especially in translation – and find an obvious answer.” (p.39) Friedman and Dolansky, both University professors and career academics are employed to do the work of the scholar and this is a lifelong task. This relatively short and accessible treatment of homosexuality in the Hebrew Bible represents the distillation of an extended period of individual training and reflection and an even longer period of institutional development within wider communities. If we cannot any longer sponsor the development of this kind of professional expertise and learning – and in the UK, University departments of Theology and Biblical Studies are in rapid decline – it is going to be much harder in future, to make sense of our cultural inheritance or in any sense, to profit from it.

Female Genius

16 Monday Apr 2012

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“Women today are far better off than women in the past. It’s time they shut up and stopped making so much fuss!”

Many things have changed for the better over the last couple of centuries, but the evidence that women are especially at risk simply because they are women is still available on a daily basis: In 2009-10, for example, about 9 incidents of domestic violence a day were recorded by the Central Scotland Police Force. Of these reported incidents – to say nothing of those that remain unreported – 88% were perpetrated by men against women.

A common response to this kind of evidence is to shift the discussion into comparisons. The suggestion is that much worse violence against women exists in “war-torn Africa” or “Islamic communities” or with people in “fundamentalist sects.” The thought that sexist structures that can breed violence on this scale, continue to characterise even so called progressive societies is quickly displaced, in this example, by a convenient connection between ‘religion’ and patriarchal oppression. In other words, progressive societies are seen to be essentially secular.

Of course, this represents a genuine dilemma for feminist theologians and critical scholars of religion because the case against Christianity is compelling and as feminists, they generally have no desire absolutely to deny this. And yet, dismissing Christianity simply as something to be thankfully consigned to history, means consigning all the achievements of women who have identified themselves as Christian alongside it; from this perspective, all Christian women are victims if not collaborators. Yet in its effects, this approach hardly differs at all from previous attempts by men to deny the achievements of women because of their gender.

To address this dilemma we first have to go back to the relationship between feminisms and the Western Enlightenment. This movement, celebrating the power of human reason to explain and harness the forces of nature, gave a powerful impetus towards feminist thinking by severing the connection between social order and a patriarchal God; without God the Father to give a warrant for the whole hierarchical order of being including women’s subservience to men, there was no reason why women should any longer buy into the myth of male supremacy. On the other hand, the key architects of the Enlightenment were far less successful in taking the divinity out of the human male and all things masculine, including a masculine distain for Christianity as a dangerous and irrational (feminine) superstition.

Moving back to the 1970s and 80s, feminist biblical critics, were still struggling to resolve the dilemma even as they worked to apply second wave feminist theory to Christian scripture. They were stll caught up in the double bind; struggling to draw attention to biblical women and women readers in a positive way, whilst at the same time trying not to let either patriarchal texts or the guild of (male) biblical scholars that interpreted them off the hook. Thus their readings of the bible recorded the presence of biblical women, yet very often these accounts focussed on the Bible’s “texts of terror” – its stories of casual violence, its reduction of women to mere objects or to the empty “otherness” that defined a real male presence. In other words they often ended up playing more strongly on the sense in which Christianity was unsympathetic to women than on the sense in which women might justly take their places as its crafters, sustainers and reformers. Yet, looking at the situation more positively, this was exactly what those scholars were doing in trying to address a complicated set of issues that didn’t respond easily to one approach. Sometimes in the hard-won pleasures of dialogue with these problematic structures they did manage, as writers and readers, to overcome all the built-in disadvantages with which they began as women in the male normative context of Church and academy.

In the last sixty years, there has been a vigorous growth in the kind of work that focuses on the lives of women. And, having so many more narratives about women to draw on, our imaginations are fed and our view of what women can do is dramatically widened. In this way, the scenario with which this piece began is also sharply challenged because we can begin to show that the contrast between the situation of women in the past and in the present is nothing like as polarised or final as this suggests.

Arguably, over the centuries, women have found many ways to negotiate problematic structures such as Christian patriarchy, crafting courageous, creative and at some level, pleasurable forms of engagement without necessarily rejecting it outright. Following the philosopher Julia Kristeva, I would call these women ‘female geniuses’ and have written about four such female geniuses in a forthcoming book Because of Beauvoir: Christianity and the Cultivation of Female Genius to be published this year by Baylor University Press. Look out for it!

The Archbishop Resigns

19 Monday Mar 2012

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What seems to have crystallised as the key to Archbishop Rowan Williams’ somewhat early resignation from his job as head of the global Anglican Communion is the issue of sexuality. Over the last ten years a great deal of heat and not much light has been generated around this question in Anglican circles. We have seen socially conservative Anglicans continue to realise and idolise the heteropatriarchal symbolism of traditional Christian theology while socially liberal Anglicans, in contrast, stress its prophetic nature at the same time remaining individualistic in their visions of freedom. African clergy sense the force of former colonial relationships at work in criticism of their stance on gay clergy and marriage, while gay Christians feel viciously stripped of their humanity and similarly betrayed. It is no wonder, that his latest attempt to promote the spirit of cooperation and the Gospel through a global covenant having failed, Rowan Williams felt a wish to move on. Reconciliation, in this context, seems an impossible task.

Yet as more than one commentator has noticed, an interesting fact about all this internal Anglican sound and fury is that it has continued to be focussed on essentially ‘domestic’ issues. Though Rowan Williams has certainly spoken out in the last ten years about economic questions and matters of foreign policy he has remained an outsider looking in; one generally well-respected person commenting from a largely personal perspective, rather than the head of the Church militant advising the prime minister on policy and expecting to be heard. Although the Roman Catholic Church is a far bigger affair, much the same can be said both of it and its leadership. As Professor Naomi Goldenberg said in this blog recently, even this limited role as social commentator is always at risk of ‘being delegitimated in relation to the category of religion’. In fact the fate of the Archbishop provides a good illustration of what she writes about vestigial states, caught up as he is in this acrimonious and most unloving dispute over custom and law pertaining to the ‘family’ both as a social institution and in relation to the Church’s own economy or inner arrangements.

To apply Professor Goldenberg’s analysis to this situation, Anglican Christianity, at one time, a fully integrated element of government, is now increasingly cordoned off from day to day influence by the deployment of the discursive category ‘religion’, that is defined in terms of its own insignificance in relation to the ‘secular’ state. Meantime and in some ways as a consequence of this cordoning off, the ideological character of the foregrounded and ‘secular’ state operates increasingly across the Western world by means of its own closed and self-referential system of economic and managerial justifications. Not really open to criticism, the secular state has acquired a normative status. So it is a matter of simple common sense that the Prime minister is not advised by an Archbishop guilty of ‘partisan posturing’ who should be cheered when he defends Christians but sent back to school when he suggests the Church might actually have something to say about social justice.

Applying Professor Goldenberg’s analysis, the Anglican church as a vestigial state will probably continue to be eager to take on ‘whatever social, cultural and/or managerial functions the recognized state cedes to them’. So the wrangling over gay bishops will probably continue. Perhaps it is a good thing that the Christian Churches as a whole do not function non-vestigially in British society any more, and certainly, for Archbishop Williams it must be something of a relief not to wield that kind of power and responsibility. At the same time, it is also important to recognise that just because it calls itself ‘secular’ this in itself does not exempt the British nation state from criticism of its own decidedly ideological stance on matters from the special relationship with the United States and the future of the NHS, to the role of ‘religion’. One has to ask, what is it about Christianity and the Christian Churches that our so-called ‘secular’ government is so keen to hide from sight?

 

Simone de Beauvoir and Mary Daly: Impact or ‘Impact statements’?

21 Tuesday Feb 2012

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In the run up to the next round of assessment in UK Universities (the ‘Research Excellence Framework’ or REF, 2014) research is routinely being framed in terms of its ‘excellent impact’ as well as its academic value and viability. Impact is defined as the research’s ‘excellent’ contribution to national UK ‘growth, prosperity and well-being’.
To improve their chances of getting a slice from the £3billion pie of research funding available, researchers must be able to produce evidence of this ‘excellence’; completing ‘impact statements’ that show what they are doing has changed or influenced lives, with an emphasis on lives outside the world of Higher Education and with more than a nod in the direction of government policy on economic and social benefits. 20% of the value of research submissions in 2014 will be related to this kind of measureable impact.
Patti Lather, an American cultural critic situated in the field of education, connects this notion – being presented as a matter of common sense – that academic research needs to be measured on the basis of a calculation of economic and social benefit, with a ‘turn to policy’ detectable now over a number of years and closely related to ‘neoliberalism with its managerial and instrumental demands’ (Lather, Engaging Science: Policy from the side of the Messy 2010). Whether or not it is true that – aside from policy makers – people are widely demanding measurable indications of knowledge as a transferable or exchangeable product from Universities in the UK – it is clear that these Universities have also had a long and proud tradition in the past, of fostering the kind of critical impact that throws ‘common-sense’ notions – about the nature of women as inferior to men and gender more generally as irreducibly heterosexual, for example – out of the window.

At the moment, UK Universities still appear on the surface of things at least, to be relatively upbeat about ‘impact statements’. For example, Dr Nadine Lewycky, Arts Impact Officer at Warwick University said recently that many researchers are already making a real impact. She was employed at Warwick University to help academics identify new ways of building ‘impact’ into their research and in the podcast, she claims all she was really doing in many cases, was helping her academic colleagues find the right language to make existing ‘impact’ more apparent in order to bring ‘academia into the public domain’.
Reading between the lines, however, this seems strongly to suggest that academics, are being required at the same time, to bring their research into line with a particular kind of language that defines knowledge in terms of a regulated domain or economy of transfer and exchange. The knowledge that is produced by research becomes framed as something essentially to be managed, measured and marketed. Ideas that academic research could also contribute to processes of individual or communal becoming, transformation or a matter of following the dictates of human curiosity in order to reveal something previously undisclosed or unsuspected or even as a means to great pleasure and delight, are increasingly likely to be met with raised eyebrows and the accusation that we are being naïve.

Common-sense dictates after all that people want to see what they’re getting for their tax-pounds – especially in a time of economic crisis – so ‘impact statements’ are one way to achieve the necessary transparency and accountability. But common-sense – which typically denies that there is any need for further analysis – is notoriously amenable to ideological manipulation. Common-sense dictates that taxpayers demand something they can see or point to for their tax-pound, yet this may not be true, or it may not be any more true than the fact that tax-payers also belong to complex networks of diverse and interrelated factors and forces in the context of which, determining what they want or need is a messy, untidy and hugely difficult business. What about our accountability to multiplicity and difference (Lather 2010, 14) to all those things that don’t fit neatly into the impact statement grid?

The idea that there is something wrong with an ‘impact imperative’ is not simply to dismiss the attempts of the research councils, or people like Dr Lewycky, to draw attention to the many wonderful things that are done in UK universities – for example, to help those who suffer from cancer or dementia or in all kinds of synergies with the work of the arts and forms of technology. Nor am I arguing that academics ought not to concern themselves with the lives and concerns of people outside their ‘ivory towers’. Arguably, it is very important to ‘reinscribe an applied edge to’ (Lather 2010, 28) the work we do. In this sense, being encouraged to go outside the university and talk with people about what we – collectively – do, can only be a good thing. The problem is the way in which the value of what we do via these processes is then being framed.

There are different ways to understand the impact of knowledge that is cultivated in Universities. Just to take one single example, in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir, Sorbonne-trained philosopher, posed the question ‘What is a woman?’ and came up with the disturbing answer that ‘she’ was effectively a male invention. A woman was not born as such – somehow ‘essentially’ female – but became one in conformity to the philosophical assumptions that framed the whole of European society and those global contexts colonized by it. The world was normatively male and women as well as men saw themselves very largely through the fantastical lenses of powerful men, buoyed up by the assumed superiority of their culture and education. Whatever could not be conformed to this view was dismissed; women were discounted as either bad or mad. Beauvoir’s book – The Second Sex – was controversial and upset people. It was scandalous and subversive. Yet within a couple of decades, these ideas had had an enormous impact and they were being widely applied in every conceivable context, ushering in a whole new wave of feminist thinking.

Armed with Beauvoir’s ideas for example, a brilliant and passionate young woman called Mary Daly turned her gaze on the Roman Catholic Church and its theology in the 1960s and came up with her own question: Why is the Church’s role in conditioning women so rarely referred to? Her answer, contained first of all in The Church and the Second Sex (1968) followed by a series of powerful discussions in subsequent books, was that philosophical assumptions that determined women’s value and role in life were woven into the very fabric of Christianity:

If God in ‘his’ heaven is a father ruling ‘his’ people, then it is in the ‘nature’ of things and according to divine plan and the order of the universe that society be male-dominated.
Beyond God the Father (1973,13)

Yet like Beauvoir before her, Mary Daly ruffled feathers and upset people. Though she had her books published and was frequently ‘in the news’, she upset even feminists and her attempts to teach men and women separately caused a perfect media storm.

In an article in the Guardian published on the anniversary of Beauvoir’s birth, Toril Moi tells us that The Second Sex was both a source of inspiration and insight for countless women – ‘ “It changed my life!” is a refrain one often hears’ – but it was also a stumbling block, something many people including women and even feminist women ignored or rejected.

In other words, there are different ways in which to understand ‘impact’ than one that is determined through the collection of measureable, marketable data in response to a ‘common-sense’ demand for demonstrability. Beauvoir and Daly initiated debates that have extended over decades and their ideas have not always been found acceptance. Yet it would be crass to claim that these debates have not been profoundly important, affecting our understanding of what gender is all about and whose interests it has served in ways that now saturate the policy world of ‘equalities mainstreaming’ or ‘gender awareness’. In other words, whilst the direction of ‘impact statements’ is all about what the public is getting for its money, it says nothing about the bigger issues of impact that offend or contest common sense and sensibility and in which universities have always, in the past, taken a leading role.

Standing in between the demands of government and the demands of senior academics within the academy, the research councils must have a difficult balancing act to achieve. Yet it is hard not to feel that they are too compliant with the assumptions being promoted as common sense, that value is equivalent to the manageable and the marketable and that to have impact, university research must be measurable; from numbers of cancer survivors for ever increasing lengths of time to numbers/examples of citations, hits on websites, completed feedback forms, numbers of tickets purchased, books sold, tv & radio interviews broadcast, related primary school activities organized, blog entries written ……

School Wars of Religion: R.E. in Free Schools

14 Friday Oct 2011

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Melissa Benn’s new book, School Wars (Verso, 2011) is an impassioned response to the present Coalition plan to allow control over English primary and secondary education to pass into the hands of interested private bodies, from groups of parents and teachers to faith communities and what Benn calls ‘edu-entrepreneurs’ (School Wars, 190). The present Scottish government seems still to be committed to the existing comprehensive system. But things can change and it is instructive for us in Scotland to reflect on what is happening across the border.

Those who support the new schools say that free schools provide opportunities for children who are failing or falling behind in the existing comprehensive system. Free schools are free – they don’t charge fees – and they are being set up deliberately in areas where there are higher proportions of poorer families. It sounds good and the results, in some cases, are certainly impressive. They are also ‘free’ however, because they are able to determine pretty much as they wish, the criteria for admission, the disciplinary ethos, the nature of the school day and the terms and conditions of those they employ as teachers. They continue to submit students to a regime of independently accredited examinations and there is a tacit agreement that they will respect the breadth and balance of the English national curriculum as it presently exists, but there is no absolute requirement to follow it as is the case in all state schools.

Those, like Benn, who are alarmed by the new schools put their disquiet down to a number of factors; in the first place, to a distrust of the idea that comprehensive education is really failing – or failing as catastrophically as some people like to claim; to a tendency to ignore – beyond accepting its poorer children into free school premises – forms of real, local democratic accountability; to concerns about the lack of investment in planning for school provision where free schools fail or fail to accommodate all children; to worries about a certain narrowness in some free school curricula focussed on basic skills and employability.

In some important ways, however, free schools remain far from free and are subject to rigorous forms of centralised government control. Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education in England, for example, recently told BBC presenter Andrew Marr that the Department for Education had set up a dedicated unit – with links to MI5, no less – to monitor applications for free school status in order to screen out ‘outrageous’ or ideologically unsuitable applicants. In the context of this discussion, rather predictably, such unsuitable ideologies were typified in relation to creationists and radical Islamists.

In this context, the issue of ‘R.E’ in the school curriculum – under some threat from the increasingly popular English Baccalaureate which has so far failed to recognise it as a core humanities subject – is interesting. The term, ‘religion’ has a particular resonance in the context of the school system that admittedly makes it awkward for politicians and policy makers. It continues to carry, for detractors for example, the association of confessional – and compulsory – Christianity, whilst for some of its supporters, it still seems to function as a kind of last ditch defence against moral collapse. Neither of these pictures would accord very closely with the views of most non-denominational English state school teachers of ‘Religion’ or ‘Religious Education’; a subject that has grown in popularity with students at higher levels over the last ten year. This is perhaps because of its relevance at one and the same time to the world of global events encountered via the media, and to the most familiar and intimate of human relationships. Or it may be because of the scope it provides for intellectual challenge and enjoyment or for imaginative engagement across cultural boundaries. Whatever the reasons for this growth in popularity with young people themselves, surprisingly few involved in the public debates about education, seem able – or perhaps, willing – to recognise its real value as an area of the curriculum in which we might give our future adult citizens the tools and experience, genuinely to address the kinds of concerns that Michael Gove seems to feel warrant the deployment, in relation to free schools, of the full force of our intelligence services.

Arguably a better way to defend our children’s class rooms from the kind of extremism that Michael Gove and his colleagues see as so dangerous, would be genuinely to encourage the kind of exchange of ideas and knowledge – characteristic of R.E. syllabi – that will allow young people to explore, without either naivety or unwarranted suspicion, how the world might look from different perspectives and to learn to think critically and with minds open to the possibilities as well as to the limitations and dangers of different political and cultural norms.

But how far – if at all – these kinds of skill-sets or objectives will be championed within the curricula of free schools run by organisations such as the Emmanuel Christian Centre, the Noor Ul Islam Trust, Forest Light Education Plus, E-ACT, the Cooperative Trust, Edison Learning, or Cognita, is, frankly, anybody’s guess.

The Problem of Evil: Adolf Eichmann and Levi Bellfield

07 Thursday Jul 2011

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The German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt, first coined the expression ‘the banality of evil’ (Arendt Eichmann in Jerusalem:  A Report on the Banality of Evil, 1963).  She was sent to Jerusalem in 1961 by The New Yorker to cover the trial of the former Nazi, Adolf Eichmann for his role in the practical planning and management of the ‘final solution’.  She concluded that Eichmann was no kind of  grand, operatic or blood-spattered axe-fiend with bloodshot eyes.  He had  undertaken this work because he was  ambitious, hard-working and essentially small-minded.  When she called him ‘terribly and terrifyingly normal’ it was this – in some ways, innocuous – lack of imagination she was thinking about.  The problem was, of course, that in the circumstances in which he found himself, his inability to distance himself from his role, to engage with any sense of what we might call a conscience or perhaps even a consciousness of himself, proved lethal for millions.

In our reactions to Eichmann, there is always some fear that we might also be capable of doing what he has done; of being responsible for so much death and destruction or of having to bear that abysmal shame.  Arendt noted how hard it was for those involved in Eichmann’s trial: ‘it would have been very comforting indeed to believe that [he] was a monster’.  Much time and effort was spent trying to prove that he had actually killed someone himself.  But Eichmann was not a monster and the evidence of individual murder was slight.

Here then are two instances of an impoverished imagination accompanied by deep anxiety.  First, Eichmann, obviously lacked the imagination to comprehend or deal with the appalling consequences of his plans for countless individuals, families and communities. (He had, Arendt said, “a horrible gift of consoling himself with clichés”.)  Second, we often lack the imagination to look steadily at evildoers and accept that though we might never do what Eichmann (or Levi Bellfield) did, we do not belong to a different species.  When it comes to evil we have a tendency to mystify it, that is reproduce unchallenging representations of it  from the monster in the movie with unclean appetites for human flesh and blood, to the monstrous perverts of the tabloid press, who lurk in the darkness of our communities and  prey on our children.  There is visceral satisfaction to be had as a result of these representations perhaps, and money continues to be made, however banal the narrative.  But the problem is, this imaginative impoverishment contributes to the serious underlying problem: a potential to become, through lack of thought – particularly the inability to put ourselves into someone else’s shoes – alienated from both others and  ourselves.  We run the risk of becoming – like Eichmann –  lost to any genuine sense of the demanding presence of others, of their unsettling claims on us or of their problematic existences as independent beings.

The French philosopher Julia Kristeva, dealing with the cinema and its representations of evil (Intimate Revolt, 2002) believes the visual medium in particular may not demand enough of us.  She suggests it runs the risk simply of appeasing us on some level without making us do the vital work of interpretation; putting our emotional responses into forms of language that allow us to become conscious of them and of ourselves as their source.  She has more confidence in the work of creating our own words in order to describe, and crucially  to understand what we experience.  But whatever the relative merits of avant garde literature, popular film or the great works of our cultural traditions such as the Qur’an or the Geneva Convention, the bottom line is that this work of interpretation is central to our well-being as both individuals and communities. Certainly it contributes to our imaginative enrichment but more than this, it gives us the means to make sense of and deal with evil.

What does this have to do with Levi Bellfield, convicted murderer?  There was nothing banal about the brutal way in which  he murdered his victims, of course.  But there are risks in simply relegating him to the realms of the banal – the monster whose existence is mysterious and beyond our comprehension.  We really do need to know why Bellfield became a killer and why a man who has a family, who attended a London comprehensive and became a relatively successful small business man felt he had the right to take the lives of three young women he scarcely knew and to wreak such havoc in the lives of their friends and families.

Churches, marriage and same-sex relationships…

22 Sunday May 2011

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This week, the Church of Scotland will be discussing a specially commissioned report on Same Sex Relationships and the Ministry at its General Assembly in Edinburgh. Essentially, it will be seeking to reconcile the unavoidable fact that a number of its clergy live in gay relationships they’d prefer to acknowledge openly, with its public and theological position on sexuality.

The Churches face a problem of course. Whilst our civil institutions become ever more scrupulous about anything that could constitute an obstacle to the legitimate aspirations of gay people, they remain guardians of a tradition steeped in patriarchal structures and heteronormative metaphors that raise – for those they marginalise – deeply painful issues concerning authority, identity and belonging.

In the context of much larger questions concerning the global capitalist exploitation of our environment or our failure to eradicate material poverty or even to ensure everyone has access to clean water, it is perhaps not surprising to find many people – both outside and inside the Christian community – impatient with such a ‘non-issue’. The question of whether it is right to ordain a man or woman who seeks to live openly in a stable, supportive same sex relationship seems irrelevant to the big questions. But, of course it is a significant point, touching as it does on the ordering of human relationships; a fundamental question of great moment in any society. In the United Kingdom and large parts of the western world, Christianity has provided the framework for domestic and sexual relationships for hundreds of years in such a way that, until very recently, people have really not had to give it much thought. Though critics from Harriet Taylor and J S Mill in the 19th century onwards have called marriage a form of female slavery, it has remained the default domestic position. More recently, legislation has loosened the bonds of women, taken away male prerogatives and allowed for an increase in non Church weddings, contenting itself with the more neutral territory of registration but, until now, civil society has not suggested anything substantially different from what the Church has itself prescribed. Recently, attending a lovely family wedding at a registry office in London, I was struck by how far this wedding followed the pattern of the Church weddings I’ve attended – it was a life-long, exclusive partnership in which reference was made to having and raising children. There were rings, bouquets, bridesmaids, a best man and photographers.

Yet In spite of the ritual similarities between registry office weddings and Church weddings, there are differences of course. Churches refer to ‘holy matrimony’ and seek to give significance to heterosexual relationships in very particular ways, claiming, for example, that it has been ‘instituted of God’ (Canon 31:1 of the Scottish Episcopal Church, or set up ‘for a remedy against sin’ (Book of Common Prayer, 1662). It is in the words of the canons of the Church of England, “…according to our Lord’s teaching … a union permanent and lifelong, for better for worse, till death them do part, of one man with one woman, to the exclusion of all others on either side, for the procreation and nurture of children, for the hallowing and right direction of the natural instincts and affections, and for the mutual society, help and comfort which the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity.” (Canon B 30).

Arguably, then, marriage as it exists across most of the western world today is still thoroughly bound up in a specific vision of social relations that might or might not be exclusively Christian in origins but which have been thoroughly Christianised. This prescribed form of human relating brings together sex, property and children under a heading of heterosexual – and thus, historically at least, hierarchical – partnership, and promotes this as the premier form of mutual human support. Other potentially supportive relations, including same-sex partnerships are bracketed off as, at best, insignificant and at worst, a matter for shame and guilt.

Yet Christian churches clearly can change as new priorities emerge. In Sweden, for example, a proposal first brought forward in 2003, that marriage should be open to same sex couples was initially rejected by the Central Board of the Lutheran Church of Sweden on the traditional grounds that it could only denote a relationship between a man and a woman. In 2009, however, the Theological Committee of the Church changed its view and recommended that gay couples should be allowed to marry and that priests of the Lutheran Church of Sweden could perform such weddings in their churches (see Svenskakyrkan Church Synod Liturgy Committee report 2009:2 Wedding and Marriage).

The Lutheran Church of Sweden was, of course, responding to pressure– to the changing legal position in Sweden on marriage as a civil institution. It courts criticism from Christians who believe there is a deeper or eternal order existing beyond the realm of changeable human being – beyond changes implemented in response a secular government to reflect its secular concerns – to which biblical language and the traditions of the Church point. Yet Christian theology and Church order have been marked from the beginning by manifestly human heteropatriarchal social structures, inherited from the cultural milieu of the early Christian Church. Moreover, in taking such a radical step the Swedish Church has arguably put itself in a good position to act as a positive force in society, underpinning and supporting trusting relationships rather than undermining them. This too is surely something that could be aligned with the Gospel – perhaps with its refusal to make idols out of conventional family ties and responsibilities.

Francesca’s Buried Biblical Treasures

04 Monday Apr 2011

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BBC 2’s series, The Bible’s Buried Secrets is a familiar – and in many ways, winning – combination of middle eastern street scenes, archaeological digs, panoramic shots of Jerusalem and the golden Dome of the Rock, and computer animated reconstructions.  Its writer and presenter, Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou of Exeter University’s Department of Theology and Religion, is young, personable and enthusiastic, and the whole production is good-looking enough to make viewers feel, occasionally, as if they’ve stumbled into an advertisement for the holiday of a life-time.

This is not to underestimate Stavrakopoulou’s academic credentials.  She has many fascinating, well-researched ideas about the Bible.  In a recent episode, she suggested that the stories of creation and more especially, the Garden of Eden might be based on an actual historical event – and specifically not the creation of the world!  She suggested, cross-referencing relevant archaeological findings, that the Garden of Eden might have been the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, whose intricate interior designs she likened to a kind of virtual garden.  The so-called ‘fall’ – the Genesis account of the first couple’s disobedience and exclusion from the garden – could perhaps then be the fall of an ancient near eastern King of Judah.  Arguably, this precursor of the Hebrew Bible’s first human creature, Adam, was a historical individual who seemed to consort with the gods and goddesses in the holy temple garden but  who had in fact failed, because of personal greed, to maintain the terms of a very real vassalage to the imperial powers of the day, and thereby brought ruin and destruction – divine wrath and expulsion – on himself and his people as a result.

These are intriguing thoughts – of course – but perhaps not as controversial as some of the promotional material would have it.  Although Stavrakopoulou’s theories about the Temple in Jerusalem, for example, offer us a different slant on a familiar biblical text, the approach as a whole differs little from the methodologies of the so-called Higher Criticism, calling for attention to the historical and linguistic contexts of the bible and the need for the kind of critical examination previously only applied to other kinds of books.  Certainly, in the 19th century, professors and academics sometimes lost their jobs for proposing, for example, that the Bible’s stories might have had something in common with stories of other gods and goddesses.  But it would be unlikely for this to happen today.

What is perhaps more provoking, is Stravrakopoulou’s suggestion that we might be able to liberate ourselves from the huge burden of guilt and human sinfulness imposed on us by Christian readings of Genesis 2-3, if we accepted her interpretation instead.  Telling stories is one way to normalise or universalise what is actually culturally specific.  Using the Genesis 2-3 story to make women carry the guilt for the ‘fall’ or radical sinfulness of the entire human race, is a case in point.  There are many instances of Christian theologians, poets and writers over the centuries who have drawn misogynistic meanings out of this story and, quite clearly, Stravrakopoulou’s research would not actively support these readings.  It’s more doubtful however, whether her theories really help us to come to a positive consensus on human nature.

Of course some Christians remain convinced of a more literal truth to the story of the Garden of Eden – Stravrakopoulou spoke to one or two of them and they were predictably unmoved.  However, many people who have spent time reading the Bible over the last 200 years or so, have been well aware of its gaps, contradictions, lack of empirical verifiability and perhaps even its  indebtedness to traditions mainstream Churches or theologians would pronounce as beyond the pale.  They remain intrigued; hooked, nonetheless, by these problematic Biblical accounts of ambivalent human hope and fleeting divine epiphanies.  Arguably it is these, essentially unanswerable but fertile questions that remain the Bible’s real buried treasure.