I met this morning with Simon Keyes, Director of the St Ethelburga’s Centre for Peace and Reconciliation (in Bishopsgate) and with Justine Huxley and Salim Nakhjavani, who share the job of Inter-faith projects co-ordinator. Salim had set up the meeting.

Simon reminded me that he is married to Alison Murdoch, a connection that I had forgotten. Alison did tell me about Simon and about his becoming Director of St Ethelburga’s quite some time ago.

Our discussion was free flowing and wide ranging. They told me about their various projects: the E project (the Bedouin tent to go in the waste ground just behind their Garden of Peace); The Business of Faith (advising businesses, particularly in the City, about how to respond to faith diversity issues and to implement the Equality in Employment Regulations); Scriptural reasoning (scripturally literate scholars from the three Abrahamic faiths come together to talk about issues about which there may be either difference, even conflict, between the three faiths or similarity; they use a particular process that they have learned from the US; and they work from their respective scriptures.)

The scriptural reasoning project is a very interesting one, led by William Taylor, a Cambridge-educated theologian. Salim has been conversing with William (whom I met briefly) and has persuaded him that the Faith is an Abrahamic faith and should also be engaged in this kind of dialogue.

The whole project is really quite experimental at the moment and they are trying to find what works, what people need, what people will take part in. Simon made it clear that they want to promote frank dialogue that acknowledges differences and conflicts as well as commonalities. They want to look at faith as the cause of conflict as well as faith as a resource for the transformation of conflict.

We talked about the arts and about the piece by John Latham called God is Great that has been withdrawn by Tate Britain from a retrospective of Latham’s work ‘in case it would cause offence to Muslims’ - not that anyone had complained. The artist was furious. This had been done without his consent. In our discussion at St Ethelburga’s we thought that the point of art was to provoke and to stimulate people to think. The team immediately wondered if they could display the work in their space.

Somehow we got on to comedy. I mentioned Omid Djalili and Inder Manocha. There was talk of other comedians with a particular religious identity or who use material about religion in their acts and very soon the team were thinking about a comedy evening as a way of stimulating discussion.

The space itself is very attractive. The church, of which J M Rodwell (one of the first translators into English of the Qur’an) was Rector, was destroyed by the IRA’s Bishopsgate bombing in 1993. It was rebuilt - there’s actually very little of the original fabric left, some stonework and an arcade running down one side of the building - at the behest of the Bishop of London, who determined that it should become a centre for peace and reconciliation. It’s what I would call a ‘live space’, one that has life, bare stonework, a history, a sense of peace and calm. I love that kind of space.

I find myself very attracted to what St Ethelburga’s is trying to do, particularly to their emphasis on honesty in dialogue. I am fed up with the papering over of cracks that goes on in much inter-faith work; underneath there are seismic movements the whole time between the tectonic plates of the religions. We need to face this and talk about these things and find ways to reconcile people more deeply than just being insincerely nice to/about them can achieve.

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