Posts from — April 2008

I’m slow off the mark on this one.

In June this year Liverpool Hope University is hosting The Big Hope. The university’s website describes this as

a Congress for future leaders and young people of all faiths and life stances; meeting together and listening to the experience and wisdom of the leaders of today

“Towards the creation of a more humane global society, with integrity in public life and respect for faith: a society in which every individual has the right to participate and to which every individual has the responsibility to contribute.”

A Congress of listening, learning, discussion and sharing; action, performance, service and prayer; with young people from many cultures, many countries and every continent: young people of faith, vision and humanity, who will shape the global society in the 21st Century.

So, if you feel you qualify as a “future leader” or as a young person, why not visit The Big Hope?

Technorati Tags: Liverpool, The Big Hope, youth, leaders, faith

Barnabas Quotidianus will be moving to a new server over the weekend. At the same time we’ll be upgrading to WordPress 2.5 and a new version of the Cutline theme that gives BQ its look.

Like taxes and death, glitches are inevitable, so I apologize upfront for downtime, screw-ups, and the credit crunch. All I can promise is that I will have many anxious moments as I move things over.

Happy reading!

Technorati Tags: blogging, Barnabas Quotidianus

L to R: Stephen Timms MP, Alistair Burt MP, Rt Revd Christopher Herbert

“It’s a long time since I’ve spoken at a political meeting where so many people turned out to listen,” said Alistair Burt MP, as he addressed an audience of 180 in Welwyn Garden City’s Campus West building on Monday night, 7 April, on the theme of “Faith in Government”.

Religion is still alive

As chair for the evening, I kicked off the proceedings by quoting from Tony Blair’s speech on Faith and Globalisation, using part of the opening paragraph of the speech as a jumping-off point to explain how religion, far from having disappeared off the map as many had expected and some still hope, is very much a force - for good and for ill - in public life. You can download the script of my speech here.

I then invited each of our speakers, the Rt Hon Stephen Timms MP, Alistair Burt MP, and the Rt Revd Christopher Herbert, Bishop of St Albans, to give their views on faith and politics.

All three speakers, as one would expect for committed Christians, gave positive messages about the importance of faith in politics and the ways in which they applied their own faiths to their political lives.

Faith - a great starting point for politics, says Stephen Timms

“Faith is a great starting point for politics,” said Stephen Timms, a Christian and a Minister of State at the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP). Faith communities can make uniquely powerful contributions to building stronger communities and to social cohesion. He believed that those who are committed to their faiths can be more open to those of other faiths than people who have no faith. If you have a faith, you understand why a person’s faith is so central to their identity and life.

He had found this kind of openness in Christian schools and colleges that he had visited in his constituency and elsewhere.

And faith communities treat people as citizens rather than as consumers.

He wanted to see faith communities retaining their distinctiveness but working together. He was particularly keen to see faith communities and faith-based organizations delivering public services. In fact, the DWP will be changing the conditions of the New Deal (a programme that gives people on benefits the help and support they need to look for work, including training and preparing for work) so that it will recognize the capacity of faith-based organizations to run suitable programmes, especially for young people.

Faith communities within a secular democracy - Alistair Burt

Alistair Burt said that he shared much with Stephen Timms in terms of their values, even though they were from different political parties. “Faith,” he said, “informs all the mainstream political parties.” He, too, wanted to see a greater involvement of faith communities in delivering public services. But he cautioned that it is essential that faith communities do not become an arm of government. They must maintain their independence.

Faith communities can - and should - influence government and parliament, said Mr Burt. But they must remember the context in which they are operating. The UK is a secular society and a parliamentary democracy. The government is obliged to listen to citizens, but it is not obliged to agree with them. Faith communities cannot make demands based on their beliefs and expect that the government will do what they want. If they have a case, they must demonstrate its worth by evidence and reason. Just believing something to be true is not a sufficient reason for the government to accept it.

Democracy is a two-way street, Mr Burt said. He was appalled by pressure groups, whether religious or not, which made demands and failed to honour those who serve in public life, in parliament or elsewhere. It was particularly important for faith communities to honour and support their parliamentary representatives, even if they didn’t agree with them. Some of his most uncomfortable moments had occurred in church meetings where he had been grilled and attacked in a very personal way. He hoped that faith communities would show more sympathy and concern for the personal and human needs and feelings of MPs and others in public life.

Faith communities have a responsibility, he thought, to inform politics and public life, but he was opposed to the idea that faith communities might form political parties. All the major parties are open to people of any faith.

He concluded by warning of the increasingly vocal secularists who are loudly proclaiming their hostility to religion of any kind. They are just as dogmatic as the most fundamentalist Christian, possibly more so, since they refuse to concede any place in life, let alone public life, for religion.

Bringing faith to bear on public life - Bishop of St Albans

The Bishop of St Albans observed that there had been great improvements in public attitudes to faith in recent years, but there is still contempt in some quarters. Back in the 1970s, he had represented the Hereford Diocese on the Hereford and Worcester Education Committee. He used to be invited to visit schools as “the man who believes in God” - a kind of museum piece for an oumoded belief. Now, he said, things are very different.

He described the choice he had to make while at university, whether to answer what he took to be God’s calling to him to enter the priesthood, or to go into politics, which he greatly enjoyed. He had chosen the priesthood. Coincidentally, after many years, this now allows him to engage in politics as one of the 26 Church of England bishops sitting in the House of Lords.

The bishops in the House of Lords, the “Lords Spiritual”, are not delegates of the Church of England nor of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Bishop Christopher explained. They vote according to personal conscience and not according to a Church of England “party line”. However, they bring religious values explicitly into politics. He tries to listen very carefully to the debates in the House and he has been privileged to serve on select committees on various pieces of legislation that have been of particular interest or concern to him. He instanced the Mental Capacity Bill, to which he had been able to make a number of contributions.

However, as important as what happens in parliament is, what really matters, he thought, is what happens at local level. Faith communities can make a vital contribution to social cohesion. People of faith could put themselves forward to serve on their local councils. District and county councils sometimes have morally very difficult decisions to make. People of faith should bring their principles and values to bear on such challenging cases. At the very least, those who have to make such decisions should be honoured for the service to which they have committed themselves.

All three speakers agreed that, on balance, faith can contribute in important ways to politics, whether from the inside or from the outside. People of faith should certainly not stand aloof from politics.

The Baha’i view

This was an interesting event for a Baha’i to chair. Baha’is do not take part in partisan politics, but the Baha’i teachings are packed with political values (in the broad sense of politics as the art of government). For example, in His letter to Queen Victoria, Bahá’u'lláh says this to parliamentarians:

O ye the elected representatives of the people in every land! Take ye counsel together, and let your concern be only for that which profiteth mankind and bettereth the condition thereof, if ye be of them that scan heedfully. Regard the world as the human body which, though at its creation whole and perfect, hath been afflicted, through various causes, with grave disorders and maladies. Not for one day did it gain ease, nay its sickness waxed more severe, as it fell under the treatment of ignorant physicians, who gave full rein to their personal desires and have erred grievously. And if, at one time, through the care of an able physician, a member of that body was healed, the rest remained afflicted as before. Thus informeth you the All-Knowing, the All-Wise.

And He gives them this prayer to say as the enter the council chamber:

“O my God! I ask Thee, by Thy most glorious Name, to aid me in that which will cause the affairs of Thy servants to prosper, and Thy cities to flourish. Thou, indeed, hast power over all things!”

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Christian, religion, faith, politics, Stephen Timms, Labour, Alistair Burt, Conservative, Bishop of St Albans

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Tony Blair, originally uploaded by WalkingGeek.

I was invited to attend Tony Blair’s recent lecture in Westminster Cathedral (that’s the Catholic cathedral) on “Faith and Globalisation“, but was otherwise committed that evening.

Here’s the opening paragraph of the speech. I wonder if Mr Blair has been reading the Universal House of Justice’s 2002 message to religious leaders or its subsequent publication One Common Faith.

Let me summarise my argument to you this evening. Under the momentum of globalisation the world is opening up, and at an astonishing speed.

Old boundaries of culture, identity and even nationhood are falling. The 21st Century world is becoming ever more interdependent. In this world, religious faith, crucial to so many people’s culture and identity, can play a positive or a negative role. Either positively it will encourage peaceful co-existence by people of faith coming together in respect, understanding and tolerance, retaining their distinctive identity but living happily with those who do not share that identity. Or it will work against such co-existence by defining people by difference, those of one faith in opposition to others of a different faith.

In this context, inter-faith action and encounter are vital. They symbolise peaceful co-existence.

That is my primary argument. It is directed to people who have religious faith and those who have none.

However, I then go further and argue that religious faith is a good thing in itself, that so far from being a reactionary force, it has a major part to play in shaping the values which guide the modern world, and can and should be a force for progress. But it has to be rescued on the one hand from the extremist and exclusionary tendency within religion today; and on the other from the danger that religious faith is seen as an interesting part of history and tradition but with nothing to say about the contemporary human condition. I see Faith and Reason, Faith and Progress, as in alliance not contention.

And further along, Blair says this:

Even ten years ago, religion was still being written off as a force in the world. For over 200 years, the view had grown that advanced men and women no longer needed religion. It was a view rooted in the new thinking of the Enlightenment….

But in fact at no time since the Enlightenment has religion ever gone away. It has always been at the very core of life for millions of people, the foundation of their existence, the motive for their behaviour, the thing which gives sense to their lives and purpose to their journeys – which makes life more than just a sparrow’s flight through a lighted hall from one darkness to another, in that memorable image of the Venerable Bede. In the last few years we have been reminded of the great power of religion.

This next passage from Mr Blair’s speech is spot on, absolutely in line with the words of the Universal House of Justice in One Common Faith:

Faith answers to the basic, irrepressible, irresistible human wish for spiritual betterment, to do good, to think and act beyond the limitations of selfish human desires. More than that, it is rooted in a belief that the impulse to do good or try to, is not utilitarian or self-interested but is about putting aside self, in being aware of something bigger, more central, more essential to our human condition than self. In this, the ‘other’ is not to be rejected still less excluded, but embraced as more important than you or me. And people of faith believe we are driven or guided to this end. For those who feel in this way, God is not some wise Old Man up in the sky, but the true source of life. God is selfless love, merciful and an infinite dispenser of Grace.

Here’s a complementary Baha’i quotation from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá:

O peoples of the world! The Sun of Truth hath risen to illumine the whole earth, and to spiritualize the community of man. Laudable are the results and the fruits thereof, abundant the holy evidences deriving from this grace. This is mercy unalloyed and purest bounty; it is light for the world and all its peoples; it is harmony and fellowship, and love and solidarity; indeed it is compassion and unity, and the end of foreignness; it is the being at one, in complete dignity and freedom, with all on earth.

The Blessed Beauty saith: ‘Ye are all the fruits of one tree, the leaves of one branch.’ Thus hath He likened this world of being to a single tree, and all its peoples to the leaves thereof, and the blossoms and fruits. It is needful for the bough to blossom, and leaf and fruit to flourish, and upon the interconnection of all parts of the world-tree, dependeth the flourishing of leaf and blossom, and the sweetness of the fruit.

For this reason must all human beings powerfully sustain one another and seek for everlasting life; and for this reason must the lovers of God in this contingent world become the mercies and the blessings sent forth by that clement King of the seen and unseen realms. Let them purify their sight and behold all humankind as leaves and blossoms and fruits of the tree of being. Let them at all times concern themselves with doing a kindly thing for one of their fellows, offering to someone love, consideration, thoughtful help. Let them see no one as their enemy, or as wishing them ill, but think of all humankind as their friends; regarding the alien as an intimate, the stranger as a companion, staying free of prejudice, drawing no lines.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, faith, religion, globalisation, Tony Blair, inter-faith, One Common Faith

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

I am in the middle of prepare=ing to chair a meeting in Welwyn Garden City this evening on the theme of Faith in Government. The speakers will be the Rt Revd Christopher Herbert, Bishop of St Albans, Stephen Timms MP, Minister of State for Employment and Welfare Reform at the Department for Work and Pensions, Alistair Burt MP, Assistant Chief Whip and Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party. Stephen Timms, who describes himself as a Christian Socialist, is Labour Party Vice Chair for Faith Groups. Alistair Burt describes himself as an active Christian.

The meeting, which has been organized by the Welwyn Hatfield Inter Faith Group aims to tease out a better understanding of how faith perspectives are brought to bear on parliamentary and central government affairs.

The three panel members are all parliamentarians and all Christians. I will be the only non-Christian on the panel and, as chair, I will endeavour to ensure that non-Christian voices and viewpoints are heard. I will also have an opportunity to ensure that my viewpoint as a Baha’i is part of the mix. It’s a pity that there won’t be a Humanist or other secularist on the panel - there’s a very interesting debate going on in the UK about whether religion should have a role in public life at all.

I am really looking forward to the evening. There are so many fascinating questions to be discussed and I hope that the questions and comments from the audience will give the speakers a good opportunity to address topical issues such as:

• religion and sexual orientation
• prohibition of religious symbols
• abortion
• religious education
• mental health legislation
• the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill
• the position of religious minorities in UK public life

More on this tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Christian, inter-faith, Welwyn Hatfield, public life, parliament, government