LEICESTER COUNCIL OF FAITHS AGM 2011

It's Leicester Council of Faiths Annual General Meeting this evening at Guru Amar Das Gurdwara, Clarendon Park Road.

I've been with Harry and Grace in Wigston. Around teatime every Tuesday I whisk them back and forth between two choirs of which they’re members (well, Harry two and Grace one). This evening, as soon as I drop them off at Guthlaxton College for the Leicester Phoenix Youth Chorale, I'm in a taxi, which I've booked to get me to the gurdwara on time.

I have an interesting chat with the driver en route - about where I'm and why I'm going there. He assumes I've said I want to go to the gurdwara just because it's a reference point in Clarendon Park Road. When I tell him, no, I'm actually going to the gurdwara itself, it sparks an unexpected conversation. He's clearly a bit phased by a white British guy asking to be driven to a Sikh place of worship. It's this kind of encounter that reminds me just how unusual my job is, even in a city as diverse and mixed as Leicester.

With a bit of foresight, I’ve spent some time in the gurdwara earlier this afternoon, putting up our exhibition (blogged here), so that it’s ready for the meeting this evening, panic and stress-free.

I arrive, to find that the agenda has been rejigged. I've managed to miss the food and have to jump in just as the meeting proper starts.

Our guest speaker is Paul Weller, Professor of Inter-Religious Relations at the University of Derby, who gives a presentation entitled, "Faith Communities, Groups and Organisations in Civil Society: Opportunities, Issues and Challenges". Prof. Weller's talk is based on seven theses and his comments following on them.

Thesis 1: The importance of not marginalising religions from public life

A tendency to assign religions to the private sphere will impoverish the state by marginalising important social resources and might unwittingly encourage those reactive, backward- and inward-looking expressions of religious life that are popularly characterised as "fundamentalism".

Comment: Secularists should beware the Law of Unintended Consequences in relation to religion. 

Thesis 2: The need to recognise the specificity of religions

Religious traditions and communities offer important alternative perspectives t the predominant values and power structures of states and societies. Religions are a reminder of the importance of the things that cannot be seen, touched, smelled, tasted and heard, for a more balanced perspective on those things that can be experienced in these ways.

Comment: After the technocratic death of politics and on the other side of the global financial crisis, could religions contribute to the rebirth of the politics of the human? 

Thesis 3: The imperative for religious engagement with the wider community

Religious communities and traditions should beware of what can be seductive calls from within their traditions to form "religious unity fronts" against what is characterised as "the secular state" and what is perceived as the amorality and fragmentation of modern and post-modern society.

Comment: Why are religions (and, at the moment, especially Christianity) seem to be getting so fearful about a perceived Secularist lobby and agenda? Is such fear justified? 

Thesis 4: The need for a reality checkNational and political self-understandings that exclude people of other than the majority traditions, either by design or by default are, historically speaking, fundamentally distorted. Politically and religiously such self-understandings are dangerous and need to be challenged.

Comment: What about the BNP and its appropriation of Christian symoblism? But is it only such groups who should be the cause of concern? 

Thesis 5: The need to recognise the transnational dimension of religions

Religious communities and traditions need to pre-empt the dangers involved in becoming proxy sites for imported conflicts involving their coreligionists in other parts of the world. But because they are themselves part of wider global communities of faith, religions have the potential for positively contributing to a better understanding of the role of states and societies of their own countries within a globalising world. 

Thesis 6: The importance of religious inclusivity

Religious establishments as well as other traditions and social arrangements that provide particular forms of religion with privileged access to social and political institutions need to be re-evaluated. There is a growing need to imagine and to construct new structural forms for the relationship between religion(s), state(s) and society(ies) that can more adequately express an inclusive social and political self-understanding than this which currently privilege majority religious traditions.

Comment: Can there not be alternatives to established religions that do not shut religions out of the public sphere? 

Thesis 7: The imperative of inter-religious dialogue

Inter-religious dialogue is an imperative for the religious communities and for the states and societies of which they are a part. There is a need to continue the task of developing appropriate inter-faith structures at all levels within states and societies and in appropriate transnational and international structures.

Comment: Perhaps there is, today, even more need for religious / secular dialogue.

After Prof. Weller’s talk, the main business of the evening is the election of members of the Board of Directors and the Officers. My role during this part is to take the minutes.

At the end of the meeting, I get to promote our local activities for the third national Inter Faith Week, coming up later this month. I have a big bundle of our fliers and of the programme for Phoenix Square, open at the page for the Faiths Film Festival.

I'm the last one out, having to stay behind, take down and pack up the nine pop-up banners in our exhibition. Thanks to Rosemarie Fitton for giving me (and them) a lift home. Then I manage to leave one of them outside my door overnight in the rain. Thank goodness those bags are just waterproof enough!  

Photo © Copyright P L Chadwick and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence