SACRE AT CHARNWOOD PRIMARY

I'm attending the regular meeting of Leicester SACRE (Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education), held this time at Charnwood Primary School, Nedham Street.

I've brought two guests with me today: Sam Newton, Editor of the Leicester Wave, is here at my recommendation to make some contacts, gain interest and drum up support from teachers and govenors at this meeting for an article about young Muslim women in Leicester and the burka. I've also brought Rosemarie Fitton, who's shadowing me as part of her MA course in Inter-Religious Relations at St Philip's Centre for Study and Engagement in a Multi-Faith Society. The photo above shows (left to right) Sam, Rosemarie and Jill Carr (Secretary of Leicester SACRE). They're standing before one of the displays created by pupils of Charnwood Primary in the school's "Walk of Faith".

At today's meeting we bid farewell to Rev Dr Alan Race, Vicar at St Philip's Church and Director of Studies at St Philip's Centre. To describe Alan as a mainstay of SACRE would be an understatement to put it mildly. He's a mainstay of everything inter-faith in Leicester and farther afield. He'll definitely be missed around here.

RED TAPE CHALLENGE TO ENVIRONMENT - AND EQUALITY

In today's edition of The Guardian, George Monbiot writes about the impact and implications of the Coalition placing environmental legislation on its Red Tape Challenge website. I've mentioned the Red Tape Challenge before in this blog - the shock of finding the Equality Act 2010 there, the barely controlled panic I heard in the voice of practitioners who thought that the government was wasting no time in disposing of what had been so hard won. What struck me about the section of Monbiot's article that I've reproduced below is how "environment" can fairly be replaced by "equality" and the piece not only still makes sense, but still works, for another discipline. Here's an extract from George Monbiot's piece:

But this is just the beginning of the coalition's assault on the environment. The government's Red Tape Challenge presents, on paper at last, the widest-ranging threat to environmental protection since the enclosure acts. suddenly it is asking whether environmental legislation - yes, all of it - should be "scrapped altogether". Listed as negotiable are [...] all the regulations, grand and petty, that protect us from other people's greed and selfishness.

It's a breathtaking, astonishing initiative, and the little protest it has generated testifies how punchdrunk this country has become as the government pummels every protection our forebears worked so hard to win, everything that defends us from a feral, unregulated market.

The point of the Red Tape challenge is not to scrap all this legislation but to shake the bolts looser. The government is in the process of resetting the political boundaries so that the outrageous propositions it makes in future seem unexceptional.

MY SISTER WANTED A GODLESS FUNERAL. BUT STILL INVITED GOD

Bereavement services - burial and cremation - is a topic that takes a lot of our attention at Leicester Council of Faiths. With that in mind, I was very interested to read this distinctive take on the subject in today's Guardian.

My sister wanted a godless funeral. But still invited God

A royal wedding in a register office – that's the sort of validation those of us who want to live and die as non-believers need

By Jon Canter

My sister Rosemary died of cancer in March, aged 61. As her next-of-kin, it fell to me to organise her funeral. The undertaker's office, I soon discovered, is no place for the bereaved. You can't afford to be dazed or vulnerable, otherwise you will weakly agree to all the standard things, which was not what my sister wanted.

I fought against a wooden coffin and a hearse – securing, after some negotiation, a final journey in a cardboard coffin in the back of a Volvo estate. (Don't worry. It was black.) Then the undertaker asked what religion my sister was. "Atheist," I replied. That, of course, was a nonsense. Atheism is – doh! – not a religion. In that case, he asked, who was going to conduct the funeral? If the Volvo was the unconventional substitute for the hearse, who was the unconventional substitute for the vicar?

Happily – I insist on that word – it was me. Told before Christmas that she had months to live, my sister had the inclination and the courage to prescribe the kind of service she wanted and ask me to conduct it. What she wanted, in a word, was a godless funeral. How easy was that to achieve?

In many ways, the planning of a godless funeral was a liberation. For our mother's cremation we had, via that secular miracle the internet, procured the services of a rabbi. (Oh yes, my sister's non-religion was, in fact, "Jewish atheist".) He recited the prayers with commendable gusto. But he was much like the vicar so familiar from Church of England funerals – he didn't know the deceased; he couldn't eulogise her, except to say he'd heard nice things about her from her family. How many times have you shifted in your pew with embarrassment, as a vicar tries to celebrate a member of his flock who, it's soon apparent, is a bit of a mystery sheep? I knew my elder sister for all but the first four years of her life. In celebrating her, I had infinitely more knowledge and authority than a religious intermediary only doing his or her job.

So. I would talk about her, as would two old friends she nominated.

Then what? How, in the name of godless, would we fill our allotted span? Rosemary wanted a silence, to allow everyone to think their own thoughts. To that – without telling her, for fear of embarrassment – I added a coda, derived from those football matches in which the crowd observes a minute's silence for a dead former player or manager: that silence is followed by rousing applause, which somehow conveys: "Thank you for everything. But now we have to get on with the game."

So that is what we did at my sister's funeral: I announced there would be a silence, at the end of which everyone should applaud, long and loudly, to give thanks for Rosemary's life. It worked wonderfully, though I say it myself. Others might call it gimmicky and new-fangled. At a religious funeral you draw on rituals and prayers with the gravitas only centuries of usage can bring. You take from The Book of Common Prayer, the liturgy, the Qur'an, the Torah; but there we were, at my sister's funeral, paying homage to Match of the Day.

Eulogies and silence, Rosemary felt, should be punctuated by music. ("Do you think I'm being too controlling?" she asked, as she sat on her sofa, scribbling notes about her own funeral. "Of course not," I said, making a mental note to tell the congregation of her question. For that is another benefit of a godless funeral: humour can be encouraged.)

Without hesitation, she specified the opening song. Nothing, she said, more evoked her early childhood than We Plough the Fields and Scatter. Brilliant. Now I could stand up and say, as I duly did: "By the power invested in me by my sister and Richard Dawkins, please stand and sing We Plough the Fields and Scatter." To return to Match of the Day, it certainly felt like an early away goal for God. More such goals were to follow. She wanted Milton's On His Blindness, about a man who, in losing his sight, finds that his soul is "more bent / To serve therewith my Maker". I could go on. And I will.

She craved the Lacrimosa from Mozart's Requiem Mass: "Huic ergo parce, Deus, pie Jesu Domine, dona eis requiem." Yes indeed. Amen to that.

She may not have wanted Him at her funeral, but she needed Him. My sister, born in England in 1949, a singer of hymns in her primary school, grew up with Him. She knew that He elevates. God is the man for the big occasion. So, this is what I hope will happen before my own funeral: there'll be a great state occasion that is godless, to give hope and a kind of validation to all of us who want to live and die as non-believers.

Imagine it: a state funeral or a service of remembrance for those killed in war, in a crematorium, built by Zaha Hadid, as awesome as St Paul's Cathedral. Now imagine this: a royal wedding in Westminster register office, with a registrar standing in the archbishop of Canterbury's God-fearing shoes, as the unbelieving bride enters to the sound of an ancient and venerated secular love song, of the order of the Beatles' Here, There and Everywhere..

Unthinkable, isn't it? Treasonable, probably. Socially embarrassing, certainly. We are not a religiously observant nation – except when it really counts.

Illustration by Otto Detmer

PAGANS VOICE CONCERNS ABOUT THOR

Here's a nice piece I picked up from USA Today's Faith & Reason column, which describes itself as "A Conversation About Religion, Spirituality and Ethics".

Pagans voice concerns about Thor

By Sarah Pullium Bailey for USA TODAY

Thor offers the unexpected start to the Hollywood blockbuster season, as most people may not be familiar with the 49-year-old Marvel Comics hero. Fewer people are probably aware of the Norse god Thor, who is still followed in some pagan traditions.

Reviews have been fairly positive so far, but some pagans have been posting concerns about the movie popularized in the comic book instead of in the tradition they follow. Thor is described as a great warrior of enormous strength.

Leading up to the film, some pagans voiced concerns over the film's depiction of Thor as a deity. Eric Scott wrote a post at Killing the Buddha that set off a chain of reactions on "What happens when Hollywood gets a hold of your gods."

The truth is, I looked at the toys in my hands and I saw the result of millions of dollars of development and thousands of hours of manpower, put into something bearing the name of a god, my god, and it had nothing to do with me. Their Thor was a god forgotten by all except the few quiet geeks who read his adventures in Journey into Mystery and The Mighty Thor for forty years. It wasn't that they meant to upset or unsettle me; they simply realized that people like me were too few to matter. It's impossible to think of a story about Jesus like this, not written to pander to or irritate Christians, but simply not considering them at all.

Hollywood uses Christian characters as well, Alexandra Erin argues, assuming people will be familiar with the names and symbols.

While it must be remembered that Christianity enjoys a very privileged position in our culture and thus can't claim to be injured by off-target pop culture depictions, the fact remains that the Christian religion *is* treated as mythology by Hollywood to be pillaged wholesale for stories and characters. Consider the move Legion, which has a gun-toting archangel action hero facing off against the legions of heaven and/or hell to save a come-again Baby Jesus from the wrath of a petulant God.

Perhaps the film is an opportunity to introduce people to Paganism, Star Foster of Patheos' Pantheon blog says:

Thor is an opportunity. People will seek out Pagans due to this film, silly as that may sound. When they come we should greet them with answers and hospitality, especially if we weren't received that way. Thor can mark a change not only for seekers, but for how our communities interact with them.

Are you planning to see Thor? Have you felt like Hollywood has misrepresented or taken advantage of your beliefs?

I have to declare a special kind of interest in this story. While I wouldn't exactly say I'm a worshipper of Thor, I've certainly been a fan since I was very young. I first encountered The Mighty Thor (to give him his full title - sadly, the movie versions tend to drop the great adjectives, so we don't get the Amazing Spider-Man or The Uncanny X-Men - it's a wonder that they didn't give us just "The Four" as a movie) in the pages of Fantastic comic, which was launched in 1967, when I was an impressionable eight year old (as distinct from the impressionable 51 year old I am today). This featured short black and white instalments of the adventures of several Marvel superheroes, the Mighty Thor amongst them. I used to colour in the pages myself. When I eventually discovered that they were available in colour, between glossy covers and had stories it didn't take months to follow to their conclusion, it was like entering a new world. It's one that still holds its attractions for me, as a cursory glance of my bookshelves, bedside reading or Amazon wish list would confirm.

 

 

For ages, I implored my dad, who was a skilled wood-machinist at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, to make me a wooden version of Mjolnir, Thor's hammer (translated from the Icelandic, the name means "that which smashes"). He gave it to me when I was 10 or thereabouts; it was about half as tall as I was.

In my first year at Allan Glen's, aged 11 or 12, I illustrated a project in history class about the Vikings by cutting out scenes from some of my Thor comics (an unprecedented sacrifice by itself) and pasting them into my jotter. I got 0/10 for the project and my history teacher wrote in angry red script that I should remove every trace of these from my book and do the project over again - properly this time.

In keeping with my own devotion to the god of thunder then, I've used an image from the comic, rather than the movie at the top of this blog post.

TO SEE OURSELS AS OTHERS SEE US!

My friend Catriona Robertson, who tweets as @multifaith, has been taking photographs today at the Scottish Parliament and tweeting them. She sent the photo above out on twitter with the following message:

And one for @counciloffaiths (Scots poetry & quotations inscribed all around the Parliament building)

It's much appreciated - and it's nice to be remembered in such an auspicious setting. And on an auspicious day when the first elected Mayor of Leicester reminds us that "we have the eyes of the country upon us and what we do" it seems highly appropriate.

FIRST ELECTED MAYOR OF LEICESTER ANNOUNCES CABINET

Newly elected City Mayor Peter Soulsby (front, centre in photo above) announced his Cabinet this afternoon. the team will consist of a Deputy Mayor (Councillor Rory Palmer - front, left) and six "Assistant Mayors": Councillors Ted Cassidy (front, right), (back, left to right) Sarah Russell, Manjula Sood, Mohammed Dawood, Vi Dempster and Piara Singh Clair.

Mayor Soulsby said, "I am delighted to announce the new Cabinet, which is a team with a wealth and depth of experience, skills and ability - a talented team that will help lead Leicester into a new era.

"Top of our agenda is jobs, investment, public transport, health, housing, green spaces and fair deal for the city's workforce.

"This is the first time in the city's history that there has been an elected mayor and because of this, we have the eyes of the country upon us and what we do. We face significant challenges and my new team and I are looking forward to making real progress over the next few years making Leicester a strong, proud and self-confident city.

"For the next few weeks Cabinet members will not have portfolios or specific departmental responsibilities - instead they will work together as team addressing the issues and challenges facing the city."

Now, everyone who knows Leicester (and anyone following this blog) knows that Councillor Manjula Sood is Chair of Leicester Council of Faiths and enjoys the distinction of being the first Asian woman Lord Mayor of any English city (2008-09). It will undoubtedly do our city the power of good that someone whom I've long thought of as the "poster girl" for community cohesion and inter faith relations has been appointed to this influential position. What's more, it testifies to the diversity of Leicester that out of six members of the Mayor's cabinet, one is a Hindu, one a Muslim and one Sikh.

Photo courtesy of Citizens' Eye Community News Agency

BELIEVING IN BBC'S ETHOS IS EQUIVALENT TO A FAITH

This article appears in today's Daily Mail:

Believing in BBC's ethos is equivalent to a faith, job tribunal rules 

By Steve Doughty & Claire Ellicot

Rules to prevent religious discrimination can now also be used to protect a belief in the BBC’s ethos of public service broadcasting, a tribunal has ruled.

Its extraordinary decision elevates the BBC’s core principle to a place in the law equivalent to Christianity.

And the move leaves the way clear for long-serving employee Devan Maistry to sue the Corporation for wrongful dismissal.

South African-born Mr Maistry, who worked for the BBC Asian Network, says he suffered discrimination for six years until he was dismissed last year.

He has filed a claim for ‘religious or belief discrimination’, which allegedly took place against his philosophical view that ‘public service broadcasting has the higher purpose of promoting cultural interchange and social cohesion’.

Birmingham employment tribunal chairman Pam Hughes decided Mr Maistry has a worthy case, and gave him the right to a full hearing later this year.

In doing so, the tribunal chairman established the principle that Mr Maistry’s love of public service broadcasting amounted to a belief which should have the same protection from discrimination that the law gives to followers of religious faiths.

In doing so, the tribunal chairman established the principle that Mr Maistry’s love of public service broadcasting amounted to a belief which should have the same protection from discrimination that the law gives to followers of religious faiths.

It is not clear exactly how the broadcaster is accused of treating him unfairly. Mr Maistry would not comment when asked about the basis of his case.

A lawyer for the BBC said it had not even been explained to the Corporation how it had allegedly discriminated against the producer’s philosophical beliefs.

Laws defending workers from discrimination over faith were passed in 2003.

But in the past two years they have been extended by the courts to cover political and fringe interests including views on climate change and animal rights activism.

At the same time, a series of cases have dismissed the importance of Christian beliefs.

Most recently, a couple were told they were unfit to foster children because they could not in conscience tell a child that it was OK to be homosexual.

At the tribunal, the BBC said the idea that belief in public sector broadcasting was the same as a religion was ‘absurd’.

Its lawyer, Tariq Sadiq, said if Mr Maistry’s claim succeeded, then belief in the aims of any public sector organisation – or even a private sector firm’s mission statement – would count as philosophical beliefs.

Mr Sadiq said: ‘A belief that the aim of the NHS should first and foremost be to look after the health and welfare of its patients could, if the claimant were correct, amount to belief for the purposes of the 2003 regulations, but it would be absurd for that to be the case.’

But in her ruling, Miss Hughes said: ‘The claimant had a genuine and strongly held belief in what I will describe in short as the higher purpose of public service broadcasting. It is clearly of great personal significance to him.’

Devan Maistry’s case is the latest in a string of decisions to rule that everyday opinions should have the same status as religious beliefs.

Two years ago, a tribunal found that company executive Tim Nicholson, a firm believer in climate change, was wrongly dismissed after objecting to his company’s use of flights and cars.

That case set a precedent and, this year, animal rights activist Joe Hashman successfully argued that he was wrongly sacked from his garden centre job after his activities were discovered. He said his beliefs should be protected by his employer.

CHALLENGE OF CREATING A NEW VISION FOR CITY

The Bishop of Leicester's First Person column appears in today's Leicester Mercury:

Challenge of creating a new vision for city

The Bishop of Leicester considers what the election of a mayor will bring to our community

By the time this article is published we shall know the results of Thursday's elections for Mayor of Leicester. Several months ago I wrote in this column that whoever is elected will need and deserve the prayerful support of the Christian communities in the city. I am sure we will all want to support the new mayor, not only with our prayers but with our active engagement to build a better city.

In a democracy it is all too easy both to withhold participation and at the same time to grumble. If we failed to cast a vote on Thursday we can hardly complain if the mayor does not meet our expectations. And if we did vote, whether or not our candidate was chosen, we surely have a responsibility now to work together so that the past animosities and competitiveness no longer stand in the way of building a new vision.

My hope is that people of faith will want to work with the new mayor's office more actively than ever. For the Christian community, this is a special responsibility because we believe that all earthly authority stands in the end under the authority of God.

This truth is acted out at the coronation of a new monarch when the Sword of State is placed on the altar of Westminster Abbey. It signifies that the Queen in Parliament and all who hold elected authority in this country stand under a higher authority. Even in a secular age this is crucial for our understanding of our national identity.

Those whom we have elected are given authority not to oppress but to serve. Not to disempower but to empower all the citizens to make their unique contribution to the common good.

I hope that our city council under its new leadership will not seek to take power into the hands of a small clique but rather to work with all people of goodwill to release all the energies, vision and creativity which are available in abundance in the communities of Leicester.

This may be a new opportunity for us all. I hope and pray that it will be and that the new mayor will rise to the challenge.

At the heart of this challenge will lie the creation of a vision in which we can all share. Surely a good city is one in which all can reap the benefits of increasing prosperity. One in which those who are better off are ready to bear the burdens for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged.

One in which the philanthropy and generosity of those who have the private means to contribute to the common good is welcomed. And one in which the city as a whole serves to feed the spirit and soul of its people as well as to expand the economy.

This week's visitors

Here's the update on the number of pageviews the blog has received from different parts of the world in the week just ending.

1. United Kingdom 240
2. United States 128
3. Russia 44
4. Germany 34
5. France 26 
6. India 21
7. Latvia 19
8. Canada 12
9. Iran 12
10. Norway 12

This week's total: 548  (last week's: 669) These are aggregates of figures from the top ten countries only. Blogger's stats software doesn't show me numbers of pageviews below the tenth-ranking country.

The world map at the top of this post is the graphic that I see on the stats page. The darker the green, the more pageviews from that country. I can see different versions of this map for "now" (whenever that is), today, this week, this month and "all time" (which seems to mean the last 12 months). They're updated each time I look at that them.

Vox popped by Rupal

Around 1700 this afternoon I leave the Welcome Centre, where for the past couple of hours I'd been listening to the local election results on BBC Radio Leicester. Walking down Every Street, by the side of Town Hall Square, I'm buttonholed by Rupal Rajani, who's out with a roving microphone, recording some vox pop about the election results.

She approaches me with, "Your face is familiar." I've seen Rupal at various events, functions and occasions locally although we've never been introduced. So when I do introduce myself properly she asks me to say a few words in response to the Labour landslide. I express the hope that elected members will be able to serve the whole city, rather than just those who are seen to have supported them. I say that, working for the Council of Faiths has shown me the need for social cohesion in Leicester and hope that takes pride of place rather than some sectional interest.

My older son Alastair is with me. I introduce him to Rupal as a musician, and she records a few words with him too. He says he hopes that the Mayor and councillors can give the proper attention to the development of the arts in the city.