The London Institute for Contemporary Christianity - All Articles

None of God’s Business?

Wed, 14 May 2008 21:15:46 +0100

Mark Greene reflects on the role of business

Every age has a dominant institution – the one that drives all the others. In the Middle Ages it was the Church. In the nineteenth century it was government and in the 21st century it’s business. As Anita Roddick, founder of the Bodyshop put it:

“I don’t think that anyone would argue that business now dominates the world’s centre stage. It is faster, more creative, adaptable, efficient and wealthier than many governments … So in terms of power and influence you can forget the Church and forget politics, too. There is no more powerful institution in society than business. It is more important than ever before for business to assume a moral leadership in society.”

Oscars for the Academy

Wed, 14 May 2008 21:08:25 +0100

Mark Greene finds Hollywood calling us to make a stand.

Last week, a friend of mine resigned from their job. They’d been there over four years.

They didn’t have another job to go to, they don’t have a lot of money in the bank and they aren’t prone to self-destructive, melodramatic gestures. However, the organisation was putting them in a position where they couldn’t do the work in a way that appropriately protected the people they were there to serve. Warnings had been given about falling standards. The warnings had been ignored. So, regretfully, painfully, the resignation letter was written – short, gracious, clear, legally careful.

Hope, Hope, Hurray?

Wed, 14 May 2008 21:02:22 +0100

Despite the data, Mark Greene finds reasons to be cheerful

“Woe, woe, three times, woe”, so beat the drums of doom on almost any measure of the social, emotional, physical or mental health of contemporary Britain… overworked, overtired, overspent, overweight, overdrugged … Is there hope for our muddled education system, careening from new initiative to new initiative, desperately trying to claw its way up the EU league tables? Is there hope for our children, the most miserable in the ‘developed’ world? Is there hope for our slave new world of work where the rich do indeed get richer and the rest of us get wearier? Is there hope for our community relations as the mounting fear of Islam builds an ever higher wall, razor-wired with suspicion and resentment on both sides? Is there hope when terrible events like the Bridgend teenage suicides no longer seem to be ghastly anomalies but harbingers of deepening darkness?

The Perdition of Happiness

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 20:24:21 +0000

Mark Greene explores why society in Britain is so miserable.

Oliver James’ new book The Selfish Capitalist, published in January, may prove to be one of the most important books of the year. It explores one of the most pressing problems facing British society in particular, and English-speaking nations in general: why are Britons and Americans and English-speaking nations so much more miserable, indebted, divorce-prone, drug-addicted and obese than our Western European counterparts? And what might we begin to do about it?

But first I need to tell you something: I’m a ‘Tigger’.

The culture of outrage

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 20:19:36 +0000

The British media suggests that Christians are better known for what they are against than what they are for. In an age of supposed religious tolerance, Mark Greene asks, when did we get so angry?

A pope gives a lecture in Europe and nuns are murdered in Ethiopia. A writer publishes a novel and is forced into hiding. A teacher allows her class to name a teddy bear after a popular pupil and a Sudanese crowd call for her death. A Milanese football team wear a strip with a red cross in it at their home ground against a Turkish team and a Turkish lawyer sues them, grieved by the shirt’s similarity to the Templars’ garb and its associations with the Crusades. A company throws a party offering a champagne prize in its raffle and some of the Muslim employees sue them.

With all these people being offended, with all this intensity of response to what for the most part seem rather minor infractions, or no real infraction at all, it is tempting to be outraged oneself. Where is the forbearance in any of this? Where is there any understanding of other peoples’ cultures on the part of those apparently so deeply offended? Where is there any acceptance that others too have an identity, traditions, a God they may love?

Indeed, do not many of us now feel that a policy of appeasement towards minority but vocal, influential, Muslim sensibilities is doomed to failure? On the one hand, we are busy being told that the cross is offensive pretty much wherever it appears. On the other, a section of the Muslim community want to build the biggest mosque in Europe, presumably with a minaret to match and a crescent atop it, right next to the Olympic village. And is anyone allowed to build a church the size of a phonebox in Saudi Arabia? How easy it would be to get into a confrontation about ‘rights’, rather than a conversation about mutual respect, acknowledged difference and community-building.

In this highly combustible atmosphere of intense offence, intimidation and double standards, how are we to live? Skulk away in fear? Get outraged ourselves? Outrage is tempting. After all, feeling offended gets your cause airtime, the deference of politicians and the sympathy of community leaders, so why not get hot under the collar yourself?

Opening Doors and Opening Hearts

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 20:16:14 +0000

Mark Greene discovers the power of badges and titles to open hearts in surprising places.

I’m in a car on my way to Whitworth with a friend. We stop at a crossroads in Rochdale. There on the far side of the road stands The Cemetery Hotel, sombre in its black and gold paint. Given that it’s right across the road from a cemetery, I’m sure the locals don’t give the name a second thought, but to an outsider like me, it has a macabre ring to it, the kind of place you check into, but never check out of, like the motel in Psycho. Who, apart from a vampire, would fancy a night at a Cemetery Hotel, particularly a Cemetery Hotel that is located on the Bury Rd? They probably promise you the longest night’s sleep you’ll ever have. And don’t have a breakfast menu.

A vision of sustainable living

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 09:45:39 +0000

Nick Spencer paints a picture of what a relationally and environmentally sustainable society might look like today.

There is no obvious and incontrovertible vision of sustainable living to which we should aspire. There will be as many impressions of the genuinely sustainable society as there are people to advocate them.

Imagining a sustainable society does not demand a kind of eco-fascism that seeks to impose its vision of the future on all, threatening violence to recalcitrants and sceptics. What follows, therefore, is a vision, not a template, of what sustainable living might look like at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Thin morality

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 09:40:30 +0000

Nick Spencer explores a society with a weighty problem

I am one of those hateful people who can eat pretty much what he likes and never put on weight. Neither gym nor low fat foods appeal, and I have avoided both for many years. Yet, somehow, miraculously, I remain a svelte 11 stone.

I am, thus, singularly ill-qualified to write about obesity and its threat to our physical, emotional and financial health. Smug, self-satisfied and thin: you should take what I say with a (small) pinch of salt.

Is Christmas Dead?

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 09:36:59 +0000

Nick Spencer finds that the season of goodwill hasn’t yet passed its sell-by date

Christmas is like the NHS. Most of us have some, local contact with it, and most of us like what we get. But most of us remain convinced that the institution is endangered, pushed to the point of extinction by politically-correct town-hall councillors or the health-and-safety mafia.

The Value of Vengeance

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 09:29:33 +0000

Nick Spencer explores how punishment should fit the crime

“Comment is free,” wrote The Guardian’s famous editor, CP Scott, “but facts are sacred.”

Things, alas, are not so simple today. Postmodernism has cast its ominous shadow over Scott’s solid, sacred facts and, in the age of the blog, comment is not so much free as worthless.

Is there anybody out there?

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 09:20:00 +0000

Nick Spencer looks up at the sky and reflects on what we can learn from Creation.

‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe…the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.’ So wrote Immanuel Kant in the conclusion to his Critique of Practical Reason.

Kant may have been an ambiguous believer (to put it generously) himself, but his starry heavens have long been one of creation’s – thus Christians’ – greatest theistic arguments. At their simplest (and least convincing) they supposedly demonstrate God’s existence. At the more subtle (and more persuasive) they lift the human mind towards the possibility of the transcendent, the numinous, the ‘other’. ‘The heavens declare the glory of God,’ Psalm 19 declares, ‘the skies proclaim the work of his hands.’

An Atheist’s Atonement?

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 13:11:05 +0100

Mark Greene finds much to admire in a fine film adaptation.

Ian McEwan has come a long way since the days when his menacing, somewhat morbid tales of deviancy and dysfunctionality earned him the nickname ‘Ian MacAbre’. Today, ten novels and five film adaptations later, he is regarded by many literary critics as one of Britain’s finest living novelists. Amsterdam won the Booker Prize in 1998 and his new novel, On Chesil Beach, is shortlisted for this year’s award.

Uncalculating Generosity

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 19:16:01 +0100

It’s interesting how quickly people tend to make assumptions about other people based on their jobs: nurses are caring, journalists are untrustworthy, advertising executives are serpentine manipulators … Twas ever thus.

In the first century AD, most Jews in Israel would have assumed that Zacchaeus, as a tax collector, was a treasonous collaborator with a pagan enemy and a corrupt exploiter of his own people. Certainly that’s what most preachers have assumed since. However, the story of Zacchaeus’ encounter with Jesus is not the story of a deeply corrupt individual who is utterly unlike most of us, but the story of a man running an outsourcing business in the context of a difficult and flawed economic and political system.

Harry Rises to the Occasion

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 20:18:26 +0100

Mark Greene is enchanted by Harry’s last hurrah.

We have perhaps now got used to it but as cultural events go, there’s very little to match the launch of a Harry Potter book. It’s not simply that 2.6 million copies of the UK edition were sold in the first week, it was the palpable sense of expectation, the ubiquitous speculation about which characters would live and which would die, and the determination by so many people to get a copy as soon as possible and to read it as rapidly as possible. Indeed, whilst hundreds may turn up to watch stars arrive for a film premier in London’s Leicester Square, thousands of kids all across the land queued in droves, and often in fancy dress, outside bookshops counting down the seconds to midnight like revellers in Trafalgar Square on New Year’s Eve. Furthermore, the primary engine for this interest has not been a well-oiled publicity machine or a huge marketing budget or a Jesus-was-a-space-man controversy but simply the compelling nature of the stories themselves.

Chicken soup and cappuccinos

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 20:38:11 +0100

Mark Greene takes a refreshing look at what we drink and why.

It’s a truism that different foods and different drinks have different meanings in different cultures. In most cultures chicken soup is just chicken soup but in the Jewish culture I grew up in, chicken soup wasn’t just chicken soup, chicken soup was the cure for all ailments, the universal panacea. And more than that, chicken soup was what your mother made you when you were ill. It was liquidised mother love. If you were ill and your mother didn’t make you chicken soup, the question was: did she really love you? It was a serious question.