The Cosmic Incarnation

I had a student, some years ago now, who wanted to do a study of the place of green issues in the Anglican liturgical texts. I am sure he expected to find an absence. He soon discovered, however, that because the liturgy had emerged within a largely agricultural society, one that was far closer to nature than we are now, issues associated with nature and the cycle of the year etc. were current in many different elements of the rite. This should not have come as a surprise, but it is also something that I have not really thought about or reflected on as much as perhaps I should.

I have never been overly concerned with climate change and the destruction of biodiversity etc. My priority has always been focused more closely on social justice and human inequality, although I do recognise that the two are intimately related.

When I have thought about writing a three-volume work on the incarnation it is the human, and the social that I have always assumed would be the core of the text. I have always recognised, however, that I needed to start with hierophony, the recognition of God in, and through, the world before speaking of God’s intervention in that world. I had thought that I would start there primarily to dismiss that strand of thinking only to move on to more human, more incarnational, topics.

Going through the liturgy in the traditional Latin rite over the last few days, however, and concentrating particularly on the text (not something I have normally done – not having to concentrate on the words being one of the reasons why the Latin rite appeals) I have been struck by just how much the natural world, and the cosmic, plays within that text.

There is a focus, for example, on materiality – on wood, on oil, on water, on fire, on beeswax and so on – and a recognition of, or more accurately a calling for, the indwelling of the Spirit within the material objects. The great blessings – of oil on Maundy Thursday, or of the fire, the candle and the water on Holy Saturday – places the material substances at the core of the liturgy. And throughout Good Friday there is an emphasis on wood, in all its forms, and more specifically the tree on which Our Saviour hung.

What was more significant, however, in the Holy Saturday liturgy, was the cosmic scale of the events that are unfolding. This is seen specifically in the Exultet. With the repeated statement that ‘this is the night’, and similar statements of repetition and coincidentality throughout the text. The readings begin with creation and the events of the cross, and the resurrection, are consistently placed within the cosmic realm, way beyond the events of those few days in Palestine over two thousand years ago.

Time is central here. We are often told that Christianity introduced a linear time, as opposed to cyclic time of the earlier religions. Eliade places a great deal of emphasis on the condensation of time, such that in ritual the time of now is merged with the time of origins. This is exactly what the Holy Saturday liturgy is doing, freezing time rather than introducing linear time.

Every Mass makes the time of the present and the time of the past, the crucifixion and the last supper, coterminous. The Holy Saturday liturgy takes that out and brings the time of creation, the time of the crucifixion/resurrection, the time of so many other events, and the time of the current liturgy into a moment of stasis, where all time is condensed into one, no past and no future, alpha and omega become one. This is not linear time, this is time as perceived from God’s perspective, where all becomes one, eternity in the blinking of an eye.

Over this weekend four astronauts are also travelling beyond the orbit of the earth and circling around the far side of the moon. They have sent back incredible, although no longer entirely new, images of the earth from space, that wonderful jewel of a planet in the darkness of infinity. What makes that place so special? Why is that place singled out for the incarnation of our God?

It is that question, along with the reflections on time that come from the Holy Saturday liturgy, that lead me now to think that the first part of my trilogy on the incarnation must be more positive, not just a dismissal of hierophony, but a celebration of the cosmic incarnation.

There is far more work to do here, but certainly something to think about…

Constructing and Controlling Common Sense

This is the first of what I hope will be a series of blogs that comes from my reading of Pierre Bourdieu. Others will deal more explicitly with some of his key themes. In this first blog, however, I want to address what he offers as a kind of throw away remark. A remark that I think is of fundamental importance in our social media saturated world. Bourdieu suggests that whoever controls common sense controls the way society talks about itself and about the world around it.

Common sense is not something that I have ever really reflected on. There is a series of arguments in the anthropology of religion that I would refer to under the heading of ‘religion as common sense’. Clifford Geertz is the figure I have most regularly associated with this view in my undergraduate lectures. It is Geertz’s suggestion that religion is simply a mode of thought, the basic, unspoken and unquestioned way of thinking within a specific society, and hence ‘common sense’ for that society, that is the basic principle behind this view.

My partner also regularly tells me that something or other that I have failed to do correctly, whatever it might be, is ‘common sense’. The fact that he and I disagree on how to do the task in hand or, more frequently, that my dyslexia means that I simply cannot remember how to do it, shows that it probably is not as ‘common’ in terms of sense as he assumes.

However, I have never really thought about common sense as something that is constructed or controlled. It takes very little thought, however, to recognise that this is the case. It is very rare that we see ‘common sense’ change in real time. Looking back on my lifetime, however, I can see many obvious changes (even if we ignore the impact of technology on what is ‘common’ sense).

In the 1970s and 80s it was ‘common sense’ that gay men were sexually interested in boys and latent paedophiles. Everybody thought that they knew that to be true, very few people seriously questioned it, and Section 28 was based on that principle. It took considerable effort, and ten, twenty, perhaps even thirty years to change this ‘common sense’ position. Today it is ‘common sense’ that gay people will want to settle down, get married and have kids – something that I still find rather problematic.

In recent years, however, I have seen common sense change much more rapidly, either because of sustained argument or, more frequently, due to a draconian insistence that it is the case, even when every argument argues against it. Trump is a master of stating things so loudly and so insistently that a surprising number of others come to believe that he is ‘simply stating common sense’ – what we all agree and know to be ‘true’(??).

The most explicit space where I have seen this change in action is in the move from the ‘common sense’ position that we must respect whatever identity any person chooses to adopt for themselves, to the ‘common sense’ position that women are biological women and trans women are obviously not women. This is partly a case of critical feminists simply stating, over and over again, their position, primarily by insistently asking the question ‘what is a woman’, but it also depends on the structure of the statement ‘women are women’ which appears, logically and structurally, to be ‘common sense’ and has, most recently, been defined in law and so must be ‘common sense’.

Whoever controls common sense, therefore, to go back to Bourdieu, controls society. What matters, therefore, is to set the parameters for what is, and what is not, common sense. One change, in recent years, is that certain politicians and social commentators, have deliberately begun to put this principle into practice. In doing so they have recognised, as I have suggested, that the best way of doing this is to state the case, over and over again and as loudly as possible, rather than trying to argue their case – something that those of us who have been trying to change social values over many years end up doing primarily because we do not want to offend!

 Common sense is also related to my theory of situational belief. It is formed of a series of statements that we might call ‘belief statements’. Such statements can be used to make sense of specific situations, but they need not be coherent or consistent across different situations. Another strategy, therefore, is to take key statements that are already widely accepted by the speaker’s opponents and to build new statements on these foundations, making it difficult for the opponents to reject the new statements without also rejecting the shared common position as reflected in the widely accepted statements, the ‘common sense’, that is recognised as being shared.

The statement that women are suffering increasing levels of sexual abuse, for example, is a statement of common sense that is noted across the political spectrum, but that has been most explicitly stated in recent decades among those on the left. Those of the right, however, have recognised this and have appropriated this ‘common sense’ statement by adding to it the statements that the most significant perpetrators of sexual violence on women are trans women and/or immigrants.

The original statement, condemnation of sexual violence against women, should bring us all together (although the identification of men, as a category, as the perpetrator and so the ‘enemy’, and the impact of this on boys, is another discussion). The new elements then begin to divide and are open to challenge factually. By creating these views as ‘common sense’, however, it allows those on the right to endorse certain policies that many of find morally unacceptable.

Recognising that the right has become incredibly good at controlling, managing and even creating ‘common sense’, explains, in part, the power that this gives them across society. What Bourdieu does not tell us, at least at that part of his argument, however, is how we challenge this, or perhaps how we set about creating an alternative ‘common sense’. Or perhaps it is the case that to challenge the construction of ‘common sense’ leads to the collapse of the whole structure of ‘sense’ as those on the right would like us to believe? 

The Idea of a Twenty-First Century (Catholic Heritage) University: Part 3, The New Dark Ages

The New Dark Ages

Over the weekend, I read a review of Nigel Biggar’s latest book, The New Dark Ages. Biggar is Professor of Theology at Oxford who came to prominence recently because his earlier book on Colonialism was ‘cancelled’ by Bloomsbury before being taken up by William Collins and becoming a best seller. The current book is wide ranging, but, in part it addresses the question of free speech in universities, advocating a ‘liberal’ approach that Biggar claims to be meritocratic, race blind and sex blind, what he might want to call ‘scientific’.

Biggar suggests that universities should reinstate a series of traditional virtues including ‘temperance (showing emotional restraint), respect (holding fast to the idea that your opponents act in good faith), carefulness (being accurate in representing others), charity (taking the strongest versions of opponents’ arguments), humility (knowing that we all make mistakes), and docility or teachableness (assuming that we always have more to learn)’. These are all principles that both Newman, and I, would heartily endorse.

The reviewer, however, from the Telegraph, kept stating that Biggar was only confirming ‘common sense’. Pierre Bourdieu, among others, has noted that those who control ‘common sense’ control the thinking of society, and we have seen that very clearly in recent years from Brexit, through Trump, to Reform.

When Newman talks about theological truth as ‘inspired’, we can, perhaps, also think that this kind of truth, the moral or ethical truth, is simply given, revealed in a clear and unambiguous fashion, what we might think of as ‘common theological sense’. Newman however, like all those identified as Doctors of the Church, is abundantly clear that there is nothing common, or uncontested, about revealed truth. Theological reasoning, critical reflection and a constant questioning in the light of changing society, is difficult, it takes years to perfect, and is at the core of Newman’s theological approach.

The pursuit of moral truth is not easy, it is no less critical and robust than scientific truth, but it cannot be ignored, marginalised or treated as an optional extra in the work of the university.

It is not only in our academic work that we need to draw on theological truth. When I was asked to revise the EDI strategy at Birmingham University, some ten years ago now, I was clear that we needed to develop a strategy that took account of all the protected characteristics. I know only too well, from my own experience, how the different characteristics can be played off against each other, with religion, for example, often taking a secondary place to sexuality.

The current debate about trans rights and sex or gender is another example of the attempt to pitch one characteristic against another in an apparently zero-sum game. Beginning to think through, reflect upon, challenge, and ultimately argue for, a coherent strategy of inclusion that enables respect for all individuals is far from easy.

Theories of intersectionality go some way to recognise the overlaps between the different characteristics, but they are not focused on developing an approach where all forms of oppression, marginalisation and suffering are given equal recognition. Simply claiming that we are being meritocratic, race blind, sex blind, or blind to any other characteristic, is also no answer to this challenge.

Just because such thinking is not easy, however, it does not mean that we, as universities, should not be seeking the sociological, philosophical, moral, or even theological, truths that make this possible. We will need to draw on all those in our institutions who are steeped in these disciplines to achieve this, and doing so is perhaps one of the most urgent tasks of the twenty first century (Catholic heritage) university.

The Opiniated University

Another recent book addressing the contemporary crisis in Higher Education is Brian Soucek’s Opinionated University. Soucek is speaking to an American audience, and American universities are perhaps facing a somewhat different and perhaps more existential challenges than ourselves. There is a strong call, in America, for universities to be neutral on political and other issues, if only for their own survival.

Soucek states that this call for neutrality is missing a significant point. All universities, he argues, by their very nature, express opinions. In our research we reach, and express, opinions (hopefully well-founded opinions). More importantly, for Soucek, each time we assess an assignment from students we are expressing an opinion, that this work is worth a first, a 2:1 or whatever it might be. We cannot, as universities, get away from expressing opinions and, as such, we are really rather good at it, or at least very experienced at doing so. Why should we then remain neutral in some areas, Soucek asks, and not in others?

I have been speaking recently to colleagues in the Northeast, Newcastle, Sunderland, Durham, who find themselves in areas governed by Reform led councils and recently elected Reform party mayors. They are already finding themselves being pressured, very indirectly and very subtly, to abandon certain positions, particularly around EDI, or to question their international strategies. Students from minority backgrounds are raising their concerns with the chaplains among others. Councils are already putting in place actions to remove ‘city of sanctuary’ status from their areas.

We face local elections here in Birmingham in May. Like the rest of the country these elections are being watched very carefully. At last week’s rally in the city, Nigel Farage claimed that Reform would win a landslide in Birmingham. A local priest, in an inner urban area on the other side of the city, sees the council being split evenly between Reform and pro-Gaza independents. Whatever we think of their politics, neither group has any significant experience of running a city such as Birmingham.

As with the false dichotomy between trans rights and women’s rights, we are also being pushed, by public discourse, and increasingly by the Office for Students, to make a false distinction between freedom of speech, or academic freedom, and inclusion. These are false dichotomies and suggest a particular way of thinking, which, as with my comments on equalities above, we should aim to challenge and to do the critical philosophical, ethical and theological thinking to transcend.

We would all, here at Birmingham Newman University, recognise the centrality of social justice to Catholic thinking and its importance within the wider theological project. As Catholic heritage universities, therefore, we also need to be cognisant of this tradition and embed the search for theological truth both within our practices as universities, in our academic work with, and alongside, our staff and our students, and in our public discourses.

Summary

In summarising what I have tried to address this morning, therefore, I would highlight three points that I have learnt from reading Cardinal Newman’s Idea of a University:

First, the university is the totality of its people, its academic staff, its professional staff and its students. It is wrong to see any one of these as distinct, or more relevant, than the others. Our teaching, our research, our public engagement are all part of the shared responsibility of the community as whole. We might also want to include in this our Council, our alumni and our partners in industry, civil society and the community around us. This is what the ‘university’ of the twenty-first century must be seen as, and all our activities must be fully inclusive of the whole of that community.

Second, we must recognise the interconnection and mutual interdependence of scientific and theological, or moral, truths. One without the other is defective and open to falsehood. For this reason, and not just because of the contribution of humanities and creative studies students to the economy, we must always argue the case for a balance between science, technology, humanities and the creative arts within our institutions.

Third, we are living in dangerous times. There are those who would seek to undermine, if not to destroy, the idea of the university as set out by Newman and by many others over the last hundred and fifty years. Our position, particularly as Catholic heritage universities, is to stand up for that tradition, to undertake the difficult and critical thinking necessary to make our case. Never resorting to simplistic essentialism or to simplistic relativism. This may not always be easy, but, with the vision of St John Henry Newman to lead us, and the confidence of our Catholic faith, I believe that we can stand firm and position ourselves to lead the fight for the relevance of the university into the second quarter of the twenty-first century, and for the next hundred and fifty years.

The Idea of a Twenty-First Century (Catholic Heritage) University: Part 2, Truth(s)

Truth(s)

This takes me to the core of Newman’s argument, particularly in the lectures he delivered to the university in Dublin, the first five sections of the book. Here Newman is keen to emphasise the place of Catholic theology as central to his understanding of what a university should be. More accurately, however, and given the audience that Newman is addressing, Newman is arguing for the importance of studying science and other emerging disciplines alongside Catholic theology.

For Newman, both theology and science seek after truth. However, the truth that they are seeking is different, complementary and, in Newman’s eyes, they are both necessary to a complete understanding of the world.

Science is rooted in a truth that is based on empirical observation and the experimental method. It aims to tell us about the material world and enables us to engage with and develop technologies that allow us to solve the problems faced by this world.

Theology, for Newman, is based on revealed truth. It aims to answer very different questions, about what ought to happen, how to behave, and more specifically about the nature and value of the human person, and the created world, in the eyes of the Creator. This cannot be discovered through experiment or by any amount of scientific enquiry, but science, in Newman’s view, cannot progress without this other, revealed, truth.

Today, we are consistently being told that we must look to the evidence, that science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or medicine are the basis of economic advancement, and that they should be prioritised in our universities. Newman, perhaps, had to argue for a greater place for science in the universities (especially the faith-based universities of his own day). We are looking to a time when science is all, and ‘truth’ is equated with experimental, empirical, truth. But, as Newman would clearly appreciate, ‘truth’ is never neutral.

Truth and Untruth

I am currently writing a book on decolonisation, more specifically on the way anthropologists, art historians, tour companies and popular discourses have used the idea of the Dogon people of West Africa. The academic discourse began in the 1930s among French anthropologists. This was a very active time for intellectuals and artists within the French capital. Core to much of that debate, however, and particularly to the development of ethnology, was what we have come to know as ‘scientific racism’.

From the middle of the nineteenth century work had been underway to discover a scientific basis for racial difference, whether through the measuring of skulls, other physical features or, when that failed, of intelligence. This was an empirical science, rooted in measurements and experimentation, but also in colonialism, much of it was utterly demeaning to those on whom the measurements and experiments were inflicted.

The ‘science’ of race would have sat squarely in Newman’s field of scientific ‘truth’ but it led, among other things, to the horrors of the Holocaust. We know only too well that so-called scientific truths can be partial, destructive and morally false. Scientific truth, in this sense, cannot stand without some reference to Newman’s other truth, the theological, or we might say ‘moral’, ‘ethical’ or ‘social’, truth.

One reasons for my interest in the Dogon people is that I collect art that has been created by these people. On my shelf I have a mask, a black monkey mask. There are many truths that can be related to this mask.

We can enquire about its manufacture and use among the Dogon, about the symbolism and the stories that surround the black monkey of which it is a representation. We can also ask about how it was acquired by dealers, removed from the Bandiagara cliffs in Africa to Paris or to Brussels, exhibited, perhaps stored for a time in the collection of a museum, returned to the market and bought by myself. Each step on this journey raises difficult ethical questions and subjects the mask to a range of meanings and associations that are not always easy to identify or comfortable to confront.

For all these different truths, however, both scientific and ethical, there are certain statements about this mask that are clearly untrue. It is not, as some have claimed, the representation of a helmet worn by visitors to our planet from Alfa Centauri many millennia ago and preserved as a collective memory by esoteric priests on the isolated cliffs where the Dogon live.

We may, following the post-modern turn, want to talk of multiple truths, of different kinds of truth. We may also hear it said that any truth is possible, my truth, your truth, false news, deep fakes. In this context Newman’s emphasis on truth, or on the different bases for truth, becomes ever more important. We need to be very clear when we are talking about truth and when we talk about falsehood, or untruth and that is also part of the purpose of the university.

The Idea of a Twenty-First Century (Catholic Heritage) University: Part 1, Community

I gave a paper at an event at Birmingham Newman University to celebrate the recognition of St John Henry Newman as Doctor of the Church. This is the text, in three parts:

Summary

In summarising what I have tried to address this morning, I would highlight three points that I have learnt from reading Cardinal Newman’s Idea of a University:

First, the university is the totality of its people, its academic staff, its professional staff and its students. It is wrong to see any one of these as distinct, or more relevant, than the others. Our teaching, our research, our public engagement are all part of the shared responsibility of the community as whole. We might also want to include in this our Council, our alumni and our partners in industry, civil society and the community around us. This is what the ‘university’ of the twenty-first century must be seen as, and all our activities must be fully inclusive of the whole of that community.

Second, we must recognise the interconnection and mutual interdependence of scientific and theological, or moral, truths. One without the other is defective and open to falsehood. For this reason, and not just because of the contribution of humanities and creative studies students to the economy, we must always argue the case for a balance between science, technology, humanities and the creative arts within our institutions.

Third, we are living in dangerous times. There are those who would seek to undermine, if not to destroy, the idea of the university as set out by Newman and by many others over the last hundred and fifty years. Our position, particularly as Catholic heritage universities, is to stand up for that tradition, to undertake the difficult and critical thinking necessary to make our case. Never resorting to simplistic essentialism or to simplistic relativism. This may not always be easy, but, with the vision of St John Henry Newman to lead us, and the confidence of our Catholic faith, I believe that we can stand firm and position ourselves to lead the fight for the relevance of the university into the second quarter of the twenty-first century, and for the next hundred and fifty years.

Part 1: Community

St John Henry Newman

St John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University is probably the best known, and most widely quoted, books on what it is to be a university, although it was originally published over a hundred and fifty years ago in the middle of the nineteenth century. I was immediately struck, however, when I first read it, just how relevant the text sounds all these years later. Given everything that has happened over this time, that may sound a little strange. Have universities really not changed all that much in the last hundred and fifty years? Perhaps, but it may also be because Newman was onto something.

Newman’s book has been particularly influential in the States. Here in the UK, it is noted more as an historical oddity. This may have something to do with its age, but it is also related to the book’s very specifically Catholic, and less obviously, Irish context. Universities in the States tend to be less embarrassed by this, but even in the States the Catholic element has been largely ignored.

In the UK it may be thought that we do not have a strong tradition of faith-based universities. However, up till the nineteenth century the Anglican foundation of Oxford and Cambridge, and their position as ‘the establishment’, was taken for granted. At the time Newman was writing, in the mid nineteenth century there were challenges to this Anglican dominance with universities such as Edinburgh and, in a few more years, Birmingham and the other big civic universities, establishing a more specifically ‘secular’ stance over and against the Anglican establishment.

Newman specifically addresses the debate, that was occurring as he wrote, between the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh. This was not, however, an argument about faith. It was an argument about the purpose of the university. Oxford claimed to place research and the development of knowledge at the core of their mission while the founders of Edinburgh University saw it as serving the needs of the local economy and providing the skilled workforce required to serve that economy. Newman, given his background, came down firmly on the side of Oxford. He did not argue for the economic value of the university.

Many of our current faith-based universities, those in the Cathedrals group, and including Birmingham Newman University, had their origins in the training of professionals to serve in education and in health. This is something that is still core to our own vision and strategy, but not something that Newman himself might have seen as the purpose of the university.

Community

Before looking at Newman’s argument in more detail, however, it is perhaps worth noting the context in which the lectures on which the book is based were originally given. Newman had recently been appointed, after some persuasion, to establish a new Catholic University in Dublin. He decided that his first act, or one of his very first acts, was to set out to the university what he felt a university should be, and therefore what he expected this new institution in Dublin to achieve. He presented his vision in the form of five lectures delivered to the whole university community, both staff and students.

This may sound to us to have been something of an ordeal. To stand and lecture to the whole university is something that very few vice chancellors would consider today. Most VCs do address the staff on a more, or less, regular basis within weekly, or termly, emails. All staff open meetings are still common. Many VCs also address new students through videos in welcome week, or maybe at graduations, but little of this ever outlines the VC’s vision of what the university is about as an institution.

What this process, the delivery of lectures to whole gathered community, demonstrates, for me, however, is that, for Newman, the ‘university’ is not the bricks and mortar, the physical buildings, it is the people, and what is more it is both staff and students.

I have often heard colleagues refer to ‘the university’ as some faceless entity that makes decisions that they are not a party to. We still speak of ‘the university’ as if it were the leadership team, or at most the academic staff, what the Americans call the ‘faculty’. Students, if they are considered at all, are those who are taught by the university, those who are clients of the university or those who are served by the university, not as an integral part of the university itself.

Newman places the students at the heart of his vision. If the university is not there, as with Edinburgh, to provide skilled workers for the economy of the city or country, it is there, according to Newman, to instil ‘character’ and to develop what he calls ‘gentlemen’, and specifically ‘Irish gentlemen’. This is not language we would use today, but it is this character-building purpose of the university that many American commentators turn to when they look to Newman’s vision of the university.

I have always argued that we must focus on the kind of graduate that we aim to produce. Perhaps not ‘gentleman’, but, in the modern jargon, we might claim that we are looking to prepare, not just ‘work ready’ graduates, but graduates who are ready for life.

While this is important, I also think Newman is going further than this. It is the purpose of the university, and by that he means both staff and students working together, to study together, to grow together and to seek, in mutual collaboration, after knowledge and truth. We often speak of the ‘student voice’, of ‘collaborative teaching’, of providing research opportunities for students, but do we really see the intellectual mission of the university as a fully collaborative activity, of students and staff working together, each bringing their own expertise and experience, their own questions and obsessions, their own cultures and their own faith, to push the boundaries of knowledge? I think not, and, I would argue, it might challenge all of us to reflect on what such activity might actually look like.

Is it Time to Abandon Decolonisation?

The concept of decolonisation seems to have been particularly prominent in my mind over the last month or so. Or, rather, the language of decolonisation has been prominent. The more I have heard the word, the less I feel that I understand what it is about. Is it, therefore, time to abandon the term? Decolonisation has, perhaps, become as meaningless as postmodernism or any of those other theoretical fads that appeared to be so significant at their time, but have now been relegated to theoretical history. Let me look, therefore, at a range of uses that I have come across in the last few weeks…

The Telegraph, among other right-wing commentators, tends to use ‘decolonisation’ as a code for all that is wrong with our universities, especially with the humanities. It has not quite replaced ‘woke’. It has a different set of associations, primarily related to the downgrading of English history, but it is used in much the same way, without any specific content. The difficulty with trying to counter such usages is that we have perhaps come to a position where the term itself has very little real meaning or use within academic discourse, whatever its significance within right-wing rhetoric.

In early December I attended a wonderful conference in Cairo focusing primarily on contemporary Arabic literatures. Needless to say, the conference was saturated with ideas of decolonisation, even to the point that we had a brief argument when one of the speakers suggested that Egypt did not have a colonial past (which, of course, it did, although not like some other nations). The frame for many of the presentations was the colonial history, or postcolonial context, of many Arab nations. Decolonisation was also used to describe the way speakers sought to discover Arabic terms to replace theoretical concepts from the West, most notably that of ‘trauma’, or by questioners who wanted to challenge other speakers use of Western theoretical concepts, all without fully recognising that ‘decolonisation’ itself was a concept with a strong Western theoretical genealogy.

During the conference I read a book, written in the 1990s about African literature, including comments on the way African writers presented European colonial characters and the relationship between African literatures and Black writing from the States and writing from the African diaspora. This was what I think of as classic ‘decolonisation’ although that was not a term that was ever used within the text. More recently I have read a book about the way European economic development was dependent on the East, particularly on the Muslim world and China, and only came into a prominent position in the world after 1800, building on racist constructions of Africa, Native America and the East to create a narrative saturated by Eurocentrism. Again, this is a practical example of the decolonisation of history, without ever using the term. Currently, I am reading through the catalogue for an exhibition at the Musée Quai Branley Jaques Chirac on the Dakar Djibouti Expedition in 1931-33 earlier in the year. Once again, the aim has been to highlight the African contributions and the concerns relating to collecting and the restitution of objects associated with the expedition. Clearly a decolonising text.

What has particularly struck me, however, is the range of uses of decolonisation in a series of papers for the latest edition of the Journal for the British Association for the Study of Religion, the proofs of which I have just finished checking. Here decolonisation is used to describe the epistemicide of Muslim modes of thought, treating Muslims, even in the UK, as a colonised people almost by definition. Decolonisation is also assumed as an uncontested starting point for a course on religion and the media, with reference to the range of voices heard and the need to challenge the often-stated narratives within the classroom. It is also related to ideas of cultural appropriation in a paper about yoga. Finally, and coming back to my starting point in a rather roundabout way, decolonisation is claimed by Modi’s right wing BJP government as a justification for the destruction of a mosque in Ayodhya and the building of a temple dedicated to Rama.

With so many different uses and references, decolonisation becomes all but meaningless. The fact that books written before the 1990s could talk about many of the concepts that are currently incorporated into the term ‘decolonisation’ without using the term, also suggests that it is not necessary. Let us not continue to be lazy in our thinking, reaching out for the latest fashionable concept of the moment, and let us try to express, in our own words, what it is that we are actually trying to say. It is only in that way, I would suggest, that any true social theory can move forward.

Coming to Terms with the Cognitive Study of Religion

One of the things that came out of my recent visit to Krakow, as a delegate to the 25th World Congress of the International Association for the History of Religion (doesn’t that sound grand, and rather nineteenth century?), was a clarity on what my next book (perhaps two books) might be. I spent much of my spare time, when not attending seminars or exploring the churches, city and landscape of Krakow, reading the final version of my book on myth, The Story in Religion, which I sent to the publishers in draft form earlier today. I have now written four books that are all part of my plan to produce a Grand Theory of Religion.

I have already written books on ritual, on belief, on the way people talk about religion, and on myth (or story). I have always thought that the next book should be on religious experience. I know the core message, that has always been clear: there is no such thing as ‘religious’ experience, only experiences that different religious discourses present in ‘religious’ terms, or, to relate it to the current book, through ‘religious’ stories. My problem, however, is that I am an anthropologist, with a strong interest in discourse and text, but with no knowledge, or any expertise, in the field of psychology. How on earth am I going to tackle the question of experience? Given the fact that most of the work I have so far read on religious experience has been somewhat trite, and of very little interest to me, I had no idea how I was going to get into this next book.

We had two keynote addresses at the conference, both on ritual. Neither was brilliant (one was really bad) but both referenced what has become known as the cognitive study of religion. This is one of those approaches to religion that immediately divides the crowds, especially at a conference on the study of religion. Like marmite you either love it, or you hate it. The first keynote, by an American scholar who has just won prizes for a book on ritual that, quite frankly, I could have written in my sleep (but not felt to be even worth writing) shows the negative side of the cognitive study. This takes the experimental element of psychology and applies it to religious contexts, in this case communal rituals. By measuring heart rates and other natural responses, the presenter claimed to have shown that rituals really do bring people together and helps them to breath as one (that is perhaps being a little too simplistic, but the argument was not far from this). This is rooted in Durkheim, Turner and others who have always noted that people, in crowds, begin to think as one and that the experience of the crowd is an essential part of the experience of the ritual.

The other keynote looked at ritual and play, something that is much more congenial as far as I am concerned, although nothing very new here either. The lecturer went back to the Greeks and the Romans and had some interesting things to say about the Persians, but it was his reference to a series of authors who I have always admired that rather stopped me in my tracks. He referred to the work of Marilyn Strathern, who led the department of Anthropology at Manchester when I was a student back in the 80s, Dan Sperber and Roy Wagner, whose work I have used consistently for the last forty years as the basis of my own ideas. These, the lecturer told us, were the founders of the ontological turn in anthropology and the cognitive study of religion. If that is true, then I must also be writing in the field of the cognitive study of religion without even realising it. I can certainly see the link to the ontological turn (although this is the first I had ever heard of it) as my current book talks about the importance of entering other worlds and the creation, sustenance and challenge of religious worlds through stories. I had not thought of my emphasis on discourse, or more accurately, on how religion works, as part of the cognitive study of religion, but I guess it must be.

And so, to the next book (having got the current one off to the publishers this morning, I am already thinking ahead). Recognising that the cognitive study of religion contains both simplistic empirical psychology and sophisticated structuralist approaches to cognition (and much else besides) then I could perhaps frame the book on religious experience as a review and a critique of the field of the cognitive study of religion. I would want to draw on a wide range of theories on experience and alternate chapters on core experiences (communitas, possession, altered states of consciousness, ultimate calm and awe etc.) with investigations of specific theories within the field, including Sperber, Bouyer and others (and there is still some work to do there…). It might just work!

I mentioned two books, so what of the other one? Well, that will be a novel, with the title ‘Dragons’. I know the opening lines, but little else…

‘Do you believe in dragons?’ Nadia was pleased with the rather shocked and curious response to the opening question of her presentation at the Twenty Fifth World Congress of the International Association of the Study of Religion. Most people were surprised when Nadia, a young hijab wearing Muslim woman, said that her field of study in religion was not Islam, or even feminism, but post-soviet East European paganism, but that was the point. She did not want to be pigeonholed, or typecast…

And, of course, there are dragons under the city of Krakow…

On Being a Beekeeper

Today is apparently World Honey Bee Day. This is also the time of year when the beekeeper is busy, manging the hives and making sure that the bees have the necessary frames to build their stocks of honey. As I was cleaning out the garage, therefore, over the weekend, I noted the absence of all the supers and frames that usually fill the space. My partner, who is the beekeeper, had moved them all off to supplement his various hives across North Worcestershire. This made me think back to a presentation that I gave, as Head of College, to the senior leadership team almost ten years ago when I was working in Birmingham University.

The talk was remembered by my colleagues for the fact that I illustrated part of it with images from Peter Greenaway’s Pillow Book and they were somewhat taken aback that I was illustrating a talk on the future and vision of the College with images of naked men (albeit that they were painted with text, and it was the variety and multiplicity of textuality that I was actually trying to illustrate). For me, one of the more fruitful images came at the end when I was talking about the role of Head of College. Having set out a vision of interdisciplinarity and cross cutting themes across the College, I suggested that the role of the Head of College was to be that of the beekeeper, an image of leadership that I am not aware of coming across in any other context.

The principal point of the beekeeper in this image, at least in my presentation of it, was that the beekeeper does not attempt to direct the activity and purpose of each and every bee. A hive contains a community, a range of different roles, each working together focused on their own particular activity to achieve a common goal, the production of honey and the maintenance of the hive over winter. A beekeeper does not tell any of the bees how to do their job, or direct specific groups of bees to do this, or do that. A beekeeper cannot even tell the foraging bees where to go to find honey. The hive can be placed in such a way that certain blumes are more likely to be foraged or control the timing of the addition and removal of frames such that they coincide with the blossom of individual trees. However, to achieve a specific kind of honey – lime honey, cherry blossom honey, or whatever – is very difficult in the natural environment and takes a particular kind of skill.

The role of the beekeeper, therefore, is not to micro-manage. The beekeeper primarily controls the environment for the bees, maintains the hive, expands the number of supers as they are filled, remove them as the season ends. The beekeeper protects the hive from predators and, by careful observation, controls the work of the queen and other members of the bee community. It is this ‘framing’, or ‘facilitating’ work that is key to the role of the beekeeper. It is also their job to find a market for the honey and to let the world know how wonderful the product of this, or that, particular hive might be, to prepare honey, wax and other products for shows, recognising that the work they are promoting is not their own, but that of bees who have a mind, or minds of their own.

As with the beekeeper so with the Head of College, or Faculty, in the academy. Their role is not to micro-manage, to tell each academic what they are supposed to do and how they might achieve it. The role of the Head of College is to provide the right environment, to set the scene, to enable and facilitate, to make possible the collaborative and creative work of the academic community for whom they are responsible. This takes a particular series of skills from financial management, quality control, support for grant applications etc. etc. The specific set of tasks is probably endless and often does involve working with estates to provide the right physical environment as well as a space that is conducive to work.

The Head of College must also be aware of the relations between the different elements of the wider academic community and cannot neglect any one of them. Whether it is the academics, or the students, or the professional services staff, the most esteemed professor, or the departmental receptionist. Each has their own unique, but special, contribution to wider productivity and it is the Head of College’s task to be aware of the specific needs of each one, providing the right environment for all of them to flourish.

It is often the task of the Head of College, like the beekeeper, to have a special responsibility to market or promote the work of the hive, the community as a whole. It is the Head of College’s role to represent the College at meetings of the University’s senior team, and to represent the University position to the College. However, even beyond that, the Head of College should be involved in promoting the work of the College (and all its various members) to the widest possible audiences; other academics, potential students, the wider public and perhaps even the media. The work that is being promoted, like the beekeeper, is not that of the Head of College, but that of all the individual, and collective, members of the College, with no one individual excluded or preferred.

That, I suggested, was why I would always liken myself, in that role of Head of College, to the beekeeper. An interesting allegory, but like all metaphors, probably one that it would be unwise to push too far…

Leo: What’s in a Name?

When I was much younger, merely a child, I collected lions. They might be small sculptures, toys, pictures, whatever. It was one of those things that meant that my many aunts never had to decide what to buy me for Christmas, or a birthday. They simply found a lion, or sent me a card with a lion on it. I lost the collection a long time ago. I also spent some time just looking up all the different words for lion (probably not as many as I had thought) in different languages. I had always thought that should I ever have a son (never high on my list of priorities) I would call him Leo, or perhaps Simba (the Kiswahili word for lion).

It was with real interest, and curiosity, therefore, that I heard that our new Pope had chosen the name Leo: Leo XIV. There has, of course, already been much written on this choice and what it might mean. Pope Leo himself has drawn attention to Leo XIII, the Pope at the end of the nineteenth century who challenged the capitalism of his day and supported labour movements and the plight of the those excluded by the industrial revolution. We are now entering what has been called the fourth industrial revolution, one driven by AI. As with all changes in social and economic structures there will be winner and losers, and Pope Leo XIV is very firmly placing himself on the side of the losers, those who will be alienated and disenfranchised by this new industrial revolution.

There were, however, twelve other Leos who have held the position of Pope, and like any relatively random selection of Popes from history they were probably a very mixed bunch. Leo XIV does also reference the first Leo, Pope in the middle of the fifth century. He, among other things, reached out to Attila the Hun who was marching on Rome. Here we see the peace-making theme, something that has already been an important, and necessary, part of Leo XIV’s early sermons and statements. Leo I was also known as Leo the Great, the first Pope to be given ‘the great’ as an addition to his name. What that might say for the current Leo I am not so sure.

As a liturgist my reference here is to the so-called Leonine Sacramentary, one of the earliest documents in the development of the Roman liturgy. It is a series of prayers for use at the mass and was almost certainly not compiled by Leo the Great, although some of the prayers could well have been written by him. Who knows? Taking the name Leo the Pope has associated himself with that tradition, and perhaps more importantly, with ‘tradition’. This is a name that goes back to the earliest years of the Roman church, that is part and parcel of the history of the papacy over the years and is rooted in the worship of the church. That might just be fanciful thinking on my part, but I do sincerely hope that he has something of the tradition in his thinking and is more open to the traditions of the church, and particularly the traditions of the church’s worship, than his predecessor. 

My other reference for Leo is Leo Africanus. This Leo was not a pope, although he is named after one. In fact, he was born a Muslim, in Granada at the end of the fifteenth century. Like many others at that time and place he converted to Christianity, whether willingly or not is still a matter of debate. His family moved to Fez when he was young, and he joined his father in travels to Timbuktu and the court of the Songhai empire in West Africa. He travelled widely across North Africa, on a diplomatic mission to Constantinople and probably a pilgrimage to Mecca. He was captured and imprisoned on Rhodes before being sent to Leo X, then Pope, where he was baptised in St Peter’s Rome. He is best known for his writings on his travels in Africa and the important geographical and historical material it contains.

Pope Leo XIV traces his own heritage to Spain, Italy and France, and he has devoted much of his life, and ministry, to the people of Peru and Latin America more widely. He has chosen a name, however, with strong connections to Africa. He is an Augustinian Friar and Augustine of Hippo was also of African heritage, although from the northern city of Hippo, the modern city of Annaba in Algeria. What Leo brings together, therefore, is a global perspective, a European heritage, a North American birth, a South American mission and an African name. This again is important and significant in the contemporary climate and something that we should be celebrating.

My fascination with lions, and with Leo, also goes back to Africa, the place of my own birth and my own fascination with the continent and people of Africa. There are so many reasons, therefore, that a new Pope who chooses Leo as his name must, for me, be a good thing, with great possibilities for the future. I guess we can only wait and see just how this plays out and what this new Pope Leo has to offer the world, and the church.

The Re-Emergence of Class

Reflecting on the local elections last week I have felt – for the first time in my adult life, that is since the late nineteen seventies – the need for an analysis based on class. What might we mean by ‘class’ in 2025? It will be very different from the structures of class smashed by Thatcher in 1979. It is class, however, employment status, economic outlook, values, worldview, that, for me, makes most sense of the new order revealed in last Thursday’s elections. This cuts across any other residual identities that have, perhaps, been more important in the last fifty years. Once again, I would argue, the class that we belong to, or the class that we identify with, is more significant in determining our voting patterns than any other factor.

I would suggest that in 2025 there are five dominant classes, and two residual classes.

Tribal, Collectivist, Pro-Worker

This is the traditional working class that Labour have lost, and Reform has courted, and, perhaps I might say, re-created. These are people with lower paid jobs, many of which are highly skilled. They value the collectivism of work, shared values with fellow workers, and have pride in both their work/skills and in their country. I describe them as tribal. For many that is xenophobic (which is probably more accurate today than racist), and they want to see an ‘England First’ economic policy, supporting English industry (power, steel, manufacturing, farming). They are anti big government and distrustful of state institutions that are seen as wasting taxpayer’s money and working in other people’s interests. They are generally less well educated, but more importantly, they do not see any intrinsic value in education and tend to shun it. They vote Reform and are generally pro-Trump (not necessarily ultra-right wing or fascist). It is worth noting, however, that the leaders of this party may not (as always in the past with worker’s parties) be of this class, they simply pretend to share the values of this class.

Social, Professional, Democratic

This group are the teachers, the health workers, the social services, those who are essentially committed to the idea of shared values, redistribution of wealth through taxes, the rule of law and the idea of ‘society’. Their outlook is social rather than individual and they believe in the state supporting their citizens irrespective of income or social background. Many in this group are well educated and place a high value on education although they would never describe themselves as among the educational elite. In international relations they believe in the co-operation between states, the advocacy of democracy and the importance of international institutions such as the UN and all its various offshoots. They are strong supporters of the welfare state and find the individualism of all the other classes (including the pro-workers above) distasteful. They are usually pro equality, diversity and inclusion, but often see it in an intellectual or bureaucratic fashion. These have become the core Labour voters, although the bulk of this group, and many in the Labour party, believe that Labour should be supporting the more traditional ‘workers’.

Entrepreneurial, Managerial, Corporate

Both the traditional self-employed, or self-made, and the managers of larger companies come into this group. There is a strong emphasis on the individual, on hard work and on the ability to succeed. The values are those of the corporate world: brand identity, loyalty, company first, often transferred to the state, so essentially patriotic. They believe in low taxes, small government, the limiting of legislation, and yet they also recognise the value and importance of legal protections and can end up being very bureaucratic, multiplying legislation to protect their own (business) interests and to create a ‘level playing field’. They have more faith in insurance than welfare and tend to have access to private health care and private education. They do, however, see the need for, and value, a safety net for the ‘poor’. Their international outlook is not dissimilar to the professionals, placing a strong emphasis on the international order and collaboration between states. There is a recognition of the importance of international treaties and organisations, but only if subordinate to the nation states and if they are committed to the interests of those in this managerial group. They are also the traditional Conservative voters and may continue to vote Conservative. However, their world is shrinking as international business is being taken over by the tech giants with very different values and working practices.

Liberal, Inclusivist, Internationalists

I am using liberal here in both of its traditional senses. There is a strong commitment to liberty and individualism, especially when it comes to economics, but also to equality, diversity and inclusivity, welcoming everybody irrespective of background. These are people who we might think are self-made, dominating tech and internet-based companies of all sizes, from the small creatives to the large multi-national and multi-billion-dollar outfits. However, few of these people are ‘self-made’ and there is often independent wealth in the background, whether from family or previous work in the financial sector or law. Effectively, they are wealthy enough not to have to worry about questions of equality, social mobility or even, perhaps, government, although they are fully committed to all three. They are, above all, internationalist in outlook, citizens of the world, with a strong commitment to free movement, free flows of wealth and the downplaying of national identities (their families are often very mobile and living in many different countries). This group is also highly educated, I might even say the educated elite, even if individuals may have ‘dropped out’ of education and returned. This is the prosecco drinking crowd that we are told is now voting Liberal Democrat.

I would add two other groups to this classification: The Radical Idealists who are committed to causes, most importantly global warming and other climate related issues, but who also take proactive, often disruptive, action for other causes. They could come from any of the classes above but tend to be younger and reject the whole class-based analysis, and they vote Green. Finally, there are the Excluded and Disenfranchised, probably a sizeable proportion of the electorate but, despite some from the professional and liberal groups claiming to advocate on their behalf, they are highly unlikely to vote and have no party to support their interests.

How these groups are distributed in English society (this analysis does not work for Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland) can be seen very clearly in the voting patterns in last Thursday’s election. How well the groups are prepared to work together to form a working administration is, however, a very different question and one that might be particularly important if the voting patterns we saw this week are reflected in the next general election.