A bike crash, hot pink nail polish, fish, chips, and a beautiful godson. (Thx for the photo, DC.)

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Sense as the liturgical orientation of a work does not arise from need. Need opens up a world that is for me; it returns to itself. Even a sublime need, such as the need for salvation, is still a nostalgia, a longing to go back. A need is return itself, the anxiety of the I for itself, egoism, the original form of identification. It is the assimilation of the world in view of self-coincidence: in view of happiness.

— Emmanuel Levinas, 'Meaning and Sense'

Labels: dunedin, levinas, manchester, newzealand

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We were lucky enough to have the afternoon off at the Cathedral and instead to hear Christchurch Cathedral Grammar School Girls leading our Evensong. Such visits are always valuable for a number of reasons: first, they give another choir the chance to sing in a different place; second, they bring with them members of a different congregation, and on this occasion, some of the families the girls are billeted with; third, they offer a test of our hospitality — and I'm pleased that many of our choir showed up and attended Evensong.

But most of all such visits are important because, by giving something literally out of the ordinary, they remind us that the acts of worship in which we participate from week to week are nowise performances, but rather offerings: liturgy, collective work to be sacrificed. And they remind us that the esoteric and high-brow music to which we so comfortably grow accustomed constantly runs the risk of atrophying: by its very transcendence drawing us out of community rather than into it.

This is the kind of lesson that can only be taught by the least amongst us, and is the essence of the inverted hierarchy of God's Kingdom. The lesson is also timely, as the New Zealand Hymnbook Trust launch their new volume of home-grown songs, Hope is Our Song, at Knox Church, Dunedin, this Sunday evening.

Labels: church, music, newzealand, theology

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I wanted to visit you on my way to Macedonia, and to come back to you from Macedonia and have you send me on to Judea. Was I vacillating when I wanted to do this? Do I make my plans according to ordinary human standards, ready to say 'Yes, yes' and 'No, no' at the same time? As surely as God is faithful, our word to you has not been 'Yes and No.' For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we proclaimed among you, Silvanus and Timothy and I, was not 'Yes and No'; but in him it is always 'Yes.' For in him every one of God's promises is a 'Yes.'

— 2 Corinthians 1.16-19

It is easier to say 'Yes' to people. But if you say 'Yes' to everyone, you end up contradicting yourself: saying 'Yes' to one thing logically means saying 'No' to something else.

— George Connor, retiring Bishop of Dunedin, 28 November 2009 (paraphrased)

crisis: c.1425, from Gk. krisis "turning point in a disease" (used as such by Hippocrates and Galen), lit. "judgment," from krinein "to separate, decide, judge."

— Online Etymology Dictionary

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I had seen her already, swinging a U-turn on a one-way street, parking in a 180 bay with only seconds left to catch the bus to Dunedin. As we take our seats I momentarily consider saying hello and introducing myself in the way that is entirely natural in a German film. But hers is an apparently trivial wrecklessness I have seen before and learned not to touch. I briefly eavesdrop on one half of her phone call, before donning my headphones and pressing play on Whirimako Black. Two seats apart on the back row of a half-empty bus: a proximity which invited a connection, but an emotional chasm that I am still not willing to cover.

The sun sank, bathing roadsigns in its deep golden glow. And the landscape seemed suddenly providential, receptive and feminine. She drew up her legs to her chest and turned sideways on the seat — a posture both available and defensive, both sexual and foetal. To think back a year is now to recognise that things are no longer the same. Aotearoa has made me an ocean-goer for the first time. But as well as excursion, a voyage sometimes gives us, in the most unexpected context, some old thing we thought lost forever. Going home on an untravelled road through unfamiliar towns revealed not violence but benevolence, love: a road laid for the stranger to travel, a house built that the wanderer might rest.

How tragic a thing that humans can feel nostalgia for pain. But in every novelty there is the trace of such a nostalgia. Last week, for the first time in years, I embraced an unrequited love. And for him a few tears rolled down my cheek on that bus last night.

Labels: love, newzealand, relationships

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Proclaiming the Gospel may have much to do with the struggle to make explicit what is at stake in particular human decisions or policies, individual and collective, and in this sense bring in the event of judgement, the revaluation of identities. [...] I am wholly in sympathy with [Lindbeck's] challenges to the "liberal" assumption that this [discernment] is to be achieved by adjusting theology to current fashion, and what I have already said accords in important respects with his call for discernment on the basis of criteria drawn from the specifically Christian narrative ("an intratextually derived eschatology").

But I want, in contrast, to argue that such discernment is not easily intelligible when divorced from the language of transformative judgement, enacted in particular events, that is the central theme of so many of our foundational texts. In short, I don't think that Christian and theological discernment can ever be wholly "contemplative" and "noninterventionist"; I believe it is more importantly exercised in the discernment of what contemporary conflicts are actually about and in the effort both to clarify this and to decide where the Christian should find his or her identity. The Christian is involved in seeking conversion — the bringing to judgement of contemporary struggles, and the appropriation of some new dimension of the transforming summons of Christ in his or her own life.

— Rowan Williams, "The Judgement of the World" in On Christian Theology (my bold)

The Anglican Communion is in one hell of a pickle. And in spite of his brilliant words (you can read the whole essay online), it is happening on Archbishop Rowan Williams' watch. Of course, the polarization of "liberal" and "evangelical" in Anglican churches was a process that occured over a period of decades, ably, if polemically, documented by Michael Hampson in his book Last Rites: The End of the Church of England. Williams cannot be held personally accountable for the fact that we are in our current situation. But both his sympathisers and critics believe he may well be responsible for perpetuating it by appeasing those that, according to the theology he expressed in the passage above, Christians should not be at all hesitant to pass judgement on.

In the light of all this, I suggest that the voices most often identified as "liberal" and "evangelical" have no claim to these names; and Williams knows it, because he, too, places "liberal" in inverted commas, uneasy with its connotations in ordinary language. In the contemporary church the word "liberal" has come to signify the maxim "be nice to everyone", while continuing with the most base of hypocrisies. The Church's theology, scripture, liturgy, religious belief, ethical reasoning, has been reduced by the "liberal" to this catastrophic, bastardised misreading of the gospel. By the same token, "evangelical" has sadly come to denote another bastardised misreading of the same gospel, this time based on a wantonly inadequate reading of the Bible undertaken to justify bigotry. Hampson writes of this situation:

The real tragedy [...] is the complete failure of integrity on the part of the liberals. On the single-question test of orthodoxy — "What is your attitude towards homosexuality?" — their silence and ambivalence show more sympathy for the dangerous cult of contemporary fundamentalism than concern for the truth or for the good of the world and its people. The truth, and the dignity of homosexual people everywhere, have been sacrificed "for the sake of unity" to the cult of fundamentalism. The latest sacrifice at the time of writing is the Anglican Communion, now officially a worldwide anti-homosexual organisation. It has carried out the first two expulsions in its history — the United States and Canada — for refusing to discriminate sufficiently against homosexuals [...] This is not a price worth paying "for the sake of unity": it is a betrayal of the very heart of the gospel.

My anger at this situation, which is never far from boiling over, was further heated by a conversation with someone from the Dunedin Diocesan Office at Selwyn's High Tea a few weeks ago. I had explained why I thought the "evangelical" position on homosexuality was morally bankrupt. The response of my interlocutor was: "But don't you think they believe it?" I was dumbfounded at the sheer spinelessness of this attitude — as if the legitimacy of bigotry should be assessed only by how sincerely it is held. But sadly, it is a spinelessness that has been led from the front. The evangelical wing of the Church must be held responsible for their (successful) attempts to blackmail the entire institution over the appointment of Jeffrey John. But Williams should be held responsible for giving in to these attempts by forcing him to step down. What Williams clearly believes in his own theology is that, in that situation, the gospel called for a moment of judgement. In his own words, "The Christian is involved in seeking conversion — the bringing to judgement of contemporary struggles, and the appropriation of some new dimension of the transforming summons of Christ in his or her own life." Where was that faithful act of judgement in the Jeffrey John saga?

Well, Dunedin has recently faced its own moment of judgement and the result is not particularly encouraging. Dunedin priest Juan Kinnear has given an interview this week quietly lamenting the rise of a "conservative" to the Otago & Southland bishopric. Kinnear's ordination took place a few years ago against the backdrop of similarly ugly scenes to those witnessed during the Jeffrey John saga. The word "conservative" introduces a new dimension to this debate. That any Christian could identify with the term "conservative" is a fact that I find risible. What does the gospel have to say about "conserving" anything? It is a message of generosity, openness, but also judgement. Conservatism, by contrast, is about keeping what you've got, sticking to your thoroughly parochial certainties, and condemning change on the basis of its sheer novelty. It assumes its own penchant for condemnation to be a legitimate expression of the gospel imperative to pass judgement.

Earlier in the same essay, Williams writes:

The Church may be committed to interpreting the world in terms of its own foundational narratives; but the very act of interpreting affects the narratives as well as the world, for good and ill, and it is not restricted to what we usually think of as the theological mainstream. Something happens to the Exodus story as it is absorbed into the black slave culture of America. Something still more unsettling happens to Abraham and Isaac when they have passed through Kierkegaards's hands — or the hands of the agnostic Wilfred Owen, writing in the First World War of how the old man refused to hear the angel "and slew his son, And half the seed of Europe, one by one". [...] Owen's savage transformation of Abraham's sacrifice points up what we might miss in Genesis: the final drawing back from slaughter is an act of obedience as great as or greater than the first decision to sacrifice Isaac. It also points up the impotence of the narrative in a world that has lost the means to forgo its pride. Not sacrificing Isaac is a necessary humiliation; the righteous old men of Europe in 1914 are strangers to such a possibility. This is indeed a discovery of scripture and world, and of the gulf between them; and it is now — or should be — part of what the Church reads in Genesis 22.

Scripture, the gospel itself, is changed by our collective cultural experiences of gay liberation. It is not an experience the gospel-writers could have known; so it is not good enough to fall back on old certainties with the pathetic pseudo-liberal justification, "But it's what they believe". Liberals must fight relentlessly for views from all perspectives to be voiced and heard; but this is not the same as making an apology for relativism. Rather, liberals must then fight equally relentlessly for the values a truly progressive and liberal theology stands for, and directly challenge those whose beliefs betray the gospel. If it cannot do this, it seriously begs the question if these so-called "liberals" stand for anything at all. The kind of "liberal" Hampson describes, the kind of "liberal" I conversed with at High Tea, is really an old-fashioned conservative in some fashionable clothes, more interested in the structural integrity of an antiquated institution than in discerning a truly Christian response. So I give the last word to Williams, in the hope that he might start to enact his own theology.

In judging the world, by its confrontation of the world with its own dramatic script, the Church also judges itself: in attempting to show the world a critical truth, it shows itself to itself as Church also.

Labels: christianity, church, dunedin, homosexuality, newzealand, theology

Tonight was High Tea at Selwyn College, the place I have been living and working for the past nine months. This annual event brought together all the present residents of the College, as well as Fellows, board members, representatives from our rival Knox College, the Bishop of Dunedin, and the Mayor, Peter Chin — a very messy bunch. It is also a day when the retiring student committee hand over to their newly elected replacements. We celebrate the year that has gone, and look forward to the promise of a new community still to be formed. It is a day which blurs the old and the new, mingles continuity with change — a very messy day.

On a night when the year seems to be drawing to a close, I feel privileged to have been invited to be a part of it all; but I also find myself pondering the meaning of a community like this. How can it be that such a special corner of the world, which I have gradually come to understand and appreciate as time has gone one, is also a place in which I have struggled to feel at home?

A community of mutual friendship

To explain a place like Selwyn to an outsider is a difficult task. It combines a genuine spirit of community with an openness to individuals who break the mould; it mixes exceptional hard work with real humility; and above all, it embodies a Christian ideal of mutual friendship in a way I have experienced nowhere else. It is not the kind of elective, reciprocal relationship we usually mean by the word "friendship", but rather a latent awareness that I am responsible for the least of my neighbours, whether I like him or not. I have no doubt that, in one way or another, all Selwynites take this ideal of serving others into the wider world and into their future lives. Of this the College is rightly proud.

Selwyn, then, is a strong and healthy community. But strong group identities come with their dark side. When groups of people form tight networks of trust and care, they become exclusive by definition; paradoxically, the more intimately a group shares in its life together, the bigger the risk of alienating others. I suppose this is really the biggest thing I have struggled to make sense of this year — how could such a tight community ever exclude the need for conformity? In the first weeks here my sense of disorientation was extreme: I saw a succession of bizarre rituals, and I had no matrix of experience into which I could integrate them. The only advantage of being thrown into this situation is that I could empathise absolutely with newcomers to the College. Yet those early events ultimately bound the community together and enabled its members to flourish as individuals. When residents repeat the Selwyn motto, "vitai lampada tradunt", they are not passing on a torch of empty initiations, hollow ceremonies, and cold formalities. Instead, Selwyn's torch represents its core value of mutual friendship, and it is this which is passed on to a new year. College traditions are valuable only insofar as they serve this purpose.

Messy Communities

If this year has made me realise one thing, it is the inherent messiness of community life, in all its manifestations. I came to Dunedin having worked for seven years in a different kind of Christian community, a tightly-knit network of about a hundred people who attend a church in Blackley, Manchester. I think back to that place now and recognise that the key to its success is its total embrace of messiness. The church has a busy schedule of events which nourish relationships between businesses, schools, other churches, and the local residents that the church ultimately exists to serve. Being a church should be an avowedly messy experience; there is always something going on, and you try to do your bit without ever having all the information; you take on small tasks which you know will make some bigger thing possible, without yourself ever truly catching sight of the whole picture. Similarly, conversations with fellow church members are fragmentary, messy affairs; interrupted snippets by which we know and care for one another. So for me church in Manchester was a mess of activity; an unfathomable dis-order that can only come from an organism that grows, vibrates, bears fruit.

At Selwyn my job brief is essentially to care for students and to keep them in line. Both of these aspects encourage you to think in terms of systems and rules: What problem is this person having? What rule is this person breaking? I had to learn new skills quickly; in particular I rapidly discovered that discipline is an important part of pastoral care, and is not set at odds with it. I learned that, so long as discipline does not creep into the realms of outright control, it is a legitimate, indeed a necessary, feature of friendship. Good friends hold each other to account; true friendship is judgemental, not just affirmative.

What it took me longer to recognise is that Selwyn, too, is a place governed not just by systems and rules, but by messiness. Holding each other to account, caring for one another, is as much a creative as a procedural act. What makes this community is not its ability to impose commands on itself, but rather its capacity to change, its flexibility. Traditions are a kind of command from history; but we are not in this world to take orders. Traditions challenge us to change them, to make them suit our purposes, to improve them. This is messy work; and it is lived out in the unplanned conversation, the uninvited guest, the unexpected embrace.

Integrity and disintegration

The community of Selwyn College 2009 will, over the next few weeks, disintegrate. Its energy will dissipate into an inconceivable network of new relationships. It will not be possible ever to reassemble the pieces of this community's identity, which is bound to this place, at this moment of time. The meaning of tonight's events at High Tea is in their very contingency, their transience. The messiness of this community's disintegration mirrors the messiness of its formation. And for me, the meaning I take from a difficult year is this: embrace the mess. A community obsessed with the integrity of its own heritage forgets that the outsider is always there, just out of sight. The stranger, the newcomer, is the real test of our heritage's hospitality.

May Selwyn College 2010 be not just a tidy home, but also a hospitable mess.

Labels: collegiatelife, dunedin, newzealand

The will to a system is a lack of integrity.

— Nietzsche (emphasis added)

Stay away from me everybody cos I'm in my sin
If this joint is raided somebody give my gin
Don't try me nobody cos you will never win
I'll fight the Army and Navy, somebody give me my gin!

— "Gin House Blues" as performed by Nina Simone

Alcohol in our lives

Today (14th September) I went, with several colleagues, to an open lecture at the University in which members of New Zealand's Law Commission presented a brief summary of their recent report "Alcohol In Our Lives". It must be conceded that any government facing the problem of widespread alcohol abuse, and repeated public demands to do something about it, is in an unenviable position. To do nothing makes a government look weak or in denial; to restrict alcohol by legislating makes it look authoritarian; and to further liberalise alcohol makes it look irresponsible.

I will lay my cards on the table first: I have strong libertarian views, which judging by the authoritarian and pragmatistic inclinations of the entire post-war political settlement, seem to be very unfashionable. The common accusation levelled at libertarians, particularly us that adopt more extreme positions, is that we are deeply individualistic, obsessed with the freedom of the ego at the expense of everyone else — in other words, that our beliefs about liberty cannot be translated into a political order without endorsing injustice. For certain this is a danger in libertarianism. Previous political versions of its ideas have certainly created or endorsed injustice: apologists for laissez-faire capitalism in the nineteenth century asserted individuals' property rights on the basis of their justice without considering the possibility of inequality in the distribution of these rights (which Nozick later, inadequately, addresses. But that is another topic for another time).

Harm

Self-harm

Much of today's discussion focused on the dimension of harm, and by implication, a concern for the health of those who drink. This is where libertarianism has something important to add to the current debate. Libertarians hold that it is not the business of any branches of the state to prevent someone causing harm to themselves. This is an idea that has become so alien to the public that it is usually greeted with confusion. But it is an important principle.

The libertarian argument goes like this. The state exists solely to provide justice, that is, to uphold rights and adjudicate between conflicting rights. All rights in the true sense are derived from the right I assert to the integrity of my own body. Harm done by one person's body to another person's body (or, by derivation, the infringement of one person's rights by another person's liberty) is defined as injustice. Now, the remit of such a state need not be very narrow, though it certainly needs to be narrower than the models that presently dominate the West. For instance, let us suppose that healthcare is a right (notwithstanding the fact that this is not an easy argument, technically speaking, either to make or to deny — hence the current debate in the USA). On this view, to guarantee the provision of health insurance is squarely the business of government. Indeed, it is its duty.

Cue the alcohol debate. One of the arguments most often made in favour of arbitrary restrictions on alcohol consumption is the "cost to the health service". Now, I do not deny that this is an important issue, and ways to deal with it need to be addressed. But one way it should not be addressed is by using the health service as a justification for restricting the rights of an entire population, or, indeed, a single individual. A moment ago I suggested that governments provide universal healthcare because it is perceived to be a right. To use the health service as a political tool to expedite the reduction of liberties (which some would call liberty-rights) is to morph into a source of tyranny a healthcare ideal which once promoted freedom. The tendency towards this argument in grown-up social democracies is in my view one of the strongest objections to strictly socialised healthcare (which is not, incidentally, the same as an objection to the principle of universal health insurance).

A disturbing number of the people lobbying for further restrictions on the sale and consumption of alcohol do not see a problem with effectively intervening to prevent an individual harming him/herself. I am told by a reader in the UK that a medic being interviewed on TV seriously suggested the other week that alcoholics should be prohibited by law from consuming alcohol in their own homes. If you cannot see why such a proposition is deeply wrong, then libertarianism can help you. As I have said, the state, and the law as an arm of the state, exists to uphold rights. And all rights are rights to be free from interference, even when I am using my rights to do something that you think is wrong, or which is harmful to myself. This is the very essence of a right as a political concept.

Of course, this is not the end of the matter. Libertarianism — in its rehabilitated, redistributive form — is not an apology for inaction, selfishness, or blindness to the sufferings of others. It simply asserts that where individual suffering is self-inflicted, it is not the business of government to act, since the situation does not raise any issues about justice. In our capacity as friends, families, private citizens, churches, charities, lovers, etc., we are, of course (thanks to the concept of rights) free to offer advice, support, and make solicited interventions. Yet, unlike government restrictions, none of these options need violate an individual's rights.

Harm to others

Harm occasioned by one person upon another is a violation of a right. Therefore this is a matter of justice — the direct business of the state. However, I think it is wrong to see violence occurring after alcohol consumption and therefore to assume that the alcohol as a substance is to blame. After all, the vast majority of us consume alcohol without beating anyone up on the way home. What should be addressed culturally is the attitude to alcohol which makes people behave violently, or to drink so much that they lose all self-control. But what must be targeted by the law is the act of violence, not the act of drinking, since it is the former which constitutes a violation of another's rights and an offence in law. To target the act of drinking sends at least two messages: 1) it is not possible to consume alcohol responsibly; 2) alcohol is a mitigating factor in criminal acts committed under the influence, ie, if you punch someone when you're drunk, it's not as bad as if you punch them when you're sober.

In response to this admittedly more difficult matter, I think two simple legal changes would make a big difference: 1) Liberalise alcohol availability in supervised public houses to those aged fourteen and above, thereby enabling parents to introduce their children to alcohol in a normalised and responsible way which avoids establishing the enormous taboo that currently engulfs the topic. 2) Explicitly establish in law that the presence of alcohol as a factor in criminal acts will be treated as an aggravating and not a mitigating factor, and adjust sentencing guidelines accordingly.

Unfortunately, I don't think the Law Commission has been listening to many libertarians.

Labels: alcohol, newzealand, politics

Labels: dunedin, newzealand

If this year in New Zealand will achieve one thing of meaning it will be the cultivation of a spirit of independence in me. I am only now shaking off the risibly naive equation in my mind's eye of independence with selfishness, individualism. On the contrary, a place of dependency is no place to act from, and certainly no place to serve others from. I can already better understand the analytical political philosophers' talk of domains and actions and powers. But the naivety they have not shaken off is the assumption that these domains, actions and powers are inert, GIVEN, bare, neutral. While independence, as subjectivity, is certainly the essential plain from which to serve others and do good, it is also far more than that; it is a plain whose ONLY meaning is to provide this opportunity. Freedom, choice, independence, surely exist only by virtue of our need and duty to serve, love, relate.

Such is the paradox of this refreshment, this resolve, this turning of a new leaf. It is always a resolution to take back control; but with this movement, and with the inevitability of a shadow behind an object cast in a new light, is the knowledge that independence will produce only a new, refreshed kind of subjection, and I will soon be a hostage again to the demands which my liberty can but must not refuse. And this is the essence of morality.

Labels: ethics, newzealand, philosophy, politics

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Safety for passengers on the way to the buffet car is not a priority on this train.

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...it is on the morning when he is going out to fight a duel in particularly dangerous circumstances that, when he is perhaps on the point of losing it, he suddenly becomes aware of the value of a life which he might have used to establish a body of work, or simply to enjoy himself, and of which he has made no use at all. 'Only let me not be killed,' he says to himself, 'and see how I shall work, starting this minute, and how I shall enjoy life!' Life suddenly seems more valuable to him, because he has included in it everything it might be able to give, and not the small amount that he usually makes it give to him. He sees it through the eyes of desire and not as what experience has shown him he can make of it, that is, something so very commonplace. It has, in an instant, been filled with work, travel, mountain-climbing, all the fine things that he thinks the dreadful outcome of this duel may make impossible for him, without realizing that they were already impossible long before the duel was thought of, because of his bad habits which, even without the duel, would have continued. He comes home without a scratch. But he goes on finding the same objections to pleasures, to outings, to journeys, to everything of which he feared for a moment being deprived by death; life is enough to cut him off from them. As far as work is concerned — since extreme circumstances exaggerate what was already present in a man, diligence in the hard worker and laziness in the idler — he awards himself a holiday.

— Proust, The Prisoner

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Here we bring water
But what well is clean
And what water new?

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A late modernist wet dream.

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The chapel, revered architecturally and for its resonant acoustic.

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Of all the things that I knew about Karl Popper, his exile to New Zealand somehow escaped my attention!

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Hi folks. I finally got around to clipping our photo! :-)

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He iti hau marangai e tu te pahokahoka.

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This is the unsealed road I mentioned (there's a lot of them around here).

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Horseshoe kiwi and bike trailer in Middlemarch.

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St Bathan's is a tiny place down an unsealed road in Central Otago, usually one of the hottest parts of the country. (Speaking of which, Auckland had 100% humidity yesterday.) Formerly a thriving town, St Bathan's was all but deserted after the gold mines ran dry.

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