Religious Intelligence.com

Redefining marriage to include same-sex couples would benefit nobody | John Sentamu

John Sentamu — Thu, 17 May 2012 23:09:19 +0000

I object to same-sex marriage because I believe in social pluralism, not fancy-free individualism

I will be the first to accept that homosexual people have suffered discrimination and sometimes worse through the decades and that the churches have, at times, been complicit in this. There is much penance to be done before we can look our homosexual brothers and sisters in the eye. But that baleful history does not diminish the need to speak the truth in love.

I firmly believe that redefining marriage to embrace same-sex relationships would mean diminishing the meaning of marriage for most people, with very little if anything gained for homosexual people. If I am right, in the long term we would all be losers.

Of course, if someone should ask, "how will my marriage be affected if couples of the same sex can marry?", the answer is: not at all. But let me put the question another way: what sort of a society would we have if we came to see all family relationships primarily in terms of equal rights? The family is designed to meet the different needs of its different members in different ways. It is the model of the just society that responds intelligently to differences rather than treating everyone the same.

While I am a strong supporter of justice and equality of opportunity for all people, I want to insist that with those rights go our responsibilities to one another. These are enshrined, I believe, in our legal definition of marriage. Would we be a better society if we made marriage simply a private contract between two individuals, with no wider implications of kinship and family? I do not believe that we would. The issue is not the implication for any existing marriage, but the implication for people in the future, when the social meaning of marriage has been changed and, in my view, diminished.

Drawing parallels between the proposed the proposed same-sex marriage and inter-racial marriage ignores the fact that there is more than one paradigm of equality. For me, racial equality rests on the doctrine that there is only one race – the human race – and any difference of treatment on ethnic grounds is therefore unjustifiable. But there is another view, based on the complementary nature of men and women. In short, should there be equality between the sexes because a woman can do anything a man can do or because a good society needs the different perspectives of women and men equally?

As far back as Mary Wollstonecraft we find that second view pressed very firmly. We see it today in the welcome insistence that all-male committees, clubs and so on are not fit for purpose. Unless one believes that every difference between the sexes is a mere social construct, the question of equality between the sexes cannot be completely addressed by the paradigm of racial equality. Defining marriage as between a man and a woman is not discriminatory against same-sex couples. What I am pressing for is a kind of social pluralism that does not degenerate into a fancy-free individualism.

Civil partnerships in the United Kingdom, granted under the Civil Partnership Act 2004, give same-sex couples rights and responsibilities identical to marriage. There is a formal process for dissolving civil partnerships akin to divorce. This similarity does not turn them into marriage. They are different from marriage. They are in every respect in ethical terms an honourable contract of a committed relationship. This difference does not imply that they lack protection in law, economics and social standing. To change the law and smooth out this difference on grounds of equality would force unjustified change on the rest of the nation.

It is important for the understanding both of marriage and of civil partnership that the categories are not confused. The retention of the current understanding of marriage should not prevent gay and lesbian couples from being able to affirm and honour their relationship without being obliged to fit into another category.

The question for me is one of justice, and not equality. Justice is the primary category. It does not mean not treating everyone the same way,but giving everyone what they need or deserve: education to the young, homecare to the old, opportunity to the enterprising, protection to the threatened. Equality follows justice, and secures its consistent administration: not just some young people, but all, not just some threatened people but all. A clear picture of the just order is what makes equality objective. Without it, equality claims are liable to be subjective and contradictory.

If it was a question of justice, what injustice would result from not turning civil partners into married couples? I suggest: no injustice.

It is a great mistake to use the statute to give comfort and assurance. The rule of law exists to address injustices. The current difference between marriage and civil partnerships does not involve injustice, but the proposed changes arguably would, by creating two new varieties of marriage.

The virtue of the civil partnerships scheme lay in the attempt to treat the needs of gay and lesbian couples as what they are, not to bundle them into some other category. Marriage is built around complementarity of the sexes, and therefore the institution of marriage is a support for stable families and societies.

Those civil partners who consider that their partnership is still inadequately recognised should give the civil partnership legislation time to establish itself and gain increasing public understanding.

This is an edited extract of a paper that can be read in full at http://j.mp/JjgEpv

• Comments for this article will be switched on in the morning

John Sentamu

Texas’s war on history | Katherine Stewart

Katherine Stewart — Thu, 17 May 2012 19:40:19 +0000

Christian-nationalist zealots are trying to rewrite US history, airbrush slavery and enshrine creationism in Texas schools

Don McLeroy, chairman of the Texas State Board of Education from 2007 to 2009, is a "young earth" creationist. He believes the earth is 6,000 years old, that human beings walked with dinosaurs, and that Noah's Ark had a unique, multi-level construction that allowed it to house every species of animal, including the dinosaurs.

He has a right to his beliefs, but it's his views on history that are problematic. McLeroy is part of a large and powerful movement determined to impose a thoroughly distorted, ultra-partisan, Christian nationalist version of US history on America's public school students. And he has scored stunning successes.

If you want to see a scary movie about this movement, consider taking in Scott Thurman's finely-crafted documentary Revisionaries, currently making the festival circuit, which records the antics of McLeroy and a hard right majority on the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) as they revise the textbook standards that will be used in Texas (and many other states).

The first part of this documentary deals with the familiar "science wars", in which one side seeks to educate children in the sciences, and the other side proposes to "teach the controversy" in order to undermine those aspects of science that conflict with its religious convictions. But it's the second part of the movie where the horror really kicks in. As I explain in more detail in The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children, the history debate makes the science debate look genteel. While the handful of moderates on the SBOE squeals in opposition, the conservative majority lands blow after blow, passing resolutions imposing its mythological history on the nation's textbooks.

Cynthia Dunbar, a board member who has described public education as a "subtly deceptive tool of perversion", and who homeschooled her own children, emerges as a relentless ideologue. During the hearings, she yanks Thomas Jefferson from a standard according to which students are expected to "explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas … on political revolutions from 1750 to the present", and replaces him with the 13th-century theologian St Thomas Aquinas. Moderate Republican board member Bob Craig points out that the curriculum writers clearly intended for the students to study Enlightenment ideas and Jefferson in this part of the standard, not a mix of Protestant and Catholic theologians, but the resolution passes anyway.

Dunbar isn't very subtle about her agenda. In one scene, the filmmakers track her to a prayer rally in Washington, DC, where she implores Jesus to "invade" public schools.

The board goes on to remove the word "slavery" from the standards, replacing it with the more benign-seeming "Atlantic triangular trade". They insist on calling the United States a "constitutional republic" rather than a "democracy" – largely because they want students to think of their country as Republican, not Democratic. So convinced are they of the timeless superiority of American/Republican values that one of them introduces a standard asking students to "explain three pro-free-market factors contributing to European technological progress during the rise and decline of the medieval system".

Historical figures of suspect religious views (like Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin) or political tendency (like union organizer Dolores Huerta) are ruthlessly demoted or purged altogether from the study program. Meanwhile, the board majority makes room for an eclectic array of ancillary figures from the revolutionary period, such as Charles Carroll and Jonathan Trumbull. What these marginal figures have in common, other than being dusted off from high shelves and promoted by the board, is the fact that they were loud defenders of orthodox Christianity.

Even by their own admission, the board members were hopelessly unqualified to make judgments about the history. So they appointed a committee of academic "experts" to vet the standards. The committee was a model of "bipartisanship" in the modern era. For their part, the moderates on the board appointed credible historians, professors at Texas universities; one was defended by a moderate Republican board member as "a good Republican … not some kind of crazy liberal".

The conservatives, on the other hand, appointed Peter Marshall of Peter Marshall Ministries, a group that seeks to "reclaim America for Christ" and is "dedicated to helping to restore America to its Bible-based foundations through preaching, teaching, and writing on America's Christian heritage and on Christian discipleship and revival". They also appointed pseudo-historian David Barton, the former vice-chairman of the Texas GOP and founder of the Black Robe Regiment. The latter, sinister-sounding organisation is an association of "concerned patriots" whose goal is to "restore the American Church in her capacity as the Body of Christ, ambassador for Christ, moral teacher of America and the world, and overseer of all principalities and governing officials, as was rightfully established long ago".

Barton is known for fabricating quotes from America's founders, or taking them out of context to build his case that America was established as a so-called "Christian nation". And here's the gruesome kicker: the Texas board actually ignored advice from its own, balanced committee whenever it contradicted the agenda of the far-right majority.

Sometimes, the most important characters in a story are the ones who don't show up. In the Texas battle over history, the heroes who went missing were the kind of people and organizations that might have defended the teaching of history in the way that the scientists mobilized to defend the teaching of biology. The scientists are reasonably well-organized. When creationism rears its paleolithic head in state legislatures or on school boards, it faces the opposition of organizations such as the National Association of Biology Teachers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Center for Science Education, the American Institute for Biological Sciences, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, the National Earth Science Teachers Association, and others.

Defenders of biological sciences can also fall back on court rulings such as Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District and Edwards v Aguillard, which prohibit teaching of creationism. They also have a wealth of popular treatments of scientific issues to draw upon, such as explanations of evolutionary theory by Richard Dawkins and other scientists.

History, however, is often left to fend for itself.

To be fair, in the Texas proceedings, some historians and activists made valiant attempts to contain the damage. Kathy Miller, spokesperson for the Texas Freedom Network, an Austin-based research and advocacy group, was allocated several minutes for her impassioned defense of religious and political neutrality in public education. Professor Steven K Green, director of Willamette's Center for Religion, Law, and Democracy, used his five minutes in front of the board to remind them that "the supreme court has forbidden public schools from 'seeking to impress upon students the importance of particular religious values through curriculum.'" The board majority smiled and looked away.

So, where are history's defenders?

Part of the problem here has to do with a common fallacy about history. We think of history as a "soft" subject. We know that it always involves some degree of interpretation, that the "narratives" are always "contested", and that the answers are never so obviously right or wrong as they are in science. We also know that there have been leftwing versions of the history that are just as distorting as the rightwing propaganda served up by McLeroy and friends. But it's plain wrong to think that we can only throw our hands in the air and conclude that history is whatever anyone chooses to say it is.

Some academics have gotten too used to speaking only with one another. Many could do a more forceful job of seeking to protect the public from disinformation. When I was researching my book, I came across plenty of academic historians who were dismissive about David Barton in private; but few were willing to go public, or to invest the effort in refuting him in detail.

Barton recently came out with another piece of propaganda, The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson. To their credit, a pair of professors who identify themselves as conservative Christians, Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter, have stepped forward to debunk Barton's latest exercise in their book, Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims About Our Third President. But that hasn't stopped Barton's book from becoming a bestseller.

Maybe, we find it easy to underestimate the harm that bad history can do. McLeroy and his cohorts desperately want students to be taught that America is beyond criticism. It's greatness, they believe, stems from the values, principles, and methods of America's conservatives, and the only safe path to the future is to suppress or eliminate whatever does not conform to their image of a purified America. These "revisionaries" are far from the vision of the US bequeathed by the same founders whom the far right claims to revere.

The "glory of the people of America" as James Madison actually said, is that they broke free from the "blind veneration" of the ways of the past and learned how to draw on the "lessons of their own experience" in order to build the world anew.

Katherine Stewart

Turkmenistan: Another prisoner of conscience jailed on false charges?

Forum 18 News Service — Thu, 17 May 2012 16:47:43 +0000

For the second time in 2012, a Jehovah's Witness in Turkmenistan has been sentenced to four years in a labour camp for allegedly "distributing pornography". His fellow-believers insist to Forum 18 News Service that - like the first such prisoner Vladimir Nuryllayev - the charge against Aibek Salayev is fabricated to punish him for his faith. Salayev was sentenced on 12 April by the same Judge at Dashoguz City Court, Akmurad Akmuradov, who sentenced Jehovah's Witness conscientious objector Navruz Nasyrlaev to the maximum two-year strict regime labour camp sentence for this "offence". Salayev was brutally beaten by the ordinary police and MSS secret police "in the stomach, on the kidneys and on the head. As a result his face swelled up and he could not eat", local Jehovah's Witnesses who wished to remain unnamed for fear of state reprisals told Forum 18. Another conscientious objector, Juma Nazarov, has been arrested, and there are six other known Jehovah's Witness conscientious objector prisoners of conscience. There are also an unknown number of Muslim prisoners of conscience jailed for exercising their freedom of religion or belief. One other Jehovah's Witness conscientious objector is on a suspended sentence.

Sexual abuse compensation case to test legal limits of church’s liability

Owen Bowcott — Thu, 17 May 2012 15:43:09 +0000

Appeals court hears landmark case brought by woman who claims she was abused by nun and raped by priest in 1970s

Sympathy with victims of sexual abuse should not be grounds for courts to extend the law on compensation "infinitely" and impose extra liabilities on employers, the court of appeal has been told.

In a test case that could alter relationships between many organisations and their staff, the trustees of a Catholic diocese are denying responsibility for crimes allegedly committed by a priest in a children's home.

The claim has been brought by a 47-year-old woman – known to the court as JGE – who says she was sexually and physically assaulted at the Firs children's home in Waterlooville, Hampshire, in the early 1970s.

The claimant maintains that the nun in charge of the home assaulted her and that Father William Baldwin, the local parish priest, who has since died, sexually abused and raped her.

The high court ruled that the trustees of the Portsmouth Roman Catholic Diocesan Trust were "vicariously liable" for the actions of Baldwin, even though the court was told that priests do not receive a salary.

Lord Faulks QC, who represented the trustees, said they regarded sexual abuse as an "abhorrence". But, he warned, the courts took the view that responsibilities imposed on employers were not "infinitely extendable".

"It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the adverse publicity that has surrounded the Catholic church in relation to sexual abuse in recent times has caused the [high court] judge to make a substantial leap in reasoning so as to associate the priesthood ipso facto with sexual abuse. That is not a satisfactory legal approach," Lord Faulks said.

He said this decision had "wide-ranging consequences for employers and many other institutions well beyond the Roman Catholic church" and "the law is in danger of becoming incoherent and developing in an unprincipled way.

"The understandable desire of the courts to give compensation to victims of sexual abuse beyond that provided for by parliament, or under existing laws should not have that effect."

The diocesan trustees also dispute whether Baldwin could have abused the woman, maintaining that he became the local priest after the alleged victim had left the children's home."

The trustees "deny that they are vicariously liable for Father Baldwin as a matter of law on the basis that a priest is the holder of an office and not an employee or otherwise in [their] service.

"While the priest owes his bishop reverence and obedience, he exercises his ministry as a co-operator and collaborator rather than as someone who is subject to the control of his superior as would be the case in the employment field … [he is] the holder of an ecclesiastical office."

But Elizabeth-Anne Gumbel QC, for JGE, told the appeal court that "the relationship was one of empowerment and granting of authority – [the trustees] provided the premises, the pulpit and the clerical robes to Father Baldwin and gave him the authority to carry out their work."

To find they could not be liable for Baldwin's alleged crimes "would be to in effect exempt the Roman Catholic church from a position where they may be vicariously liable for any [wrongs] committed by priests," she argued.

Owen Bowcott

Does Buddhism need the supernatural stuff? | Andrew Brown

Andrew Brown — Thu, 17 May 2012 14:14:13 +0000

As the Dalai Lama is feted at St Paul's, a more low-key Buddhist will debate with a secular Christian the appeal of truth over myth

This week has been bookended with two notable Buddhist events. On Monday the Dalai Lama was presented with his Templeton prize at a ceremony in St Paul's. On Sunday, in a rather more low-key event, Stephen Batchelor and Don Cupitt will be debating with Madeleine Bunting the possibility of religion without supernaturalism at Friends House on Euston Road in London.

Cupitt is a Christian, of sorts: at least, he's an ordained Anglican priest. But he believes almost nothing of traditional Christianity. "The whole system of Christian doctrine is a somewhat haphazard human construct with an all-too-human history, and … the Bible, when read closely, does not actually teach – nor even support – orthodox doctrine."

Batchelor, similarly, trained for 10 years as a Buddhist monk in Dharamsala, the headquarters of the exiled Dalai Lama, but believes few of the central doctrines of traditional Buddhism. "The kind of secular Buddhism I am interested in … entails a rethinking of Buddhism from the ground up. And what emerges from this reconfiguration of core values and ideas might not look anything like the Buddhism we are familiar with today."

Both men believe in the finality of death. They suppose that this life is the only one we have or can have, and that it is absurd to suppose that personality, in any form, survives the collapse of the body. The doctrine of karma is here reduced to a simple statement of faith that the world is made of braided causal chains: every effect has a cause, and is itself a cause of other effects. There's nothing there about reincarnation.

For both men, the appeal of Buddhism is that it is concerned with truth, rather than myth structures. Follow certain practices and you will come to understand more deeply certain essential truths about the world. It's a method in some ways like the scientific method, but with the inestimable and essential advantage that Buddhism has morality built in. It is an explanation of the moral facts of the world. It makes no sense for them to claim that religions could ever be morally neutral, in the way that people think of technology. They can be, and often are, morally appalling. But they can't be simply neutral. Prayer and contemplation change people irrevocably.

A surprising amount of this is compatible with perfectly orthodox Christianity and, for all I know, Buddhism. The emphasis on truth, rather than faith, is certainly a mark of all the interesting Christian thinkers that I know. But I wonder whether the project of secularising religion like this will ever be more than a minority pursuit.

Watching the ceremony in St Paul's, and listening to the Dalai Lama earlier, I felt the faint proddings of my inner Rupert Murdoch. When he described the Dalai Lama as "a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes", he was of course defending his imperialist allies in the Chinese government. But he had a point. At the press conference in the crypt of St Paul's we listened to the Dalai Lama explaining that he was perfectly ordinary, just one of 7 billion human beings, yet almost everyone in the room – even Arianna Huffington – addressed him as "Your Holiness". Who, here, was fooling whom?

I don't doubt that the Dalai Lama is a good man, a profound thinker and a skilled statesman. He deserves his prizes. But a huge part of his popularity in the west stems from the deracination of his doctrines. They appear far more secular and far less supernaturalist over here than they actually are when lived out among Tibetans.

More seriously, traditional Buddhist language is full of false friends when translated into English: words that sound the same but mean something very different. When the Buddhist says that the root of happiness is "self-confidence", he sounds like the worst sort of business guru. He answered one question about how he could bear all the suffering in the world by saying that "self-confidence is the key factor. The basis of self-confidence is honest truth. These things I myself learned to be the case. Living as a Buddhist monk, as a practitioner, [I have been] always honest, truthful."

But the kind of self-confidence – indeed, the kind of self – produced by life in a monastery is not going to have much in common with the kinds produced by life in a western economy. One of the central religious yearnings is for platitudes to be true: wouldn't it be wonderful if we could all get along. And since, for the most part, the aspirations of religion towards charity are not realised in the world around us, they need to be cast in terms of another world. That is what supernaturalism does, and it is what the exoticism of Buddhism in the west accomplishes, too. I wish Batchelor, Cupitt, and Madeleine Bunting well. But I doubt their teachings will ever fill St Paul's.

Andrew Brown

City site sought for Hindu ashes

Hindu News latest RSS headlines - Big News Network.com — Thu, 17 May 2012 13:12:28 +0000

Bristol's Hindu community may be able to scatter the ashes of loved ones in the River Avon in future rather than travelling to India's River Ganges. The city's new Lord Mayor Peter ...

In defence of self-help books | Alain de Botton

Alain de Botton — Thu, 17 May 2012 12:41:18 +0000

The ancient philosophers recognised we all need help navigating our lives – so what explains self-help books' decline in prestige?

Anyone wanting to damage their intellectual credentials at a stroke need only do one simple thing: confess they read self-help books.

There's no more ridiculed genre in the literary canon – and you can see why. Most self-help books are written by Americans of the most sentimental and unctuous sort. They promise their readers eternal life, untold riches and an escape from every grubby aspect of being human, all within 300 pages of upbeat, relentlessly repetitive and patronising prose. No wonder the unstated assumption of the cultural elite is that really only stupid people read them.

What about everybody else? The assumption is that life doesn't need to be navigated with lessons. You can just do it intuitively. After all, you only need to achieve autonomy from your parents, find a moderately satisfying job, form a relationship, perhaps raise some children, watch the onset of mortality in your parents' generation and eventually in your own, until one day a fatal illness starts gnawing at your innards and you calmly go to the grave, shut the coffin and are done with the self-evident business of life.

However, most of us will probably privately admit that living isn't entirely as simple as that – and that it might be useful to have somewhere to turn. For 2,000 years in the history of the west, most of philosophy simply was self-help. The Ancients were the most adept practitioners. Epicurus wrote some 300 self-help books on almost every topic, including On Love, On Justice and On Human Life. The Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote volumes advising his fellow Romans how to cope with anger (the still very readable On Anger). It is no injustice to describe Marcus Aurelius's Meditations as one of the finest works of self-help ever written, as relevant to someone facing a financial meltdown as the disintegration of an empire.

Christianity continued in this vein, with such bestselling guides as Thomas a Kempis's The Imitation of Christ. What, then, explains the gradual decline in the prestige of self-help books that continues to this day? A key catalyst was the development of the modern university system that in the mid-19th century became the main employer for philosophers and intellectuals and started to reward them not for being useful or consoling, but for getting their facts right. There began an obsession with accuracy and a corresponding neglect of utility. The idea of turning to a philosopher or historian in order to become wise (an entirely natural assumption for our ancestors) started to seem laughably idealistic and adolescent. Alongside this came a growing secularisation of society, which emphasised that the modern human being could do the business of living and dying by relying on sheer common sense, a good accountant, a sympathetic doctor and hearty doses of faith in science. The citizens of the future weren't supposed to need lectures in how to stay calm or free of anxiety.

And so the self-help field was abandoned to the many curious types who thrive in it today: people who are reclothing the Christian message so as to promise us financial heaven if we believe in ourselves, have faith, work hard and don't despair. Or else those with a passing acquaintance with Buddhism, psychoanalysis or Daoism. What unites modern practitioners is their fierce optimism. They make the grave assumption that the best way to cheer someone up is to tell them that all will be well. They are utterly cut off from the spirit of their more noble predecessors, who knew that the fastest way to make someone feel well is to tell her that things are as bad as, and possibly much worse than, she could ever have thought. Or, as Seneca put it so well, "What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears."

To try to rectify the situation a little, I've just edited a new series of six self-help books with solid intellectual ambitions, authored by experts in their fields, including work, emotional health, technology, money and political activism. The tone is helpful but realistic. There's no earnestness or patronisation. I've written a little volume on sex, with advice on impotence, oral sex, sex addiction, infidelity and other issues.

A culture which gives a role to guidance and the self-help book stands a chance of making at least one or two fewer mistakes than the previous generation in the time that remains.

Alain de Botton

Lone marcher resurfaces, Tibetans join fast in support

Phayul Latest News — Thu, 17 May 2012 12:28:00 +0000

Tsetan Dorjee, the lone marcher in Nepal has resurfaced and had a brief telephonic conversation with Phayul this morning. Without giving his exact location, Dorjee said that he has been facing a lot of difficulties on the road

Canon Reginald Askew obituary

World news: Religion | guardian.co.uk — Thu, 17 May 2012 11:50:34 +0000

Canon Reginald Askew, who has died aged 83, was a theological teacher; vicar of Christ Church, Lancaster Gate, in west London; principal of Salisbury and Wells theological college; and dean from 1988 until 1993 of King's College London. Reggie was a bearded giant of a man, with a laugh that echoed down the naves and a smile that was never far away. A passionate, scholarly interest in the relationship between theology, worship and the arts made him an exceptionally stimulating teacher. A sense of drama, eloquent use of language and generosity of spirit made him a memorable preacher.

He was born in Aberdeen, educated at Harrow school and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and trained for ordination at Lincoln theological college. He began his ministry as curate of St Michael's, Highgate, in north London, then taught at Wells theological college. In 1969 he became vicar of Christ Church, Lancaster Gate (where I was choirmaster). Reggie encouraged the liturgical use of early music and invited various luminaries to lead debates at evensong, including Monica Furlong, Bernard Levin and Archbishop Michael Ramsey.

One of his outstanding initiatives during this time was in Northern Ireland. In 1971, with a local priest, he borrowed an aeroplane from the RAF and brought children from the Falls and Shankill roads to Paddington for Christmas. Later, with a small group of parishioners, he returned to the province to explore how Christ Church might best support reconciliation on the ground. They met the founder of the Corrymeela peace project, Ray Davey, who suggested the parish provide money for an ecumenical worship centre. To raise the funds, Reggie demanded that his congregation not only empty their pockets of loose change, but write large cheques as well. The centre was built, with a stone from Christ Church at its heart.

He was a highly effective and imaginative principal at Salisbury and Wells where he led a new project providing training for ordinands who could not undertake full-time study. His scholarship, flair and experience were much appreciated by colleagues and students. As dean of King's College London, Reggie was responsible for the training of priests, as well as the pastoral care of all students. He organised open lectures on topical theological issues.

Reggie retired to Somerset in 1993 where he continued to cut and print his splendid linocuts, and wrote a book entitled Muskets and Altars: Jeremy Taylor and the Last of the Anglicans (1997).

He is survived by his wife, Kate, their son and two daughters, and eight grandchildren.

Now, China plans to ‘strike hard’ on Tibetans in Nepal

Phayul Latest News — Thu, 17 May 2012 10:13:00 +0000

In alarming reports coming out of Tibet, Chinese authorities in Tibet have planned measures to re-launch the infamous Strike Hard Campaign, this time reaching beyond the borders of Tibet and into Nepal.