Tag: <span>01 document</span>

Tag: 01 document

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What sorts of difference does René Girard make to how we read the Bible? (Alison, 2009)

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The dynamic of “Rise, take up your pallet and walk” is “be mobile – keep going”. The five books of Moses were not supposed to be five porticoes giving shelter to paralysis, when not actively promoting helplessness, leaving people stuck beside a still water waiting for some superstitious passing of an angel. Those books are supposed to be a dynamic path to be trodden by an Israel under orders from an active Lord who opens up a way in the sea, or at the very least commands people to cross a wadi. The pathos of the difference between the helplessness of the Israel that the Lord finds on his visitation of the pool and the power and strength of the Israel that the Lord intended to bring into being, and is witnessed to in Moses’ writings, this pathos provides the context for the sign which Jesus performs here.

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The Priestly pattern of Creation and a fraudulent reading of St Paul: A Catholic reads some Pauline texts in the light of Mimetic Theory (Alison, 2009)

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It is one of the best known of René Girard’s principles for reading certain texts – those of myths, those of Scripture and some early modern texts – that he asks how the text in question relates to an incident of persecution. Girard posits a real incident of persecution, a murder, a lynching, a mass expulsion of some sort which has structured the context within which the texts have come to be written. He then asks what the relationship between the real incident and the text is.

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Prayer: A case study in mimetic anthropology (Alison, 2009)

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One of the strangest features of that weirdly under-religious collection of texts known as the New Testament is how little there is in it on prayer. In fact, given that almsgiving, prayer and fasting are usually the visible pillars of what we call “religion”, it is odd how little the New Testament attends to any of them. The only place where all three are treated with something like rigour is in the first eighteen verses of the sixth chapter of St Matthew’s Gospel. And there they undergo, as I hope to show you, what appears to be a gross relativisation. They are completely subordinated to, and reinterpreted by, a penetrating understanding of the working of desire.

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The pain and the endgame: reflections on a whimper (Alison, 2009)

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You wrote to me to say how overwhelmed you were with the various incidents in the public domain relating to being Catholic and gay which piled up over the last few weeks of 2008, and wondered if I had anything to say. I asked you for some time, since I too have found it all somewhat overwhelming, and wanted to avoid immediate commentary, which tends to be reactive and not helpful. However, I’ve been trying to work through it all, and have sort of got a handle on it – one which is odder than I had expected.

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Letter to a young gay Catholic (Alison, 2008)

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Normally whenever there is a discussion about matters gay in Catholic publications, the style very quickly becomes stiff, and a mysterious “they” appears. This “they” seems to inhabit another planet from the one you inhabit. Whoever is talking about “they” is, in fact, on another planet, one where a strange lack of oxygen makes it impossible to use the pronouns “I”, “you”, “we”. If someone does start to use those pronouns, you quickly sense that the only thing that gives them the freedom to do so is that they are heterosexual, and are honest enough to say that they don’t really understand what it’s all about.

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Navigating uncharted waters: the gift of faith and growing up LGBT (Alison, 2007)

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The first point which I’d like to make, in a sense, is a big sigh of relief. And the sigh of relief is as follows: if faith were an ideology, and gay were a pathology, how easy this conference would be! Because if faith were an ideology, it would merely say “nyet” to us, and if being gay were a pathology, then we would merely go “oh poor little me”; and the matter would be over. Unfortunately for people who try to present things in the way that makes faith into an ideology, and being LGBT into a pathology, this world has collapsed. The world in which faith is an ideology, and ‘LGBT’ is a pathology, has collapsed. Our ability to have survived into what might pass as adulthood in some of our cases, seems to have borne witness to this. We’re no longer run by the world in which faith is an ideology, and being LGBT is a pathology. But getting out of some of the tracks of thinking, to which many of us have got used, which did rather regard it as though we were perpetually stuck between those two, has taken time.

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The shape of daring imagination: coming out and coming home (Alison, 2007)

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I’d like to go back to the little boy, or little girl, and share with you what I have learned to pray for. It took me a long time to be able to pray for this, but I think it’s the prayer the little nine-year-old wanted to pray. It’s a prayer for four things: a home; a heart; a husband; and a ministry.

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Strong Protagonism and Weak Presence: The Changes in Tone of The Voice of God (Alison, 2007)

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My motive for beginning with a grammatical niggle is that it points towards something more properly theological. If we start with “For God so loved…”, then all our concentration and effort goes into imagining the emotional intensity which lies behind the manifest activity. What is really interesting is not so much what happened, about which we can satisfy ourselves with the briefest of enquiries, describing it in very spare terms. What would really be interesting is the degree in which the act was intended, the push behind it, the emotional force with which the principal agent of this activity carried it out. If, on the other hand, we begin with “It was in this way that God loved”, then we have no prior access to some supposed interior life of God, modelled on our own. Instead it is that which is visible, that which is manifest in the activity itself, which becomes the lure for our fascination. And it is only in the degree in which we allow ourselves to be pulled inside that activity, and what we can discover starting from it, that we begin to get some notion of God’s love.

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Advent and Christmas Lectionary Meditations (Alison, 2007)

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We are used to the imagery of God communicating by God’s word, and so think of our responses to God as aural: listening, and obedience (from ob-audiens – intense hearing). Yet how much of the religion of Ancient Israel was a priestly religion of Presence! We forget that one of the central images of God’s communication in the Scriptures is that of the Shining face. From the Priestly Blessing of Numbers 6 to the continuous references in the Psalms, it is expected that worshippers will see the radiance of God’s face, and in its light, they too will shine.

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Love Your Enemy: Within a Divided Self (Alison, 2007)

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In passages like the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus was not teaching something called “morals”. He was making available an anthropology of desire, and one that presupposes an understanding of who we are, how our selves are constituted, which seems to have a great deal in common with what we are now learning from the scientists.