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A dear friend drew my attention to an essay by C.S. Lewis a couple of days ago, and it was too late at night to respond properly, but I feel the question she raised deserves a proper response.

"Lewis picked up on the key mythology of the liberal church: that miracles are intrinsically impossible and therefore we must re-interpret scripture as a pious fraud."  -  the opinion of my friend.

I so rarely have conversations like this these days.

"key":
It is probably fair to say that beliefs about miracles are key to the difference between liberal Christians and Bible-literal evangelicals. Liberals in dialogue with BLEs may well focus on this issue. However, liberals continue to exist when the BLEs leave the room. They are people of faith in their own right and are not best understood in terms of their relationship to the beliefs of BLEs, and the hostility this sometimes arouses in BLEs. I have books on my shelves by various authors I would describe as liberal Christians, and they have titles such as 'God of Surprises'; 'Accidental Saints: finding God in all the wrong people'; 'Amazing Grace: a vocabulary of faith'; or 'Wrestling with Angels'. I search in vain for 'Pious Fraud: why it's really important to know that miracles are impossible'. This is not "key" for liberals.

"mythology"
If you wanted to express your disagreement respectfully you might want to replace this word with 'idea' or 'belief'.

"miracles"
What kind of miracle are we talking about?
(1) something that inspires awe and wonder, or
(2) an event where God suspends the laws of nature to make something happen that otherwise could not happen.
Maybe this seems like a foolish question, because clearly the liberal - BLE disagreement is about type (2). I raise it because I don't fully understand the BLE's passionate need to believe that type (2) miracles are an essential part of how God acts in the world. Maybe for some Christians the regular world that God has given them just doesn't inspire awe. If they don't feel moved, if they don't feel thankful, if they don't feel that awareness of connection to something bigger than they can imagine, maybe that would explain why they want something to happen which isn't part of the regular world. What I personally feel is that the world could hardly be more miraculous than it already is.

"intrinsically impossible"
Strictly speaking, it is not possible to know that miracles (2) are intrinsically impossible. We can't prove a negative, so we can't know it for sure. I would prefer to say that type (2) miracles are irrelevant to faith. I can't base my life on something which is by definition rare, unpredictable and unreliable, any more than I can base my personal finances on the possibility of winning the lottery. I see more (1) miracles around me than I can possibly digest, and I'd rather base my faith on that. I don't think (2) miracles happen, and I don't particularly want them too. There is an obvious theological problem with type (2) miracles, because if God is in the habit of tweaking things so that children don't have to suffer, why doesn't he do it all the time? I wouldn't want to worship a manipulative tyrant, and that's how I would see a type (2) miracle God.

"pious fraud"
A fraud is a deliberate deception. That's a very serious allegation. I've never come across liberal Christians who accused the Gospel writers of simply lying.

I think the authors of the books of the Bible took the truth very seriously indeed. That doesn't mean I feel I should agree to every single word they wrote. I see an unscientific worldview, and I also see a lot of sexism, an acceptance of the institution of slavery, and several passages which are extremely hostile to Jewish people. I find that it is possible to distance oneself from those things whilst still recognising the truth that the Gospel writers were expressing. I do not believe that  [Bible] - [miracles] = [pious fraud]. Is that what you believe? Are type (2) miracles really more important to you than love, forgiveness and redemption?

I tried to do it strictly with books I'd read in the last 12 months, but I cheated a couple of times.

The big problem with Mansfield Park is that compared to Pride and Prejudice it's not as funny, and nobody can really understand why Fanny and Edmund disapprove of amateur theatre.

What's brilliant about the book is the way Austen lets the Crawfords cast their spell on you, so that you have to consider the reasons why Fanny doesn't trust them, and she lets you think that they might get their own way and it might not be a disaster. The Crawfords are charming, witty, talented and daring, and when they are cynical you very often agree with them. Fanny, the heroine, is withdrawn, downtrodden and passive. And inexplicably priggish about amateur theatre.

Or alternatively, Fanny is like Morwenna in 'Among Others'. She's trapped amongst people who don't understand her and are mean to her, and she escapes into books. She notices the natural world around her. She watches people, she thinks. And when it really matters, Fanny stands her ground, even though absolutely everyone around her and half the novel's readers think that she's crazy.

It's true that at the end of the book Fanny gets married, but this is buried in the final 'what happened afterwards' chapter, with no dialogue or detail:


Austen is absolutely right. 'Edmund marries Fanny' is much too happy and uncomplicated a story to be interesting. Mansfield Park is interesting because a rich, intelligent, attractive, popular young man falls in love with the penniless heroine, and the heroine refuses to marry him, and it isn't immediately obvious what will happen next.

I've just read this essay by George Eliot for the first time, thanks to Project Gutenberg.
It's great fun, a Thog's Masterclass for 1856, mocking bad writing for being bad. It's also infuriating. Virginia Woolf concludes 'A Room of One's Own' by urging women to write. Even if you aren't 'Shakespeare's sister', when you write you are helping to make this a world in which women do write, and one of them might be Shakespeare's sister. George Eliot would definitely prefer you not to write unless you have a talent for it. She concludes with these words,

'And so we have again and again the old story of La Fontaine’s ass, who pats his nose to the flute, and, finding that he elicits some sound, exclaims, “Moi, aussie, je joue de la flute”—a fable which we commend, at parting, to the consideration of any feminine reader who is in danger of adding to the number of “silly novels by lady novelists.'

Obviously, the fact that she specifically targets women, as if men never wrote badly, is particularly annoying.

The one thing that makes the whole essay not only forgivable but endearing is that it is dated just one year before Eliot published her own first fiction ('Scenes of Clerical Life'). She wants to write novels. She transparently envies women who have novels in print. She desperately wants to be one of the excellent writers and fears that she will be one of the bad ones. Later, even after her first successes, she would repeatedly abandon writing projects in despair - hopelessly rubbish writing projects like 'Middlemarch', for example.

It is passionate writing by a 37-year-old woman who doesn't know she is on the brink of greatness.

P.S. Eliot names three women writers who are deservedly taken seriously: Harriet Martineau, Currer Bell, and Mrs. Gaskell.

We all thought we knew that "The Paperbag Princess" was a story teaching that it is good for girls to be resourceful and independent.  But my historical research shows that is not the real story at all!!!  The paper bag is a later addition!!!  The original story of the prince, princess and dragon is much, much older and says nothing about women's resourcefulness and ends with marriage!!!  Feminist views of the paperbag princess story are therefore completely mistaken!!!

Can I make a documentary now?

We've just taken out a subscription to 'De Standaard', a Flemish daily paper, and it happens that it arrived in our postbox for the first time this morning.  They celebrated International Women's Day by carrying over twenty short interviews with women.  Which was great.  But it was a pity that they chose to interview only Flemish women, and only those who have prominently successful careers. 

Then there was a passing comment in the page 2 introductory article (by Karin de Ruyter) about how women's domestic work is eased by service cheques (dienstencheques) and household appliances.  Have you ever seen a piece of paper clean a bathroom?  I'd love to see that.  What she meant, of course, is that using the service cheques scheme, middle class people can pay poor people, mostly women and often immigrants, to do cleaning work for them.  These people are so invisible to 'De Standaard' that they disappear completely behind the tax-deductible system which subsidises their very low pay.

Today is a day to think about the woman who sewed your jeans, the woman who picked the leaves for your cup of tea, and the woman who cleans your office.  Or if it happens that it was a man who did one of those jobs, think about him too, but above all show some solidarity, and dare to imagine what life might be like if the people who did those essential jobs had the same standard of living as European journalists.

Not only am I voting in Belgian and not British elections, but I am more outraged by Belgian than by British politicians.  I hate and fear Bart De Wever more than David Cameron.  Only by a small margin, but this week Bart is definitely in the lead.

Here I translate a key paragraph from an NVA election leaflet we received today - and these aren't the fringe, these are set to become the biggest Flemish party.

"Your neighbourhood, your community: together in harmony

Under the lead of the NVA the Flemish government works towards integration.  In this way can we really tackle the problems of living together.  Our purpose: safe neighbourhoods where you can live and work with your neighbours.  A community with mutual respect.  But meanwhile the federal government has turned the Belgian migration tap fully open.  The French-speaking parties threw the borders open, arranged massive regularisations and sent the bill to the Flemish.  The NVA wants a strict and lawful asylum system."

We also have the great line "social security should be a safety net not a hammock".

I love living here, I really do.  But I've lived through Thatcherism once already.  I don't want to have to do it all over again.

"Other animals don't go to so much trouble before they mate, do they?"

Williams writes here about the importance of difficulty in conversation - of realising that you have not yet completely understood - and I found reading this book to be like a difficult conversation.  I think he may be saying something important, but he isn't saying it very clearly.  The book is relatively free of footnotes and was probably intended for a general readership but the circling, nested caveats and soaring abstractions are so academic in style I can nearly taste the port.

And yet, this is a conversation I wanted to persevere with (and he said a lot of the same stuff better in "Silence and Honey Cakes", published three years later in 2003).  He is trying to articulate the inadequacies of a concept of the self as an independent entity, and the ways our culture and public life are impoverished by reductive thinking about identity.  As a school governor once said at my primary school prize-giving, if a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing badly.

I have been told so many times, "It's important to make some time for yourself".  What is this self, which is in some sense neglected or absent during the time I spend on childcare and the practical business of managing a household?  People may variously mean that it is good to make time for rest, for looking after your own health, for playfulness, for adult relationships, for challenge and achievement; and then they are right.  But it is an odd habit of speech, and I think not accidental, that marks out the time I spend caring for dependent children (whether I am bored and irritable or relaxed and having fun) as specifically not "for myself". 

An Anglican clergyman I once knew told me that he had asked job interview candidates how they would answer the following question:
"I have a bus to catch in five minutes, but what does the resurrection mean to you?"
The answer he was looking for was "If you really want to know you'll have to miss your bus".

I wonder what he would make of Karen Armstrong's book, which attempts to cover 3000 years in 229 pages.

The title itself shows a certain bravado, given that the Bible is the most studied book in the world; but I think that on the whole Armstrong has succeeded in writing a book that lives up to it.  If you have ever studied the Bible and have a passing familiarity with European history, you will probably find it quick and undemanding reading: you won't learn very much but her summaries can be thought-provoking and elegant.  If you haven't ever read the Bible, or not since childhood, I would happily recommend this book as a quick introduction to the way the Bible has been read through history.

There are two gaps that leapt out at me.  One is that although Armstrong writes about Jewish approaches to the Bible, the Eastern Church disappears from view at the beginning of the Middle Ages, never to be heard of again.  The other is in her chapter on "Modernity", ie the last two hundred years.  The whole thrust of Armstrong's book (and several of her other books) is to attack fundamentalism by exposing it as a modern heresy.  This is a worthy aim which I can applaud, but in her treatment of modern times she does write as though fundamentalism on the one hand, and the liberal academic pursuit of historical criticism on the other, were the only games in town.  She says herself that historical criticism alone makes for a dry spiritual diet, but she doesn't make any space to write about the more lively and creative ways that people are reading the Bible outside the universities: liberation theology and other contextual theologies; the revival of Ignatian and Benedictine approaches to Biblical prayer; the charismatic movement; and the healthy eclecticism that is increasingly available to ordinary Christians in 'mainstream' denominations.  It's a shame, because it makes for a doom-laden epilogue crying in the wilderness, and many of the things it's crying for are already happening all around her.

And another thing: no bibliography.

But still, an afternoon pleasantly spent, and really you have to admire it - about 13 years a page.