Category: Book Review

Human consciousness: complete and inconsistent?


Robin Craig, Frankensteel, Thoughtware Publications 2012
(Kindle edition: Amazon price $US1.99)

 

Reviewed by Ted Witham in TableAUS (Australian Mensa News)  September/October 2012

 

Robin Craig’s “Philosophical Reflections” in TableAUS often provoke replies both polite and unmannered from Mensans. In these “Reflections”, Robin presents his highly rational and positivist world-view using the rhetoric of the philosopher. I enjoyed reading a new side of Robin in his novella Frankensteel.

 

Frankensteel tells the story of an anthropoid robot equipped with an organic brain whose intelligence grows from a few simple learning algorithms. The robot at first appears unable to speak, however, but just the fact of its invention throws the authorities into panic mode. They order its maker Stephen Beldan to destroy it. Frankensteelhas quite a presence in a room, and its first spoken words are effectively a declaration to its maker that it would be inhuman to destroy it. Though the scientist locks the robot away, it inevitably escapes and seeks out the company of Professor David Samuels whose expertise in human consciousness may help it understand whether it is human or not.

 

Special Investigator Miriam Hunter is ordered to hunt “Steel” down and finds herself drawn into the moral dilemma at the heart of this story:  whether this human creation with its intelligence should be destroyed or not.

 

The story has been told before. Any writer since Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic attempting a re-write of the Frankenstein myth must have a stand-out factor to distinguish it from its predecessors. Its factory setting and its police hunter skilled in dark arts of pursuit and assassinationgive Frankensteel a modern “industrial” and almost noir feel.  The character of the professor, in particular, gives Robin Craig the narrative licence to develop arguments for and against artificial intelligence and its relationship to human consciousness. Frankensteel brings the old myth up to date bytaking into account recent developments, both in neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

 

Set against these protagonists are the shadowy Imagist cult, believing that only human beings are made in the Image of God, and therefore set against machine consciousness. These radicals are capable of serious violence, but the robot uses his intelligent understanding of human beings to survive.

 

Frankensteel is a novella length story which I read in a few hours. Its chief problem is that the characters are not sufficiently developed for me to care what happened to Frankensteel or any of his friends. It might be stronger if it was compressed to a short story length and then told through the eyes of just one of the characters, Frankensteel himself perhaps, so that readers both identified with his nascent humanity and were also drawn into the discussion about machine and human consciousness.

 

But I salute Robin Craig for imaginatively raising the issues: I enjoyed meeting Frankensteel.

 

A new priest-detective


James Runcie, Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death (The Grantchester Mysteries),  London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (2012), Edition: First Edition, Hardcover, 400 pages, available through (Australian) public libraries. (Paperback $15.00 approx. online)

Reviewed by Ted Witham

I am glad to have met Canon Sidney Chambers, a priest who is an accidental sleuth. The Grantchester Mysteries begin in the early fifties when Sidney Chambers, who has received a minor canonry from an African diocese, begins his ministry as Vicar of Grantchester near Cambridge. Chambers is a war veteran who has seen active service, and a bachelor unable to choose romantically between a young German widow and an old London friend Amanda Keating. He is conscientious about his ministry, wanting to be available pastorally to his people and to frame all the day to day work of the parish as part of the mission of the Kingdom of God.

However, Sidney finds himself drawn into different crimes: partly because of his association with his best friend, Inspector Geordie Keating, with whom he shares a weekly beer and game of backgammon, and partly because a clergyman can go where others cannot. For example, the mother of a young woman he is preparing to marry dies suddenly. The woman’s fiancé is a doctor and her mother would not give her approval for the marriage. The match and dispatch aspects of his ministry give him access to the young murderous couple while his friendship with a policeman gives him a reason to question the coroner.  

The stories are easy to read. Each crime is only short, and the characters move comfortably in and out of the stories depending on whether they are set in Cambridge or London or in the great house of the local gentry. Their tone is light-hearted, and I chuckled gently at many points. Some of the dialogue made me laugh out loud.

This clergyman loves jazz and cricket and dines occasionally at his old College where he teaches New Testament. He wonders whether he is a bit eccentric among clergy. In fact, part of the pleasure of reading The Shadow of Death is the authenticity of the picture created of parish ministry in post-war England.

James Runcie, son of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, may well be writing from his observations growing up as a clergy kid. He has certainly created an engaging priest-detective, a worthy successor to G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown.  Mr Runcie has promised another five Grantchester Mysteries spanning the period of English history from the accession of Queen Elizabeth II to the marriage of Charles and Diana in 1981. I look forward to following Canon Chambers and his sleuthing.

Emerging Butterfly?


Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God, Paraclete Press 2006. E-Book 2012

Reviewed by

Ted Witham

The key idea of How (Not) to Speak of God is that many Christians in the “Emergent Church” movement embrace paradox. The first few chapters unpack the implicit idea in the title: that the moment we speak of God, we deny who God is. All attempts to define or describe the Christian God are doomed.

This is, of course, not a new idea, but it is unusual for evangelical Christians to push the point as hard as Rollins does. Essentially, Christians are atheists, because our God is beyond human category. At best, we can glimpse God in icons which often appear to point away from the reality of God, but which express metaphors that are self-consciously metaphors and not definitions.

Christians are defined not so much by what they believe as by how they believe; and this dynamic faith will manifest in works of mercy and restorative justice in the real world.

The second part of this encouraging book is a series of liturgies designed by the house church in the Menagerie Bar, the pub that Rollins calls his spiritual home. The themes range from Judas to Corpus Christi to Eloi Eloi Lama Sabachthani. The description of each liturgy is preceded by a reflection introducing the theme. The liturgies emphasise imagination and emotion and are described in practical detail, so that readers could use them as they are, or adapt them for their own setting.

If this is the coming, emerging church, then I would not mind belonging.

Interviewing Thomas


Matthew Fox, Sheer Joy, Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality,
HarperSan Francisco, 1992, 532 pages.
reviewed by Ted Witham

In 1986, I was lucky enough to spend 13 weeks with the medieval genius, Saint Thomas d’Aquino. It was by accident. Forced to choose a Church History unit in my studies, I opted for the subject with fewest dates and chronological gymnastics: Thomas Aquinas.

What a joy it was for me to shatter my image of him as a dry-as-dust scholastic theologian, concerned about angels dancing on pinheads.

Brother Thomas came alive for those 13 weeks, a spiritual companion who enlarged the view I had of faith in Christ. His personality is quirky, warm, courageous, utterly straight. He showed complete disinterest in things such as social etiquette.

Thomas was a mystic, and a genius of the order of Albert Einstein.

But after my course I found it difficult to communicate my enthusiasm for the ‘seraphic doctor’. His writings are hard work to read, and if you wish to follow through an idea, apart from the 30-40 volume set of the Summa Theologica, you really need a knowledge of medieval Church Latin. (If you are blessed with a e-Reader, you can download the complete Summa edited by the Dominicans for 99 cents.)

That is, until Matthew Fox’s Sheer Joy. Sheer Joy is a Thomas reader that aims to make Aquinas accessible to a wider audience. In Sheer Joy, Fox “interviews” Thomas, his brother in the Dominican Order (or ex-brother, as Matthew Fox is now an Anglican)! Fox puts questions to Aquinas, the answers to which are the actual words of Aquinas.

This interview format achieves three things:

* Fox can ‘ask’ 20th Century questions to reveal Aquinas’ relevance for us.
* Fox invites Thomas Aquinas to show his skill as an interactive teacher. Brother Thomas has a warmth easily submerged in long passages of translation.
* Fox displays his enthusiasm for his mentor and the reader can catch it!

As it is a selection from the writings of Aquinas, Sheer Joy is inevitably an interpretation of the master theologian’s ideas. Matthew Fox does set out to show in what ways Aquinas is a creation mystic. The themes of the four conversations (decided by Fox not Aquinas) are the movements of mystic theology: the Positive Way, the Negative Way, the Creative Way and the Integrative Way. Fox does take the risk of distorting Aquinas by placing him in an alien framework. I think, however, that the distortion is minimal. Medieval mysticism is not so alien to Thomas, who was a great poet of the Eucharist, influenced by Francis of Assisi and the medieval archetypes of the “goddess” and the “green man”. Fox also takes pains not to limit his viewpoints to modern frameworks of understanding. In any case, the words of Thomas are so powerful as to stand in their own terms.

Matthew Fox succeeds in making Brother Thomas more accessible. Don’t, however, expect an easy read. This is serious and deep stuff demanding real thought. Aquinas is not noted for levity. A brother once tried to tease Thomas by telling him that there was an ox flying outside. Thomas ran to the window. Everyone laughed. Thomas said woodenly, “I would rather believe that an ox could fly than that a friar could tell a lie.” (No wonder they nicknamed Thomas “the Dumb Ox”.)

Thomas tells it straight. He tells it straight from the heart, but through one of the most powerful intellects in the history of Western civilisation. So do persevere with Sheer Joy. It yields depths of wisdom. Thomas yearns for every Christian to draw closer to God, and his insights can light the way.

Fox brings out Aquinas’ holistic teaching about the creation, the delight that God’s love brings to all his creatures and the conscious response of love and pleasure (“sheer joy”) mortals are invited to make to God for themselves and on behalf of all creatures. This basic indwelling of God in all things and all things in God releases creativity both in God and in humanity. Desire to work with God to bring about a better world, what Fox calls ‘social justice’ and what Aquinas calls ‘perfecting’ creation, is the task of all Christians.

Fox shows that the best way to understand Thomas is primarily as a scriptural teacher, who uses philosophy only as a tool to bring contemporary meaning to the Bible. We have the false impression that Aquinas is primarily a philosophical theologian mainly because many of his Biblical commentaries have not been translated before. Fox’s translations are lively, avoiding the muddy ponderings of much previous translation.

I received two gifts from reading Sheer Joy. One was the deep love Thomas Aquinas has for the God who reveals himself in nature and the Bible, and who abides in us in the Eucharist. The second was the burning desire that others might know the embrace of that love.

Moved by Priest’s First Love


Glynn Young, Dancing Priest, Dunrobin Publishing, 2011

ISBN-13: 978-0983236351, paperback 380 pages (from $AUD14.15),
Kindle $US2.99

Reviewed by Ted Witham

I was surprised at how much this first novel moved me. The two main characters, Michael Kent and Sarah Hughes, are attractive young people who have fallen in love with each other, but who believe that Sarah’s lack of faith is keeping them apart.

Michael Kent is charismatic, an Olympic cyclist, and a theology student in Edinburgh. His life keeps turning out for the better and the better, even despite tragedy at the Olympics and other obstacles in his way. He is also good at dancing. Sarah, too, is talented as an artist, and gains recognition for her paintings late in the book.

Of course, I identified strongly with the main character: I was once a young theological student, and I once fell in love. Reading the book recaptured a lost and idealised youth.

The story is set primarily in Edinburgh, Athens and San Francisco. The sense of place was strongest in the descriptions of California and the topography of San Francisco, particularly from a cyclist’s view point. All cities, however, are exotic enough to be interesting.

Glynn Young writes about faith in a believable way, sympathetically capturing an evangelical mind-set in thought and action, and describing well the dynamics of a parish staff.

I had been so disappointed by US ‘Christian’ novels in the past, where ‘Christian’ equates to avoiding swear words and sex, but Dancing Priest is a refreshing change. Here ‘Christian’ equates to thoughtful prayer and care of others.

I had some quibbles with the Anglican aspects of this novel, the worst of which surrounded Michael’s ordination at St Paul’s cathedral in London. In most dioceses I know, the days before ordination are spent in retreat: playing tourist is a poor preparation for such a major step. (It may be that the Church of England is different precisely because it does gather candidates from all over England, some of whom may not have visited the capital). More jarring was the fact that Michael was not ordained deacon before his priestly ordination. Two-step ordination is fundamental to Anglicanism.

For the most part, however, the picture of a church that was like the real Anglican Communion, but not like it, with splits and tensions like the current ones, but not quite the same, was stimulating and entertaining.

Young’s writing has reminded another reviewer of Madeleine l’Engle, and I see the connection. But in the fresh characters, the way the plot invites the reader onwards from page to page, I was more reminded of C.S. Lewis in his Space Trilogy, only with more open emotions.

Untimely, but gentlemanly, Dying


P.D. James, Death Comes to Pemberley

London: Faber & Faber, 2011. Pback 310 pages. ISBN 9-780-57128358-3. RRP $29.99


I’ve had to have been persuaded to read Jane Austen; despite the enthusiasm of some friends for the 19th Century novelist, I have been put off by her high style and the brittle world she builds of English class distinctions at the end of the 18th Century.

I was anticipating the next police procedural of P.D. James, a modern stylist and great crime writer, and I admit to some disappointment when I read the advance publicity for Death Comes to Pemberley: an amalgam of a Jane Austen novel and a crime thriller.

Elizabeth Bennet has married Darcy and settled at Pemberley. They have two sons in the nursery and their marriage is a happy one. Each year, Pemberley Hall is the scene for a grand ball, named in honour of Darcy’s late mother, Lady Anne. Pemberley is thrown into disarray on the night before Lady Anne’s ball by the bloody death of an army officer in the estate woods. The scene needs much untangling as Wickham, a man never to be received at Pemberley is found kneeling over the body, drunk, and exclaiming that it is his fault that his friend is dead. Wickham is married to Elizabeth’s sister Lydia, and causes ongoing distress to the Darcys by living irresponsibly beyond his means. Darcy as a paterfamilias has in the past been obliged to pick up the tab.

In the subsequent investigation and trial, family loyalties are stretched to breaking point, and Pemberley looks set to be shamed for generations to come, until the final resolution, which – in Jane Austen fashion – is a set of happy outcomes for all.

James’s writing is so good that I was drawn into this complex web of family relationships and intrigue and enjoyed this novel almost as much as her other crime novels. (I don’t think she can better Death in Holy Orders – but then, I’m a priest!)

I was amused that Darcy consulted his wrist-watch and Elizabeth her bedside alarm clock: they were needed to establish times of alibis. The year in which Death Comes to Pemberley is set is 1803, well before the mass production of wrist-watches and the miniaturisation of alarm clocks. Darcy, as a gentleman, would much more likely have a pocket watch, if any time-piece on his person, and Elizabeth would more likely be used to consulting a maid who might know the time from a large hall clock. I can’t help feeling there’s a joke element here. P.D. James is too careful to have simply made a mistake.

The incongruity of the time-pieces emphasise how complete the world is that James has created. I believed her portrayal of reactions to death among the British upper-class of the time. I suspect Baroness James has some nostalgia for a time when gentlemen lived on their estates and as magistrates kept good order in the realm.

The downside to this nostalgia is that Death Comes to Pemberley lacks some of the social edge of James’s earlier novels. This has been a divertissement, and a thoroughly enjoyable one, but I do hope she returns to more modern settings if we are blessed with future novels.

Ted Witham

Meat and Right for Lent


We Believe

Meat and Right for Lent

John Warner, We Believe: studies in the Nicene Creed, Perth: John Warner, 2011
(available from St John’s Books, Fremantle)
68 pages, A4 paperback

Reviewed by Ted Witham

The Rev’d John Warner believes that “Christians should say what they mean and mean what they say”. The question raised by these substantial Lenten studies is whether most Anglicans do have a spiritual and intellectual grasp on the Nicene Creed, or whether we rattle it off Sunday by Sunday unheeding of its meaning.

One school of thought says that we don’t need to understand all the philosophical ramifications of our central statement of faith. It is expressed in the philosophical categories of the 3rd Century, not in a contemporary framework, so we should recite the Creed believing that we believe the same things about God as Christians did 1,700 years ago. There is a grain of truth in this, but if we rely on it as a reason for not trying to understand the Creed better, then Fr Warner would say we are guilty of hypocrisy – not to mention sloth.

Fr Warner divides the Creed into 30 days collected into 5 sections of various lengths. At the end of each section is a series of discussion starters. The sections are traditional — Belief in: God the Father, God the Son, the saving work of Jesus, God the Holy Spirit, and The Church and the Last Things.

The teaching for each day is both solid and solidly orthodox: meat and right for Lent. The teaching is seasoned with some helpful analogies, metaphors and anecdotes. Fr Warner is aiming to reach thoughtful parishioners, though some readers may need a little encouragement and support to get the most of out the materials.

(On a personal note, I was Associate Priest in Claremont parish when John was Rector. We have worked together in study groups and in Education for Ministry (EfM), so I am accustomed to John’s teaching style.)

The five sets of discussion starters will stimulate worthwhile discussion both on the intellectual understanding of the Creed and on the practical and spiritual implications for life in the Church. I would have preferred more discussion starters and more guidance on how best to use these materials in a group, but restricting the amount of questions will keep group participants focused on the Creed.

There are too few educational materials directing us to know and understand the central teachings of our faith. John Warner’s new studies fill a real need. I hope many parishes will want to use them this Lent.

Learning to Talk the Talk in the Community of Faith


Learning to Talk the Talk in the Community of Faith
Review Essay

Situated Learning
Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991

Reviewed by Ted Witham

Christian leaders desire to have Christians fully prepared for ministry and mission. They desire a church engaged in activities appropriate for Christian faith, especially worship, service and learning, a community of practice where people go beyond simply identifying as Christian.

Christian leaders in fact spend much energy and time in finding ways of forming Christians, and these ways are often introduced to Christian communities as programs. In my experience, these programs are often resisted. It is very difficult, for example, to establish the catechumenate in an Anglican parish despite its track record as a powerful tool for deepening people’s belonging, believing and acting.

The catechumenate for new Christians, Education for Ministry for Christians seeking to exercise a ministry of leadership in a local community and the preparation of local leaders for ordination as local deacons and priests have been a large part of my professional life. In addition, as a Third Order Franciscan, I am engaged in the formation of novices as they become professed members of the Order.

I have, therefore, a large personal stake in improving the systems by which we introduce people to ministry.

I thank my colleague and friend Craig Mitchell for drawing my attention to Situated Learning. The premise of this short book is that the process by which people become effective in a community of practice is more like socialisation than schooling.

Apprentices learn through their connection to a master, appropriate access to the ‘artefacts’ of their trade, and joining in the talk about their craft. Jean Lave discusses apprentice tailors in West Africa, meat-cutters in US super-markets, and midwives in Mexico. Difficulties with the meat-cutters’ apprenticeship are analysed, and apprentices fail to learn, for example, where there is not a ‘space’ where they can comfortably watch the saws as they are used by journey-men or masters.

Initiates to AA start with a problem with alcohol and end up as members of AA (non-drinking alcoholics) through a stepped process of listening to life-stories and shaping their own.

Situated learning works well when being a full part of the community of practice is more than learning a list of skills and supporting knowledge. Rather than focusing on the learners themselves, situated learning examines the total context in which the learners become members of the community of practice through their initially limited participation in it. As new-comers, they learn from old-timers and gradually become old-timers themselves.

The notion of participation thus dissolves dichotomies between cerebral and embodied activity, between contemplation and involvement, between abstraction and experience; persons, actions and the world are implicated in all thought, speech, knowing and learning. (p. 52)

The key concept of Situated Learning is legitimate peripheral participation, where learners are placed at the edge of the community of practice and they learn by staged participation.

Most of the examples have some rite to mark the beginning of this learning and phase and another at its end where they are recognised as full members of the community of practice. They become practitioners. The rites mark each person as a liminal member of the community, a member, yes, but not yet fully a member.

Rites not only mark the status of individuals, they are also powerful in renewing whole communities, as they focus attention on the role of the community in the formation of its new members. The Lenten rituals of the catechumenate, culminating in baptism (or renewal of vows) provide these markers for catechumens. The ceremonies of novicing and professing mark the beginning and ending of the formation of a Third Order novice.

In situated learning, a mentor may be provided for the learner: a sponsor or novice counsellor. As with an apprentice’s master, this mentor may not actually teach the learner anything about the community’s practices. Their function is to provide the mentor with one exemplar of a member of the community, whose life can be observed by the mentor, and to be the focus of the learner’s connection with the whole community.

In the highly relational community of practice of ministry (as lay, clergy or tertiary), the provision of a mentor highlights that relationships are the central act of all ministry. A sponsor or novice counsellor literally loves the learner into full participation.

Dr Lave surprisingly concludes that a learner becomes a full member of the community of practice when he talks the talk. This conclusion is helpful when the practice in question is ministry as a Christian, as a Christian leader, or as a Franciscan Christian.

It implies that the learner has been exposed to the teachings and stories of the community and reflected on them, and is able to continue that reflection by talking about them. It implies that the learner can participate in worship, either in the pews or the sanctuary, or in the specifically Franciscan practice of the Community Obedience, and that the learner’s ‘talk’ in worship is meaningful and life-giving.

It implies that the learner has had access to the ‘artefacts of the craft’: she has, for example, been able to reflect on what it means to receive Holy Communion in this community, to contribute meaningfully to the service this community engages in, has the tools – Bible, Prayer Book, Third Order Manual – on which her practice is now to be based.

The framework of legitimate peripheral participation takes into account the complexity of real communities of practice. It is:

Becoming a “member such as these” in an embodied telos too complex to be discussed in the narrower and simpler language of goals, tasks and knowledge acquisition. (p. 85)

The parallels between Lave’s concept of situated learning and the formation of Christian people for ministry are clear. The implications for action are more difficult to draw. This way of learning certainly takes the emphasis off the curriculum, what a novice has to learn, and places it on the community and the way it practices its ministry. It similarly de-thrones cerebral learning from the central place it might occupy and places it on the whole person. It suggests that learners should be allowed to do real ministry (as appropriate) and not learn facts about ministry.

This way of learning highlights the mentor-learner relationship, not for the transmission of knowledge, but as a simple symbol of the wider community.

Above all, this way of learning maintains the high importance of ministry to our community and its lived complexity. We attend to new members by building relationships with them at the same time as attending to the quality of our community of practice.

Programs like the catechumenate and EfM have their place, but they are not necessary to forming a more faithful community of practice. What is needed is the willingness of ‘old-timers’ – masters of the faith! – to engage new-comers in talk about ministry and faith, so that they too will come to talk the talk, and the walk will follow.

Beyond Brokeback Mountain: the church and rainbow sexuality


Christianity and LGBTStephen Hunt, Contemporary Christianity and LGBT sexualities, Burlington VT: Ashgate Publications 2009

Reviewed by Ted Witham

Check availability and price (Australian site)

Soon after its release, my wife Rae and I went to see the movie Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee’s brilliant adaptation of Annie Proulx’s short story. We saw it as tragic story of bisexuality book-ended by an outraged protest against anti-gay violence. Many of our friends reacted negatively to it, and most preferred not even to see it.

For some, it is so difficult to deal with these issues, to name them clearly and to discuss them. Their attitude, I fear, may be expressed in the cliché: “My mind’s made up: don’t confuse me with facts!”
There are many challenging “facts” in Contemporary Christianity and LGBT sexualities, but this book is too good to be dismissed just because readers find its subject confronting. In effect, the different essayists go through the letters LGBT and Q and explore the interactions between the “non-heterosexual” population and the churches.

Fact 1: Many gay Anglican clergy cope with their homosexuality by putting up a false – or incomplete – picture of themselves to the world. They effectively censor their public face. What they play on “front stage”, is projected by energetic manipulations of the person’s “back stage”. Michael Keenan uses the image of a tapestry with its beautiful face and crazily-stitched back.

Of course it is a fact that clergy hide their homosexuality. Over the years I have been privileged to see some of my colleagues and their beautiful stitching. This essay alerts us to ways we can be more supportive of gay clergy. But it also reminds me that we all have a front and backstage; we all stitch the back so that the viewed side of our personality is what we would like it to be.

In her chapter, Kristin Aune asks what it is about non-heterosexuality that evangelical Christians don’t like. Fact 2: She concludes that their prime concern is not their genital activity. On the contrary, what worries evangelical is that gay men are defective in their masculinity. They are not “real men”.
I found this to be a helpful insight. I used to work for an inter-church agency, and remember meeting many “real men” among the younger Government school chaplains. I was really seduced by their confidence as men, as heads of family and leaders of women and men. I acquiesced to their world-view, and even presented myself as “one of them”. To my shame, I did not challenge this too neat understanding of masculinity. As Kristin Aune describes it, being real men in these ways implied a lesser role for women, as men’s hand-maids, not their help-mates (Genesis 2). This gender polarity needs challenging not encouraging.

Marta Trzebiatowski sets out to explore the disapproval Polish women experienced when some announced that they are called either to monastic life or others came out as lesbians: Fact 3: Trzebiatowski finds many similarities between the two groups: both groups of women have refused the social role of motherhood, and they have refused the “heteronormativity “of their culture.

Perhaps the Third Order can be advocates for Religious as well as others who choose not to follow social norms. As a Religious Order which includes both singles and mothers, our members know both the inner logic of celibacy and the validating power of motherhood.

I found myself most challenged by Alex Toft’s essay on “Bisexual Christians”.
Fact 4: There are, it seems, as many definitions of bisexuality as there are bisexual individuals. Should you define bisexuality as sexual attraction to both the opposite sex and the same sex? If the definition is not based on desire, then is bisexuality of variant of gender, not male, not female, not straight, not gay, but all or some of the above?

Does the fact that people who understand themselves as bisexual in fact void all definitions of gender and sexuality so that none is really meaningful? Or to follow another track, are we all in fact bisexuals? Was Jesus, “the ideal template for human existence”, himself bisexual?

Writing for the Church of England in 2004, Thatcher and Stuart concluded that:
… bisexuals undermine the whole sexual system, the neat classification of people into homo and hetero, the pathologizing of homosexuality as a heterosexual disorder, and so on. (p. 77)

This “dangerous” fluidity usually evokes only negative reactions from the church: Toft found that the church considered bisexual individuals to be “in a state of confusion” (p. 85), rejecting a God-given identity.
Unsurprisingly, bisexuals find it difficult to continue to relate to churches. Many bisexuals felt that the only way to continue as Christians was outside the official Christian community.

Those who do stay in the church, feel forced to separate their sexuality from their spirituality “and ‘act’ heterosexually within religious spheres”, creating “great inner conflict” for individuals (p. 85).

According to veteran researchers Andrew Kam-Tuck Yip and Michael Keenan, transgendered Christians throw up an even deeper challenge to the churches: Fact 4: To be transgendered is to experience oneself as in some way opposite in sexuality to what one “should be”. A transgendered person may feel trapped in the body of the wrong gender/sex, or may need to dress in clothes of the opposite sex, or may have physical markers of both sexes.

Again, the permutations defy clear definition. The way transgendered people come to a clear self-understanding is by paying attention to their bodies. Transgendered Christians recall the church to an embodied theology. Mainstream Christians too often devalue not only the body but matter in general. This leads them to wander into a docetic heresy, devaluing the incarnation, the embodiment of God in Jesus of Nazareth. Transgender brings us back to a more classical theology, reminding us that we cannot grow spiritually if we deny the body. “Transgenderism … is about spiritual growth as an embodied experience.” (p. 99)

Stephen Hunt untangles the different threads of the influence of gay Christians on policy in the church and in the community. Not surprisingly, he finds that they have been more effective in changing laws than challenging theology: Fact 5.

Richard O’Leary takes us to the very religious world of Northern Ireland where the difficulties gays experience are magnified by the culture: Fact 6.

Yvonne Aburrow asks “Is It Meaningful to Speak of ‘Queer Spirituality’?” Feminist theology has a “hermeneutic of suspicion”. Readers scour their reading for bias to find out whether the writer has smuggled patriarchal values into this text. Have assumptions of male superiority, distorted the meaning of the text? If so, the reader can then make appropriate adjustments.

Fact 7: Queer theology takes this hermeneutic of suspicion a step further, looking for any normative bias to any gender or sexual identity. For example, when we read Genesis 1:27,
(“God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.”)
do we read these words through the eyes of heteronormativity? In particular, does the little word ‘and’ deceive us?

The Hebrew word for ‘and’ ranges in meaning, sometimes joining two terms very closely, and at other times describing a real difference between two things? Do we see the “and” in the phrase “male and female” in the latter sense, as disjunctive, emphasising the separateness of the genders? Could we not legitimately emphasise the conjunctive nature of the “and”? “Male and female” may highlight not a clear separation between the sexes, but that humanity is the totality of gender and sex, and that, astonishingly, this unpredictability reflects the truth about God, as humanity is created in God’s image. This is not a new reading of Genesis: Phyllis Trible reads Genesis 1:27 in this way.

Queer theology intends to be provocative, and, because of its radical assumption that no expression of gender identity is normative, will at some point end up offending every reader. This offence validates the approach.

In fact, queer theology might take us back to Saint Paul’s radical idea that “in Christ Jesus, there is no longer … male nor female.” (Galatians 3:28), Christ, Paul says, is gender-blind, just as he is colour-blind. We need transgendered people to remind us of this foundational Christian value.

Derek Jay then sketches “Trends in the Spiritual Direction of LGBT People.” Jay uses the three-stage schema of St John of the Cross and its purgative, illuminative and unitive stages of spiritual growth as a framework to explore the particular needs of LGBT people in direction. For example, the spiritual director needs to note when the church’s attempts to enforce celibacy on non-heterosexuals lead to promiscuity, and then help the person to find integrity in their life choices. LGBT people need to accept and celebrate their differentness. Fact 8: Directors can encourage LGBT people to model an alternative spirituality – a more embodied, more accepting, spirituality, with more integrity about sin – to the rest of the Church.

The book challenges me to action at several points. Firstly it takes me to tapestry; not for the purpose of picking apart the tapestries of others trying to identify the stitching hidden at the back of the face their owners present to the world. Rather it is to pay attention to one’s own front stage and backstage; to examine with honesty how we stitch and how we hide our true selves. The purpose of the self examination is to allow our compassion for others to grow as we see how we manage our own lives.

Secondly, this book challenges me when I acquiesce to the too simple views around me, whether they are a cheerful masculinity that puts women down, and either ignores or destroys the lives of those who do not conform to the heterosexual norm.

It also challenges me to speak up, when people disapprove the life choices of others. I will not always agree with people’s choice of marriage partner or their vows of celibacy or the partner they take up with, but it is not my role in life to judge. Rather I am called as a Christian to affirm the way others see God leading them.