Animals and human rights

I was reading USA Today the other morning (strange what staying in a hotel does for you!), and came across an article about moves in Europe to give certain "human" rights to apes. From memory, one instance was Spain about to legislate on the subject, and another was a story from Austria about someone petitioning the European Court of Human Rights to allow certain rights to a particular great ape: specfically, the recognition of its right to life, and the appointment of a legal guardian.

Now, let's leave aside well-worn (but rather valid) arguments about rights going hand-in-hand with responsibilities (it's a long time since a horse was last tried for murder), and comments about man (solely) being made in God's image. Moreover, I'll not explore Jason Clark's Is Christianity Irredeemably Speciesist?.

What really bothers me is the shape of the current argument: the rather naive observation that higher mammals are rather like young children, or certain handicapped people: capable of high degrees of cognition and communication, yet not sufficiently developed to be able to function independently in society. I say 'naive', because the comparison is rather selective, and tends to ignore the ways in which these animals are quite unlike people - young, old, or otherwise.

I'm less worried about extending further rights to animals; I'm more worried about the comparison running the other way - that children and handicapped people are somewhat less than human. If they are on a par with great apes, then eventually they have less human rights than you and I. That flies in the face of everything which has been achieved with Bills of Rights, the Universal Declaration, the European Convention, and the rest.

It's not very postmodern of me, but I'm inclined to think that, as a general principle, the notion of certain inalienable rights for all human beings is a good thing. Extending certain rights to animals seems to dilute, rather than strengthen, that position. And that worries me.

tipping tyrrany

I'm in the USA, mainly to visit Microsoft HQ for a couple of weeks.

Something I so easily forget about this country is how much I hate the
tipping culture. It's not just that I am cheap, though I am. It's
not just that I don't always know when to tip, or how much. [When my
brother first moved to the States, he had the maxim "if it moves, tip
it". That seems to work.] It's not just that it seems so arbitrary -
as far as I can see, if the person stays behind a counter or desk, you
don't generally tip them; if they walk around, you do... It's not
just that in much of the civilized world, a tip is a reward, a thank
you for outstanding service, rather than an automatic right.

No. Over all, my problem with the culture of tipping is the way that
it puts some people in a permanent position of subservience. Much of
the service economy is built on this notion that we don't really want
to guarantee you a living wage, but if you make the customer happy,
you can get a bit extra.

Now, I'm not really advocating the opposite, that we should not care
about how well or badly those people do their jobs: travel in the
former Iron Curtain countries was certainly no fun. But there are
plenty of cultures - Australia is a great example - where they mange
to structure things so that people working in such jobs get paid a
decent wage, and occasionally get a tip, while at the same time having
generally great cusomer service. Is it really so hard?

Or look at it the other way: perhaps we should tip people in all walks
of life. How great it would be if students gave me some cash at the
end of each lecture? Or if we tipped the checkout assistant at the
supermarket? Or the preacher, after the sermon? Maybe we should tip
the dentist after the tooth extraction? Why do all those sound weird?

Evangelical Manifesto

Here is a most curious document. This Evangelical Manifesto sets out "A Declaration of Evangelical Identity and Public Commitment". There is much to be said for it: the authors do not presume to speak for anyone other than themselves, but seek to be inclusive and invite others to sign. It defines an "old school" evangelicalism, concentrated upon the good news of Jesus Christ, and doesn't stray into fundamentalist territory. Nor is it a proof text fest, as I expected it to be: in fact, I don't think there's a single direct bible quotation or reference.

And this purpose seems good:

For those who are Evangelicals, the deepest purpose of the Manifesto is a serious call to reform—an urgent challenge to reaffirm Evangelical identity, to reform Evangelical behavior, to reposition Evangelicals in public life, and so rededicate ourselves to the high calling of being Evangelical followers of Jesus Christ.

So it doesn't focus simply on identity, but also calls Evangelicals to reform their behaviour. So, for example:

All too often we have prided ourselves on our orthodoxy, but grown our churches through methods and techniques as worldly as the worldliest of Christian adaptations to passing expressions of the spirit of the age.
All too often we have failed to demonstrate the unity and harmony of the body of Christ, and fallen into factions defined by the accidents of history and sharpened by truth without love, rather than express the truth and grace of the Gospel.

And many more passages in a similar vein.

But (and you knew a 'but' was coming, didn't you...) the very lack of presumption about it makes it, well, presumptive. The preamble is long on explanations about "we who sign this declaration do so as American leaders and members of one of the world’s largest and fastest growing movements of the Christian faith". But isn't that curious? They define Evangelicalism as a theological category (so presumably its expression shouldn't be contingent upon culture), and emphatically see it as a world-wide movement, but sign "as American leaders". Why not simply "as leaders"? Something doesn't stack up. I think that what they have written is an American Evangelical Manifesto, even if the title doesn't say so.

The prose is by turns very lofty, and then third rate. Perhaps it smacks of having been written by a committee: for a twenty-page document striving for clarity, it lacks sufficient structure. I somehow expected more. Perhaps this is why it hasn't achieved a higher profile. That, and the curious web-site design making it hard to find out who has drafted and signed it.

But, those criticisms aside, perhaps the most interesting observation for me comes from Tony Jones: he notes that, especially in America, "Evangelical" can be either a theological or a cultural category. In practice, most of the time, for most people, it is surely the latter (how many members of my local Evangelical church could unaided come up with the list of seven Evangelical distinctives from the Manifesto?). Yet, these (and perhaps most) leaders define it theologically.

However, I'd go further than Jones: they may define themselves theologically, but the document is emphatically a call to action, to praxis, to being Christ's people: the deeper message is anything but a dry, definitional, systematic, confessional, faith. It is heading towards being incarnational and missional. I find that rather encouraging.

Have I signed my name to the document, using the web site? No. Will I do so? Let me get back to you.

And on a similar note

Is the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans really going to call itself FOCA?

Context is crucial

I love those little dissonances you get when you see signs and announcements in unfamiliar contexts...

Here I am in a German hotel. As is common in this country, the sauna is a fully mixed sex thing, with fully naked people... In the shower area, there's a basket of mini shampoo bottles, each with a large label saying "avoid eye contact". I guess that would work.

The Shia Newspaper

Someone put "The Shia Newspaper" in my letterbox a couple of days ago. You can read it online, if you want to see.

Fascinating.

I've seen a number of Evangelical (and Evangelistic) tracts presented as tabloid newspapers. This has much in common. Even down to the whole-page rant about why Darwin was so utterly wrong, and how his "prattle" has evolved... There's also a lot of mumbo-jumbo completely incomprehensible to outsiders.

Indeed, at 32 pages, totally devoid of any form of advertising, it's quite a heavyweight document: the format may be tabloid, but the articles are all longer than those in The Times and its ilk. You can admire the time and effort which has gone into producing and delivering it, but also sincerely doubt it is going to have much of an impact upon those who have received it, like I have, via a random delivery.

It's a salutary reminder, all the clearer for coming from outside my own faith community: sharing the message of Christ and his Kingdom is not easy. Engaging in some worthy activity may make us feel better (and may, by his good grace and some serendipity, advance the kingdom anyway) but eager hard work is not the same thing as effective communication.

[Yes, the self-conscious emerging punchline would say something about a relational gospel, too. You can fill in the details...]

Colossians Remixed: the event

I spent today at an event organised by blah. I think I probably found it via Jonny Baker's blog, though I can't really remember. I spoke to several people who asked me why I was there: I think the answer is that having read lots of books and blogs, I thought it was time to get out and actually meet some of these emerging church-types: what do they wear? how do they smell? do they really all carry Apple Macs?

Meeting people was probably the most valuable part of the event. There was an interesting cross-section of South-of-England Christendom. I was particularly pleased to be introduced to folks from some emerging-type gatherings in Oxford: "home", and mayBe. Interesting that they both seem to be part of the Anglican Fresh Expressions: but I guess that's the sort of people you expect to meet at a CMS-hosted event.

That's not to say that the event content wasn't worthwhile, too: the speakers were Toronto-based husband and wife Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat. They were giving an overview of the themes in their book Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire. A nice mix of straight talking (with a little interaction), large-group interaction, and small group discussion - the teacher in me is at least as interested in the format as the content! I don't get to sit and participate from this side of the "fence" too often.

They started by talking about how that in order to understand Colossians (or any scripture) we have to understand context: the Jewish context, the Roman context, and our context as readers (there was a fourth, the micro-context of Colossae: the whole Philemon/Onessimus situation). Keesmaat is a former pupil of Tom Wright, and so the Jewish context bit is a big deal, part of the "New Approach to Paul" - a bit of theology which is slightly lost on me.

The big idea, though is that Paul's writing is deeply subversive towards the prevailing Roman system - the Pax Romana coming from a highly organized but highly violent society, with a stable economy built on slave labour and keeping the Roman Citizens in the style to which the had become accustomed. And without naively looking for one-to-one correspondences, we can see many similar patterns in today's western society. Ergo, our calling is likewise to subvert the prevailing order.

They speak persuasively, and so I really want to read the book. Somehow, the message starts to sound similar to that other well-known Toronto activist's Naomi Klein - a politics I have some passing sympathy for, but eventually I'm inclined to reject. The compassion which motivates it is spot-on. The analysis of the ills of globalization is far less clear. But perhaps that should be the subject of a separate blog, because this one is already over-long.

The book is, in essence, a commentary on Colossians (evidently, it describes itself as an anti-commentary), and a fairly academic one, at that, I'm told. I'll look forward to reading it, if I can manage the theology.