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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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It’s a sign of the times, perhaps, that in the past few years the Australian Christian Book of the Year Awards for 2005 went to books that look outward, particularly to other faiths and other versions of spirituality. This has been particularly strong post-September 11, with 2003 winner Islam in our Backyard, published by regular gong-grabber Matthias Media, obviously, focusing on Islam and its growth in, and relevance to, contemporary society. Last year’s winner Michael Raiter’s Stirrings of the Soul looked at the rise of spirituality in general in Australian society, while runner-up Living by the Sword dealt with Christian ethics and the military in the light of war in Iraq. Now, all this year’s winners deal with how our spiritual lives impact on the wider community.
First, the third place getter, Love Is the Spur, which is author Geoffrey Bingham’s account of his time in notorious Changi prison. It details how Bingham found community in such a hellish place. Religions generally foster community, in contrast to materialism and greed that fracture it by emphasising the self and the accumulation of possessions inside the walls of our homes.
We are not only a materialist society, we are also a pluralist one, adding extra pressures on our relationships with our neighbours, something John Dickson, a previous winner, addresses in his 2005 prize-winning A Spectator’s Guide to World Religions (Blue Bottle Books). As a writer he tries to appeal to the everyday Australian—if there is such a creature—and doesn’t write like the academic he clearly is.
World Religions has a light-hearted and candid style, making it easy to pick up whenever current world events might require a quick refresher on exactly what the major faiths purport to believe. But it is also clear that it is intended as a high-school text, and here again its style would excel.
As a latecomer to Christianity he understands the Australian aversion to the “religious,” but combats it with enthusiasm. He also combats the idea that morality can do without religion, urging that religion is overwhelmingly the source of morality, and that therefore we need to understand the religions around us.
Part of this understanding, he suggests, is accepting the differences between religions. As part of a relativist tendency in our society, the similarities are emphasised. However, this does the various religions a great disservice, he asserts. To understand what their followers believe one must accept that each of the religions has different emphases.
As Dickson says, the very existence of some religions stems from the differences between them—Buddhism arose from the Buddha’s aversion to Hinduism’s caste system, Christianity from Judaism over whether Jesus was the Messiah.
One significant area of difference is in approaches to an afterlife—and how one gets there. And this gives rise to various approaches to death. Hindus see what we in the West would call a soul as part of a larger universal soul. For Buddhism, there is no such thing as the self, so what happens to “me” when I die is not the right question.
Where Islam emphasises the division between God and man, Christianity claims God became man. Dickson describes how a Muslim man suggested (politely), when Dickson gave a lecture on God becoming man, that the very idea is blasphemous.
In emphasising difference, Dickson is at pains in World Religions to describe the flaws of what he calls pluralism, but is really relativism, something Brian Hill spells out more clearly in Exploring Religion in School (Openbook), runner-up Christian Book of the Year.
With our pluralistic society comes relativism, the idea that the religions can’t all be right, so therefore they are all only partly right. Dickson points out that this view makes arrogant assumptions of its own, one being that the relatively few Western pluralists are right. This, argues Dickson, is not what tolerance is about.
Brian Hill’s Exploring Religion in School, which looks at the teaching of Religious Education, also argues against relativism and, like Dickson, Hill states his Christianity up-front. Public schools usually take an impartial approach, but this has the negative effect of suggesting that ultimately, as all religions are the same, we don’t need any. Religious education (RE) then becomes irrelevant.
However, says Hill, religion (even atheism) shapes our children’s values, and our teachers have a duty to teach, first, how religions do so, but more importantly, the value of spirituality in creating values. Students can’t be made to care, but RE can become more than rote learning, and is an opportunity to reach beyond the consumerism of our culture that has permeated even our educational system. In our user-pays, focused-on-outcomes society, we have devalued the rounded education that helps a student become a useful contributor to society but RE can address this.
Unlike Dickson’s work, Hill’s is a theoretical book aimed at professionals. However, every parent would do well to read the first few chapters on the postmodern context in which our children are learning—how technology and popular culture affect the search for meaning. For example, in our culture the focus on image is so ingrained that we hardly notice how we are caught in fashion’s endless cycle of consumerism.
This is a topic also taken up by equal runner-up Beyond Greed by Brian Rosner (Matthias Media).
More well-known writers than Rosner see greed as inevitable. In our postmodern society especially, where consumerism virtually is society, the concept of greed as sin has disappeared. Our national treasurer, Christian though he is, appears regularly to tell us we must spend to keep our economy ticking along. Our lives can become a work/spend cycle, and this spirals—if a cycle can spiral—when a rise in income is matched by a rise in spending.
It is a truism perhaps, but an important point nonetheless, that no matter what the income, it is never quite adequate. Our churches are not immune to this mesmerising culture. Rosner’s description of the so-called prosperity gospel, particularly Hillsong founder Brian Houston’s appallingly shallow scriptural interpretation, outlined in his book You Need More Money, should make believers’ blood boil.
This is an extreme example, and a sad one, coming from the leader of Sydney’s biggest church. But you and I are not immune. We often don’t see the sin of greed in ourselves. We neglect this log in our eye while pointing out the speck, say of sexual immorality, in our neighbour’s eye.
Says our winning author John Dickson, in one of the additional chapters in Rosner’s book, we normally think of “the world” that the Bible warns against as sex, drugs and rock-and-roll, not perverse socioeconomics.
Rosner makes a link between sexual immorality fired by lust, and greed, as both are about the desire to possess. In The Screwtape Letters C S Lewis suggests that we confuse needs and wants, and the problem of what we think we need, says Rosner, leads us to discontent, a form of rebellion against God. Not only this, but we disregard His commands to care for the poor.
In World Religions, Dickson comments on how one of the strengths of the early church was its care of the poor, attested to by astonished pagan contemporaries. Contrast this with the pitiful amount of aid that Australia sends overseas.
We can’t do a lot about foreign aid, but changes can be made to our own lives, and the ethical is in the detail, it seems. Beyond Greed offers ways of thinking about what we need and what we want, what we spend and what we give away. This is an important way to refocus, from us onto our neighbours, to emerge from the comfort of our gadget-filled homes and participate in our community.
There’s not a lot here for the light summer reader, but these books make good reading nevertheless, and will probably last you well into 2006.
Extract from Signs of the Times, December 2005 .
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