By Adrian Pabst · Saturday, January 12, 2008 Last Sunday Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, published a controversial article in The Sunday Telegraph, linking Muslim immigration and multiculturalism to the loss of the Christian culture that, in his words, “made Britain great.”
Unsurprisingly, the political and religious establishment reacted in entirely predictable ways. Politicians from both right and left condemned his remarks for being divisive and excessive. Religious figures, especially some representatives of the Muslim community, accused the Bishop of scaremongering in the face of Christianity’s decline in the UK. In either case, the implicit charge is that his analysis is one-sided and that it feeds the growing Islamophobia that apparently threatens the country’s unity and cohesion.
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By Adrian Pabst · Thursday, November 9, 2006 4.
Perhaps most importantly, Benedict sketches the contours of an alternative politics that is beyond the division between the secular and the religious. To this end, he calls for a new form of engagement among the faiths and between cultures and religions. Having argued that contemporary Western conceptions of reason are utterly impoverished as a result of equating rationality with positivism, the Pope goes on to say that his theologically informed critique of modern rationalism “has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age.” Instead, science and religion share the belief in the existence of truth and in the need to use reason rightly. Coupled with the quest for knowledge, science and religion must debate the nature of progress and the limits on new technologically feasible possibilities. More fundamentally, Benedict says that the hegemony of positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it is intellectually dead and politically bankrupt because “the world’s profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions”—an implicit recognition perhaps that Islam has resisted the secularisation of religion and culture more consistently than Christianity.
So in order to challenge the dehellenization of the West (and the concomitant separation of reason and faith) and to inaugurate an alternative politics, the first step for Benedict is to recover the whole breadth and depth of rationality, for “this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time.” As such, theology is always already public and political and does not need to justify its interventions in discussions on politics or culture.
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By Adrian Pabst · Wednesday, November 8, 2006 1.
To contemporary secular minds, it seems as if the world has entered a new dark age of religious totalitarianism. Islamic terrorists attacked the “free world” on 9/11 and elsewhere thereafter. Christian Evangelical fundamentalists sanctified the neo-con invasion and occupation of Iraq. More recently, violent protests erupted across the globe in response to a series of events: the publication of cartoons of Mohammed in the Danish magazine Jyllands-Posten; the ban of headscarves in French schools; death threats to Robert Redeker, the author of an article on the violence of Islam; the controversy on the veil in Britain.
The resurgence of religion appears to threaten the very foundations of the modern liberal democratic society: the right to freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, and freedom of choice—in short, freedom from all forms of oppression, above all the universalist and exclusivist claims of religion.
The final confirmation that religion is dangerous seems to have come in September when Pope Benedict’s address in Regensburg sparked outrage and anger across the Muslim world. The Pontiff himself appeared to associate Islam with the practice of violent conversion. In turn, Islamic leaders who condemned the speech accused Benedict of a “crusader mentality” and recalled atrocities allegedly committed in the name of the Catholic Church—not only the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition but also the Vatican’s close ties with Nazi Germany.
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