Human Rights and Just War

Last night's meeting at the Severn Forum was one of the best I've attended.

Nicholas Mercer, formerly a lawyer and a soldier, now an Anglican priest, was until fairly recently advising the army's top brass about human rights: chapter and verse he gave us for why they count in today's world: a masterful lesson!

Starting with the Athenians' massacre of the unarmed Melians in 416 BC, he took us through the Beatitudes, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Grotius and Henri Dunant to George W. Bush and Death on the Rock. Thucydides' Melian dialogue should have warned us of the whirlwind we would reap - and are now reaping - from Abu Ghraib. If international law means anything, it's that the United States' military paradigm is illegal.

And we are complicit in this illegality, having allowed 1500 rendition flights to touch down in the UK. But where is the Church's prophetic voice in opposition to the chorus of those wanting to repeal the Human Rights Act? It's time, Mercer said, for a Christian to stop trying to be the referee and to start getting involved as a player.

All good stuff - and no time left (he tells me) for a mention of nuclear defence, drones, disinvestment, environmental justice, non-violent direct action or Pax Christi!

Ravenna

The Severn Forum runs a programme of lectures on theological subjects, so tonight's "The mosaics of Ravenna" may have seemed a bit of a let off. It turned out to be nothing of the sort. Christopher Herbert, now the retired Bishop of St Albans, had the good fortune to visit Ravenna when his diocese was twinned with dioceses local to that city. Making full use of his red carpet reception, he has now put together a splendid talk, explaining what caused Ravenna to become the focus of so many "glittering prizes", and how they illustrate the development of doctrine in the early church.

So, through a sequence of excellent slides, we came to consider the absence of representations of Christ crucified; to observe that Jesus - shown naked in the Jordan in the late 5th Century - was not baptized by total immersion; and why the Good Shepherd was portrayed wearing a toga.

My photograph shows Dr. Herbert in front of a photograph of the figure of Archbishop Maximiamus - "drawn" in mosaic more than 1,500 years ago, he could be at home amongst our National Portrait Gallery's Contemporary Displays.

And the lecturer is clearly himself at home in the world of art - not just church/biblical - history: parallels with David Hockney's swimming pool pictures and an Anish Kapoor sculpture round out his talk, though he wears his learning lightly.

Great stuff, and deserving of a larger audience than the 50 or so who turned out. Surely it wasn't the football? I didn't even notice that it was being sacrificed: anyway, the talk ended early enough to let me watch the final 20 minutes - a satisfactory result!

On Sunday evening, we were in the (virtual) presence of another master of his art, Woody Allen - his Blue Jasmine, brilliantly over ripe, and redolent of the world of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

"Is Christianity dying in the West?"

The well-known broadcaster Elaine Storkey was our stimulating speaker at the Severn Forum this evening, revisiting "the secularisation thesis". Her slides gave us a barrage of statistics and quotations, first of all to substantiate the thesis - as if we were not aware of declining church attendances. I liked the juxtaposition of a photograph of the London bus slogan, "There's probably no God..." with the cartoon of a church by a bus-stop, and its notice, "There's probably no bus so come to church and enjoy yourself a bit."

More interesting was Dr. Storkey's analysis of religious life as mutating, not disappearing. Of the 40% who are dechurched (or lapsed), more than half she said are waiting to be asked to return to the fold. Of the 40% unchurched, with no experience of worship, how many, she asks, may have a longing for God? The ways of being religious have moved into the symbolic marketplace; but how do we meet them there? Who is going to claim their baggage from the carousel?

My answer was this, with which our speaker agreed - as I knew she would being President of Tear Fund, with its carbon fast: when the church takes seriously the challenge of environmental degradation, and the need to uphold God's creation, we find ourselves very readily alongside those unchurched masses, many of whom are doing much to right the wrongs we should be talking about within our churches, but are not.