Kingdom Calling by The Faith and Order Commission

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This Report begins by recalling the various other reports and initiatives that the Church of England has published and undertaken, roughly every 10-15 years, since “Towards the Conversion of England” in 1945 and yet the challenge remains essentially the same, namely that in order for the Church to be effective it needs the whole People of God to be active in God’s Mission.

This is not really about enabling lay ministry within the Church – although there are plenty of internal benefits from doing that and we should continue to build on the progress that has been made in that direction – it is about the laity being equipped to live all aspects of their lives beyond the Church as instruments of Mission.

Therefore while the Faith and Order Commission has produced a perfectly good report the earlier reports were also more that adequate – it was the action, or lack of it, that came after that left the need unaddressed, and as such I am not sure there is any reason to conclude the response will be any different on this occasion. More likely, when in 10 to 15 years time the Church of England returns to this question this will just be added to the already long list of missed opportunities.

Reforming RE by Mark Chater

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The question “what is RE for?” is hardly new, nor is the need for robust answers. The failure to do “RE” well makes it an easy target for marginalisation by those that are uninterested in it or are actively anti its place within our education system.

Mark and the other contributors are honest about the current situation and refuse to make excuses for it – and the response they put forward is both attractive and has real potential to be effective, fingers cross they manage to get some meaningful implementation.

Black Deutschland by Darryl Pinckney

Out of print, but buy it from abebooks.co.uk

I found myself somewhat lost in the layers of this novel, the dual setting of the unreality of 1980s West Berlin and Chicago’s South Side and the rich cast of characters providing a lot to keep track on.

The way Jed’s identity as gay and Black plays with different ideas of respectability is central, and those around him are also wrestling to the identities they wish to have, the identities those that others give to them, and the gap between the two.

He begins with a rosy picture of gay bar ChiChi, but increasingly there is a darkness within the dynamics of its patrons – which often is the case if you scratch the surface of nostalgia for the tight knit gay spaces of the last century.

England by Marueen Duffy

Out of print, but buy it from abebooks.co.uk

Published in 2001 it is interesting to see some aspects which are of their time but actually Duffy has been successful in taking a long view as most of what she writes rings true now as well as it did then.

For those that worry that Brexit referendum campaign misled the British people there is little comfort here as the Myth of England that Duffy describes has Brexit weaved into its DNA, for example she notes on p103 that there is an “arrogance bred of this isolationist image… We would prefer to go it alone, even against all economic reason…” so if there were untruths used in the referendum they were ones the English mindset was preconditioned to want to believe.

We also find this in the reaction of many to the Scottish referendum within England, an attitude that I heard from many was essentially if Scotland wanted to be independent then good riddance to them – giving voice to a suppressed belief that England is burdened rather than enriched by the relationship, and the sense that expressing a desire for self-determination is essentially bad manners and ingratitude to the long suffering English parent.

Clearly she was writing just before “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters took other the world, as on p231 references the sentiment “Carrying on is itself a basic English stratagem, translated into wartime cliché as ‘pressing on regardless’...” without the biggest cliché of those particular posters – and fascinating window on the way they have being commercialised essentially as a simulacra.

The dogged carrying on is perhaps the appeal of Test match cricket as the batsman occupies the crease holding out for the draw.

The were some places where language felt a little dated, perhaps in retelling the racist tropes of our colonial past she would now make more explicit distance of her own views from them, and I felt that we ended up with a little too rosy a picture of Afro-Caribbean and Asian immigrant experiences in this country.

We also have a rather breathless conclusion, after millennium of history we get from the darkest days of WWII to the present in 20 pages – maybe it is the intervening 20 years that have put a significant additional distance, the War being 80 rather than 60 years behind us – increasingly it becomes the War Great-grandparents rather than Parents lived through, and so is remote from us. But the conclusion is also optimistic that we are about the break free of the Myth and become Europeans (newly connected by the Channel Tunnel which she mentions for more times that feels warranted) – whereas as things are turning out we have retrenched back into Myth.

And reading in the first days of our second COVID lockdown these words, on the penultimate page, felt weirdly prophetic… “will e-commerce catch on in a country where people are used to going out not merely to shop but to meet others, either by accident or design? Our perceived discontent will be greater if we become a nation of fearful stay-at-homes… Although we are the least touchy-feely of people, we still need social intercourse, we need to feel the village beyond our front door...”

Stephen by Carl Watkins (Penguin Monarchs)

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Again the Penguin Monarchs series provides great interest in a slim volume, in the long run of Henrys and Edwards with its smattering of Richards the name Stephen stands out – yet somehow I had a vague knowledge of the Empress Matilda and “the Anarchy” without setting it in the context of Stephen’s kingship.

The story of Stephen points to the way that the hereditary principle was rarely a straight jacket, and it seems as often as not the English crown passed on beyond the direct line. Also, particularly having just read Maureen Duffy’s England, it is a reminder that the “isolation” of England is a myth, the interplay with Wales and Scotland, but also France and the wider continent had a very intimate influence on the shaping of the “politics” of England.

I also found myself reflecting that the is a echo between Matilda and Mary Tudor – both had the challenge of acceptance as female rulers, but this was not helped by their husbands, the fear that Philip of Spain would naturally control his wife Mary Tudor and through her England is prefigured in the fear that Matilda would be beholden to her husband Geoffrey Plantagenet.