Some links

[tree_and_leaf]

Rowan Williams on the challenge of presenting religion in a world interested in 'spirituality' (and no, this has no connection to Doctor Who, before anyone asks): if we who adhere to revealed faith don't want to be simply at the mercy of this culture, to be absorbed into its own uncritical stories about the autonomous self and its choices, then we need to examine the degree to which our practice looks like a new world. It's a Rowan Williams article, so it's fairly dense, but he has some interesting points about the tendency of such fashionable concepts as 'spiritual capital' to end up confirming existing behaviour and/or social patterns.

On the subject of faith being absorbed by the culture surrounding it, Indian bishops attack the prosperity gospel and the treatment of the Church as a product to be marketed (as well as good old fashioned simony).

Finally, the RC Bishop of Brentwood has been talking about migrant workers, and why Britain has a responsibility to them.

Comments

[overconvergent.livejournal.com]

I am glad you liked it; he's a favourite of mine.

I think that one could chart the history of this by looking at the foundations of religious orders within the Church; new ones get founded to correct the sloth that has crept into the old ones, and for a while they're more rigorous, but then they become slothful too, so another new order is founded ... and so it goes on.

[tree_and_leaf]

Yeah, that's a very common paradigm. Though it's not entirely straightforward - you also get internal reforms: one of the classic examples being the Dominicans in the 14th/ 15th century. And, of course, sometimes one wonders if the reformers were always right, and whether they trampled over perfectly valid forms of the religious life, just because it didn't fit their idea of what the founder intended.