It was a stimulating yet busy ten days, and I lectured on my own work on the role of religion in reconstruction and reconciliation in Zimbabwe. In the coming weeks, I hope to reflect on this blog on some of what I learned at the conference, to return to this blog’s current debate on the Orange Order, and to take up other issues, such as the reaction to the Cloyne Report.

Sadly, some commentators are continuing to post such comments. In the past week, I have removed some of these comments and seriously considered removing many more. When authors descend to the level of personal attack or indulge in a long post about a different or only vaguely-related topic, it creates a climate in which other readers of the blog find it difficult to have a constructive debate about the topics that are actually under consideration.

In a comment on last week’s Fr Brian D’Arcy and his Critics post, one of those commentators said:

Gladys: I respect your publishing our comments. Many sites don’t and many newspapers won’t.

This makes me ask whether some of these commentators have been banned from other blogs? I doubt that they have been banned because they disagree with the person or people who moderate the blog. If the posts on my blog are indicative, they have lost the privilege of posting comments because they have introduced new, irrelevant topics or resorted to personal attacks.

I think that the only way forward for Christians (and any concerned citizens) is to engage in respectful debate. I want to hear what people with different perspectives than I do have to say. But in future, this blog will be moderated much more stringently. I will remove and edit more posts and, if necessary, block people who consistently violate these ‘house rules.’

(Image sourced on flickr photosharing, by kev/null)

The meeting will be chaired by David Bolton of the Fermanagh Churches Forum and the members of the panel are:

Rev. David Cupples – minister, Presbyterian Church, Enniskillen

Sr. Elizabeth Fee – retired teacher, Sister of Mercy for over 40 years

Dr Gladys Ganiel – lecturer, Trinity College Dublin at Belfast (the Irish School of Ecumenics)

Zelda Kingston – lecturer, South West College and Methodist preacher, Enniskillen Circuit

Fr. Peter O’Reilly – parish priest, St Michaels’ Catholic Church, Enniskillen

The event will begin at 7.30pm and members of the audience will be invited to submit questions as they arrive.  Between 7.30pm and 8pm, refreshments will be served, while the panel consider the questions submitted and decide which they wish to discuss. At 8pm the panel discussion will begin, and the event is due to end by 9.30pm. 

The event is free and all are welcome.

Dr Hayward has contributed another perspective on the book, asking why it matters if Ireland’s political parties are ‘Europeanized?’, on the Queen’s Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work Blog.

The BBC aired the documentary, ‘Zimbabwe’s Forgotten Children,’ earlier this month. When I watched the film, I was struck by the grim resignation and stoicism with which the children she worked with seemed to accept their fate. They knew their childhoods had been stolen.

Many children in Zimbabwe are forced to take care of sick and elderly relatives, or to scrabble out enough money to buy food for their families through panning for gold, collecting bottles, or digging for bones (to be used in sugar refining) in rubbish heaps.

Sithole originally intended to make a film about her childhood and the excellent education that she received in Zimbabwe. She grew up in a time when Zimbabwe was envied throughout Africa for its high-quality education and health care systems.

Now she sees children turned away from schools because their relatives cannot afford to pay, in some cases, as little as 50 cents per term for school fees.

Sithole visited Zimbabwe in 2005, and was there when Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF government implemented Operation Murambatsvina (Remove the filth). Operation Murambatsvina was the demolition of poor, high density suburbs whose citizens were suspected of supporting the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

Operation Murambatsvina – and other ZANU-PF policies such as the seizure of productive farms and their re-distribution to false independence war veterans with no training in farming – have garnered some attention in the West.

But we hear less about Zimbabwe’s children, who are now in danger of becoming a lost generation.

In a country where the life expectancy is 34 years, many have lost their parents to HIV/AIDS or the cholera epidemic, in which about 4,000 died. These children may be cared for by elderly grandparents – or, as this film showed – they may be the ones caring for the grandparents.

This is the case for Obert, a boy in a rural area who tries to feed himself and his grandmother by panning for gold and trapping small birds with sticky gum from trees. His grandmother was once a fore-person on a white-owned farm. All of her family were employed on the farm, and she says that the farmer treated them well and that she could do the job ‘better than any man.’

Obert is one of the brightest pupils in his class. But we see his grandmother reduced to pleading for mercy with the government lackey who comes to the school to send home all of the children who have not paid their fees. Obert is sent home because his grandmother cannot produce 50 cents.

Here’s a boy who loves school and yearns for an education, who for the sake of 50 cents would have the chance to grow up and become a creative and productive member of society. Zimbabwe will need the intellect and skills of such children if it is ever to emerge from the situation it is now in.

You can still see some clips from the documentary on the BBC website, or visit the website devoted to the documentary.

Be warned that some of the scenes and stories are harrowing. I was often frustrated when watching it that the filmmakers did not intervene (i.e. ‘give the woman 50 cents, would you!’), but there is provision on their site to donate to the children.

In today’s Irish Times, Dr John Murray argues that ‘separating religions and schools is not democratic.’ He is responding to an earlier commentary by Dr Ronan McCrea. The crux of Murray’s argument is that secular state schools are not really neutral. Therefore, if the state does not allow people to send their children to state-funded religious schools, it is undermining their democratic and human rights. Murray writes:

It is Ronan McCrea and people like him who wish on principle to deny any and all religious parents the choice of a religious school. How genuinely democratic is that?

How can anyone think he is favouring religious freedom by calling for religions to be excluded from State-funded schools, thereby forcing all religious parents to send their children to schools that exclude their most personal and deeply held religious values and beliefs (unless they have the money to send their children to fee-paying schools)? Does anyone really think this is religiously neutral?

I have some sympathy with Murray’s argument – at the theoretical level.

But my problem comes when we move from theory to practical reality. A wide body of social research in Ireland and the UK has revealed that religiously-based schools here have contributed to social divisions. This is most obvious in Northern Ireland, where religiously-based schools are one of the lynchpins of an unofficial apartheid system. In the UK, researchers have found that religiously-based schools perpetuate the gap between rich and poor.

Although McCrea’s main concern was the Saudi Arabian Government’s desire to establish a school in the Republic, Murray seems more agitated by criticism of Catholic schools. He also says:

Like many Irish parents, I send my children to Catholic schools, and do so happily. One reason I do so is that I want them to cherish their religious heritage and tradition, and to see it as a source of high moral ideals and patriotism. Catholics can be good citizens and good people because of their religion – and not in spite of it.

Again, I can identify with Murray’s stance. I don’t think all religions are viruses from which we need to protect the young. There are far too many historical examples of people utilising religious resources to promote transformative social change – like the ending of the slave trade or the American civil rights movement – to want to expunge it from the public sphere altogether.

But I think that insisting on religiously-based education in public schools simply ignores the divisive role religiously-based education has played in Ireland’s past, while at the same time betraying a lack of confidence in religion itself. Must religious people rely on state-run institutions – the schools – to promote their visions of ethics, morality and the good life?

The priest at the church told Ekklesia that the aim of the billboard was to spark debate about the meaning of the incarnation.

Anything that questions the stereotypical Christmas notion of a sanitised baby Jesus surrounded by swooning cherubs seems to me a positive step. But I am certain there is another view, that such ‘advertisements’ are inappropriate and needlessly offensive to sincere people who take the Christian faith quite seriously. I am guessing the advert could cause extra consternation among Catholics, as there is a belief within the Catholic Church that Mary remained a virgin her entire life. (My Catholic friends are often surprised to learn that most Protestants believe Mary and Joseph had children together after the birth of Jesus, and that some Protestants believe one of Jesus’ ‘half-brothers’ wrote the biblical book of James).

But to me, an interesting question is why would dedicated Christians be especially offended by this billboard? It could be that many Western Christians feel under attack from the ‘new atheist’ brigade led by Richard Dawkins, so they feel vulnerable when their faith seems belittled in public.

Or, perhaps it is because the billboard challenges some of the unquestioned assumptions that have been common among Western Christians about the incarnation. At Christmas, we hear much in church about Christ coming as a vulnerable baby to become a Saviour and King. Especially among Protestant traditions where the theory of substitutionary atonement is sacrosanct, Christ’s roles as Saviour and King dramatically overshadow what might be called his human qualities.

The billboard – with Mary and Joseph in bed together feeling the very human emotion of disappointment – is meant to get people thinking about the human elements of Jesus’ life on earth. His contemporaries probably considered him an illegitimate child. Shepherds, some of the most marginalised people of his day, received the divine announcement of his birth. Along with his parents, he was a refugee in Egypt. His profession, carpentry, was not the most prestigious. When he began his ministry, he said he was appointed to preach good news to the poor.

The priest at St Matthew’s said that he hoped it was ideas about the incarnation such as these that would be discussed. If these aspects of Jesus’ life inform my reflections on Christmas this year, I think I will be all the better for it.