The New Slavery....

http://www.openhorizon.org.uk

In a world where markets have been prised open
by the irresistible power of globalised capitalism
walls keep people in, but mostly out.

And yet people are shifted like cattle, like the
slaves of the Atlantic Triangle...Webs of violence
enmesh us, compromise us, involve us all...Women made
in the sparkling divine image, promised a new life
then sold into the slavery of 'house-servant' for the
new global elite or the abusive spiral of forced
prostitution...Where is God? Where are Her people?



What might the new politics' in the UK have to say
about the trade in human beings, and more to the point
what might the 'new' politicians' do? What should we do?

This web site, sponsored by the Methodist Church in
the UK offers ome ideas....One race, the human race
Check out the site and get active....

NEW BOOK ON URBAN THEOLOGY

Check out my new book, 'Voices from the Borderland'
which explores the shape of Urban Theology in
C21....

It's out in August 2010, published by Equinox,
but you can get a sneak preview [and order it too!]
by typing 'Chris Shannahan' into Amazon.co.uk...


http://www.amazon.co.uk

Let me know what you think....

HYBRID URBAN FAITH

In Context

The concept of hybridity refers to the increasingly significant emergence of ‘dialogical identities’ in urban Britain. The 2001 National Census pointed to a growing community of people of dual heritage. In Birmingham 30,000 people defined themselves as dual heritage [3%] and across England and Wales 677,000 people defined themselves in this manner [1.2%]. It is important to set this trend alongside the persistence of raciological debate, the increasing electoral success of the far right British National Party in the early years of the 21st century, critiques of multiculturalism, debates about belonging and the nature of Britishness.

Social hybridity represents a critique of essentialist raciology and fixed patterns of identity. Thus urban youth identities can draw hip-hop music together with Anglicised-Jamaican patois that is infused with Bengali/Punjabi/Urdu vocabulary and ‘New York’ street fashion to give rise to a new hybrid/dialogical identity. Urban popular culture provides a clear illustration of cultural and technological hybridity. Fusion is not new within urban music (see for example Jazz fusion or funk in the 1970s and 1980s). However the fusion of different cultural forms which bring different expressions of diasporan British life into dialogue is more recent. Two examples of such musical hybridity are the Asian Dub Foundation who draw together rap, bhangra, classical Indian music, dub and ragga and the solo artist Nitin Sawhney traditional Indian music, flamenco, Latin rhythms, drum ‘n bass, tabla and techno. Such hybrid urban music exemplifies the challenge which hybridity represents to compartmentalisation.

In Theory

The concept of social hybridity has stimulated increasing debate within social theory and cultural studies. The term is not without problems. It invites parallels to be drawn with its use in botany where different species of plant are fused to create a new hybrid or with the pseudo-scientific raciological taxonomies of the nineteenth century. It suggests that the only future for plural Britain is one in which normative difference leads to fusion and not an evolving dialogue of equals. In spite of this the concept has challenged fixed and binary understandings of identity. The term has been closely associated with Bhabha who speaks of a ‘third space’ within plural societies. This dialogical space critiques notions of cultural isolation or ‘purity’ through its articulation of an in-between location which is characterised by fluidity, uncertainty, dialogue, instability and difference. A hybrid society is one, according to Hall, which is characterised by intimacy and not isolation, fusion and not so called purity. Gilroy observes, ‘From the viewpoint of ethnic absolutism this would be a litany of impurity.’ Baker suggests that the experience and language of hybridity signal an inexorable move away from the binary definitions of modernity towards an increasingly fluid and intermingled urban society. The hybrid third space within urban Britain which is forged in the gaps between fixed communities can be seen as a locus for submerged narratives to emerge. As Baker points out, ‘Within our postmodern culture we now have stories, theories, cultures and urban spaces that are fusions of gender, sexuality and different degrees of mobility as well as race, culture and ethnic identity.’ In his challenge to raciology Gilroy asserts the ethical force of hybridity, suggesting that the ‘…theorisation of creolisation and hybridity…’ can provide the template for liberative identities in the twenty-first century which move beyond essentialism and raciology.



In Theology

Whilst proactive reflection on hybridity has only emerged in recent years within urban theology the related question of syncretism has long been a source of debate as Schreiter notes in relation to the dialogue between indigenous cultures and missionary based Christian preaching on a global scale. During the last decade two British urban theologians have focused reflection the contemporary experience of hybridity in post-colonial Britain. Beckford has sought to forge a dialogue between the black-led church and Rastafarianism, arguing that the concept of ‘dread’ within Rastafari can be placed in a dialogue with understandings of Jesus as liberator to fashion an emancipatory hybrid Christology. Unlike Beckford who has sought to use hybridity and cultural interchange to forge a specifically black Christology, Baker has begun to reflect on the character of hybridity itself as a new and potentially liberative theme within urban life and faith. He speaks of the emergence of a ‘third space’ theology which arises from the dialogical space in contemporary society which is created as a result of the subversion of fixed binary understandings of identity. Hybridity becomes a creative theological category which Baker argues emphasises the creative potential of ‘burred encounter’, inclusive hospitality, dialogue, catholicity, holistic understandings of creation and an ‘...open-ended and fluid Christology.’


Some Key Texts

Chris Baker, The Hybrid Church in the City: Third Space Thinking. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)

Robert Beckford, Dread and Pentecostal: A Political Theology for the Black Church in Britain.
(London: S.P.C.K, 2000)

Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture. (London: Routledge, 1994).

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. (London: Verso, 1993

Paul Gilroy Against Race. (Cambridge Massachusetts, The Belknapp Press, Harvard University, 2000)

Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? Abingdon: Routledge, 2004

Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’ in Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur. ed. Theorising
Diaspora. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003)

Robert Schreiter, Constructing Local Theologies. (Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books, 1985)

Leonie Sandercock, Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities (London: Continuum Press, 2003)

William Temple Foundation

Two imaginative takes on new patterns
of urban theology in the fluid C21 city...

http://www.ashgate.com

Readings of the Bible within dominant theology and theologies of liberation which perpetuate the myth of Christendom in a post-religious context are unlikely to have little impact beyond a declining Christian remnant. Readings of the Bible within dominant theology and theologies of liberation which neglect diversity and implicitly promote theological camp mentality implicitly preserve the hegemony of an excluding political and religious elite. A new urban Biblical hermeneutic is needed which is rooted in a nitty-gritty reading convention where the awkward questions of marginalised urban communities are not avoided, moralised or fenced off behind doctrinal orthodoxy.

This new approach will be underpinned by the insights garnered from reception theories within cultural studies and a reader response model of Biblical hermeneutics, comparable to that utilised by Rowland, Vincent and Davies and Beckford.[i] Writing from a postcolonial perspective Segovia illustrates the dynamic challenge embodied by reader response approaches to the Bible which locate the act of meaning-making, not in text or church, but in the encounter between the reader and scripture. This implies that there can be a range of alternative readings and invites, as Beal notes.[ii] Such fluidity can tend towards relativism unless it is informed by a guiding hermeneutical stance, or reading strategy. However, as Segovia notes, reader response hermeneutics can wrestle the privilege of interpretation away from ‘experts’, instituting a new democracy within Biblical hermeneutics.[iii] Fowler describes this paradigmatic shift, ‘No longer can meaning be understood to be a stable determinate content that lies buried within the text, awaiting excavation… meaning becomes a dynamic event in which we ourselves participate.’[iv]

It is because the act of reading the Bible is potentially a subversive co-operative venture that a political urban Biblical hermeneutic premised upon liberative difference and an option for the oppressed avoids the charge of relativism. In the hands of a conscientised reader the Bible can become a source of liberative reflection and counter hegemonic praxis, not an irrefutable canon of doctrinal orthodoxy as Tamez, Bauckham, Pixley and Clodovis Boff confirm.[v] Through the use of ideological criticism, as Stratton observes, a new and liberative Biblical hermeneutic can arise which interrogates both text and dominant traditions of Biblical criticism on the basis of a careful examination of the nature and location of power and its hegemonic character.[vi] In a diasporan urban context such an approach should be supplemented by an engagement with the counter-hegemonic postcolonial Biblical hermeneutics exemplified by the work of Sugirtharajah.[vii]

On this basis a new urban Biblical hermeneutic will assert a paradigm of insignificance and reversal which is characterised by the counter-hegemonic use of scriptural symbols which, when framed by a hermeneutics of liberative difference, can be brought into a mutual dialogue with emancipatory descriptors of urban life and struggle. This new Biblical paradigm can feed emerging urban communities of faith and resistance which provide the interpretive communities within which this paradigm is articulated.

Within the Gospels Jesus prioritises insignificance as a vehicle for a series of liberative reversals which dubbed the religious and socio-cultural hegemony.

[i] See Davies and Vincent, Mark at Work; Rowland and Vincent, Bible and Practice; Beckford, God and Gangs and Jesus Dub and Chris Rowland in Fernando F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert, ed., Reading from this Place Volume 2: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in Global Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 169-182.
[ii] Timothy Beal, in A.K.M Adam, ed., Handbook of Postmodern Biblical Interpretation (St. Louis, Missouri: Chalice Press, 2000), 128-130.
[iii] Segovia in Segovia and Tolbert, Reading from this Place Volume 2, 7-15.
[iv] Robert Fowler, Let the Reader Understand; Reader-Response Criticism and the Gospel of Mark
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 3. See also 25-26.
[v] Richard Bauckham, The Bible in Politics: How to Read the Bible Politically (London: SPCK, 1989)
142-150; Pixley and Boff, The Bible, the Church and the Poor and Tamez, The Bible of the Oppressed.
[vi] Beverley J. Stratton Beverly, in Adam, Handbook of Postmodern Biblical Interpretation, 120-127.
[vii] See Sugirtharajah, Voices From The Margin and Postcolonial Criticism and Biblical Interpretation, especially 43-70 and 179-200. Sugirtharajah identifies a spectrum of counter-hegemonic postcolonial Biblical readings: Dissident, Resistant, Heritagist, Nationalist, Liberation and Dissentient.

BIRMINGHAM URBAN THEOLOGY FORUM

University of Birmingham
Urban Theology Forum

invites you to share in an afternoon seminar entitled:

SPACES OF RELIGION AND ECONOMY IN

A TIME OF UNCERTAINTY

To be given by

Stephen Willey [Chaplain @ NEC Group]
Gregory Roberts [Postgraduate student, University of Birmingham]
Markus Vinzent [University of Birmingham]

In the John Kydd Room at Elmfield House, University of Birmingham (Selly Oak Campus), Bristol Road, Selly Oak [just opposite Weoley Park Road]


Wednesday 24th June from 2-4.30pm

Please let Martin Stringer (m.d.stringer@bham.ac.uk) or Chris Shannahan (cjshannahan@googlemail.com ) know if you are able to attend.

URBAN THEOLOGY AND COMMUNITY ORGANISING

To Begin:

Broad based community organising in the UK is both old and new. It is old because progressive people of faith and no-faith have for centuries engaged in grassroots action for social justice. It is new because the way we work within Birmingham Citizens only began to emerge 20 years ago when the Citizens Organising Foundation was established. Since its formation in 1989 COF has helped to stimulate the development of broad based organisations like Birmingham Citizens in Liverpool, Bristol, Bradford, North Wales, Sheffield and London. Some of these coalitions remain in close relationship with COF whilst others, like Birmingham Citizens, have begun to develop their own futures from the bottom-up.Based on the work of Saul Alinsky in Chicago during the 1930s and 1940s, broad based organising is a pragmatic model social action which unites disparate groups around shared concerns so that their common efforts can bring about achievable change. This model of united social action has become common in the USA where networks like the Gamaliel Foundation and the Industrial Areas Foundation link literally hundred of local broad based organisations in shared civil action.

In an era where the uniting power of religious institutions, political parties and trades unions has waned dramatically, as the American sociologist Robert Putnam notes, broad based organising offers an alternative grassroots approach for faith and community groups who want to make a difference in public life. Jurgen Habermas describes the ‘public sphere’ as the arena within which civic and democratic values have been expressed by an emerging middle class.[1]

In Britain an increasing majority of people have apparently become disillusioned with this political class. BBO is providing religious groups to find new ways of bringing about progressive change and having an impact on public life. Macleod, Henderson and Salmon suggest that since the establishment of the COF in 1989, Broad Based Organising in Britain has developed to a large degree in isolation from other expressions of community engagement.[2] In spite of an occasional isolationism BBO provides perhaps the most live contemporary example of ‘third estate’ civic activism: not the state acting for people but people acting together for themselves.Much British government policy over the last decade has sought a so-called common public space which revolves round a shared ethic of mutuality, often referred to as social cohesion. BBO operates within this public space but enables religious communities to assert its diversity and multiplicity. Lina Jamoul suggests that although community organising helps different religious groups in the city to work together its focus is not neutral because it is committed to creating a counter-cultural public space where diversity is used to challenge injustice and exclusion.[3] The work of Robert Putnam on the potential of social capital to resource shared action on common issues helps to summarise the approach taken by BBO. Putnam speaks about the way that social networks and relationships within communities can empower local people, build bridges between different groups and resource change.
BBO is an example of bridging social capital in action.

In light of this brief word about the development of BBO in Britain I want to say a little about how community organising works in practice. Why has it appealed to religious groups in cities like Birmingham?One but not the sameWithin the Christian scriptures Saint Paul compares the church to a body: many parts, each with their own function and character, but one body. When one part of the body is hurt the whole body is damaged. The needs of one part of the body impact on the whole body. Each part needs and is in relationship with every other part of the body. This is an image I have often used to describe BBO within the church but I believe it is an image that clearly expresses the way we work in Birmingham Citizens in a language that is transferable across many different communities. In a city where difference is often viewed with defensive suspicion the use of diversity as a source of strength is a sign of hope. In terms of our action the Pauline Body imagery means that where one member group within Birmingham Citizens expresses a need this becomes a challenge for us all. What happens on one side of the city or to one religious or community group happens to us all and it is this philosophy that has helped us to develop a networked model of action for justice.

The pioneer of BBO, Saul Alinsky, emphasised the importance of self interest as a motivation for action. I have to be honest, I think Alinsky was wrong. What motivates the faith groups that are part of Birmingham Citizens is not self interest but shared interests and a common commitment to social justiceEmpowerment and Democratic Action BBO in Britain has grown largely in inner city communities amongst disempowered people. It has been most effective amongst people who feel either disenfranchised or powerless to bring about significant social change because of their relative weakness. In a sense it can be compared to the Civil Rights movement in the U.S.A and examples of ‘people’s power’ across the globe.

Three characteristics of BBO make this empowerment possible:
1: An emphasis on decisions that are made from the ‘bottom-up’ not the ‘top-down’.
2: A clear commitment to making decisions about campaigns together.
3: An understanding of power as relational and relationships as the basis of action.Issues Based and Organised

Whilst BBO stresses the importance of building long-lasting community organisations, rather than short-term social movements it bears a striking similarity to the characteristics that Manuel Castells suggest mark urban social movements: goal/issue oriented, rooted in a specific context, engagement with structures of power, organised and strategic and stimulated by conscientised organisers. Birmingham Citizens has developed a clear, three tier, organisation: action teams [relating to and delivering specific actions], a strategy team [shaping the day-to-day and strategic direction of BC] and a Board of Trustees [taking legal and management responsibility for the organisation]Focus on Common Commitment to Social JusticeWhilst Birmingham Citizens is not explicitly faith based it is true to say that an overwhelming majority of our member organisations are faith groups [churches, mosques, gurdwaras, temples, synagogues]. BBO has emerged in Britain at a point when some argue we have become a post-religious’ or a secular society. This is not an argument I buy fully. Nevertheless in a society where the values of religion are no longer those of the majority of Britons and no longer provide a binding narrative around which people can gather the values and methodology of BBO offer us the tools to build what I want to describe as a ‘post-religious liberation theology’. As a person of faith who is committed to Birmingham Citizens I see in BBO an expression of what I believe to be God’s Bias to the Oppressed and a channel to express my own preferential option for the oppressed.

The Story Moves On: In the summer of 2004 I co-chaired a series of ‘Community Dialogues’ here in Birmingham, drawing together people from across the inner city to identify key pressures on family and community life. It was out of this grassroots consultation that the Citizens ‘Agenda for Social Justice in Birmingham’ emerged. In April 2005 Birmingham Citizens held its founding assembly when 23 faith groups, community organisations, schools and trades unions from across inner city Birmingham became ‘founding members’ of the coalition. Birmingham Citizens challenged the Chief Executive of Birmingham City Council to work in partnership to address the scourge of drug dealing and gang activity in public parks, to address the rising tide of rubbish and rats in parts of the inner city and to work towards the implementation of a ‘Living Wage’ for Birmingham.[4] The Deputy Chief Constable of West Midlands Police was challenged to work with Birmingham Citizens to address the breakdown of relations between the police and sections of the community and to work in partnership to provide improved cultural awareness training for police officers in the city. 700 people watched as these challenges were laid and the force of focused broad-based organised ‘people power’ placed pressure on these key officials to agree to work with this new network for social justice in Birmingham.Four years later we have become a more diverse people’s movement which reaches across most parts of our city and includes Hindus, Sikhs, Jews, Muslims and Christians, as well as a range of community organisations and schools. At a point when stories of religion in public life in the UK often seem to revolve around enclosed identities, ethnic/religious ghettoes, attempts to limit Britishness and the so called ‘war on terror’ Birmingham Citizens offers another picture characterised by:1: Bridge building2: Socially progressive inter-communal politics3: Inclusivity4: Solidarity with marginalised communities5: Commitment to placing religious communities at the heart of public life as agents for justiceFurther Work is Needed: It must be noted, however, that in both London and Birmingham BBO exhibit’s a number of significant weaknesses.

1....BBO has displayed an anti-dialogical character that resists networking with other movements for urban which can be expressed as the dismissal of alternative approaches[5].
2....Whilst asserting egalitarianism the concerns of larger Churches and Mosques and the head offices of the Citizens Organising Foundation in London can appear to outweigh those of smaller faith groups and community organisations.
3....The power analysis within Broad Based Organising presents an outmoded Modernist mode of power relations which takes no account of the transformed nature of power in a Globalised urban age.
4....The amoral pragmatism of the pioneer of Broad Based Organising, Saul Alinsky[6], which relegates value based activism and elevates self-interest conflicts with the philosophical core of faith based liberative praxis in spite of Jacobsen’s suggestion that, “Self-interest honours both the ’self’ and the ’other’ in the relationship.” [7].

The Future:Unless BBO in Britain finds a way of expressing this implied solidarity of the oppressed in terms which engage creatively with the uniting values of the Ummah, or the glocal praxis of catholicity, or the inversion of ‘self-interest’ encased in Jesus’ Beatitudes, or his call to make a ‘journey downwards’, the powerful model of community transformation which Community Organising embodies will fail to realise its potential to exemplify a postmodern and post-religious Urban Theology of. If these significant blind-spots are addressed BBO has the potential to reinvigorate radical action for social justice in urban Britain. The model’s affirmation of ‘Liberative Difference’ and a networked approach which challenges cultural dislocation and creeping ghettoisation and its characterisation of Community Organisers as ’political intellectuals’ represent a creative appropriation of the principles of liberation theology in a post-religious urban context. Consequently, BBO can contribute to the framing of a proactive Urban Theology of and Difference which has the capacity to enable radical transformation on the streets of inner city Britain.

NOTES...

[1] Habermas Jurgen [1989], [transl. Burger Thomas & Lawrence Frederick] ‘The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society’, Cambridge, Massachusetts, M.I.T Press
[2] Macleod Jay [November 1993], ‘Community Organising: A Practical and Theological Appraisal’, in the Journal ’Christian Action’ , London, p7. Henderson Paul & Salmon Harry [1995], ‘Community Organising in the UK Context’, London, CommunityDevelopment Foundation, pp vii
[3] Jamoul Lina [2006], unpublished PhD Thesis [accessed at http://www.londoncitizens.org/ 24.1.2007] ‘The Art of Politics: Broad Based Organising in Britain’, London, Queen Mary University of London, Geography Department, 21
[4] For a summary of the Actions of Birmingham Citizens [2005-2007] see http://.www.birminghamcitizens.org.uk/ .With reference to the ‘Living Wage’ campaign see: Birmingham Citizens & The Community Union [October 2005], ‘A Living Wage? Mapping Low Pay in Birmingham’, Birmingham, Birmingham Citizens & The Community Union
[5] Henderson Paul & Salmon Harry [1995], op. cit., pvii and Macleod Jay [November 1993], op. cit., 7
[6] Alinsky Saul [1971], ‘Of Means and Ends’ in ‘Rules for Radicals’ , quoted in Cox Fred, Erlich John, Rothman Jack & Tropman John [1974], ‘Strategies of Community Organisation: A Book of Readings’, Illinois, F.E Peacock Publishers, 198 & 200.: Alinsky: “Life and how you live it is the story of means and ends….The man of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms….Ethical standards must be elastic to stretch with the times.”
[7] Jacobsen Dennis [2001], op. cit., 51

DOING BLURRED URBAN THEOLOGY

METROPOLITAN THEOLOGY

1. Arises from engagement with multipolar metropolitan life.
2. Is committed to action/research [action/reflection]
3. Views difference as a defining text for theological reflection
4. Is translocal, holding the global and the local experiences of city life in dialogue
5. Reflects the fluidity of metropolitan life
6. Is inter-cultural and inter/intra-faith and explores the transformative capacity of a ‘cultural politics of difference’.
7. Takes place in the ‘Third Space’ between fixed positions/perspectives and identities
8. Is committed to those on the underside/outside of metropolitan life
9. Is postmodern and post-Christendom
10. Engages with the existential questioning of ‘post-religious’ metropolitan generations
11. Adopts a non-confessional ‘nitty-gritty’ hermeneutical stance.
12. Dubs metropolitan realities on the basis of a core commitment to an ethic of liberative difference
13. Is inherently and necessarily interdisciplinary
14. Acknowledges but moves beyond the reductionism and camp mentality of contemporary urban theologies

URBAN THEOLOGY IN Y2K

Urban theology is a contextual theology which emerges from intimate engagement with the multiple processes which shape urban Britain. It is a public theology; ushering faith from the wings of society to the centre of the public realm; a practical political theology beginning with experience and ending with transformative action. It is tempting to pretend that it is possible to re-package the class-based reflection of the Thatcher years. Such myopia freezes urban theology in time. Fluid urban Britain demands a fluid interdisciplinary urban theology which grapples in increasing depth with the following themes:

The multipolar nature of globalisation.
The experience of global forces in local communities (glocalisation).
The increasingly complexity and fluidity of inner city communities.
The multiple nature of oppression.
Persistent raciology, identity and difference as the defining terrain for urban theology.
New configurations of city-space, inequality and conflict.
Emerging patterns of networked and fluid patterns of urban resistance.
The post-religious and postmodern nature of urban society.
The significance of urban popular culture as a vehicle for negotiating meaning and truth.

How do current models of urban theology match up?