What is in Kelvin's Head?

Scottish Shia Community shows us how to do interfaith work

31/07/2015

It was a great honour and privilege last night to be a guest of the Scottish Shia community at an Eid meal to celebrate the end of Ramadan. The photograph shows me with Sayed Ali Abbas Razawi, the Director General of the Scottish Ahlul Bayt Society.

There are many reasons why we need to have interfaith meetings and many ways of doing it. Last night, the Shia community in Scotland offered us a wonderfully relaxed and easy way to go to engage with one another – they took us out for a meal. Well, it was more of a banquet than a meal, in the Village Curry House in Tradeston which served us splendid food.

The good thing about eating over a meal is that you can dip in and out of conversations – mixing chatter about where people are going on holiday with theological questions and all the while you are learning about each others traditions. As I hear the Shia people talk about the universal search for justice that they are engaged in, inspired by Imam Hussein, there are obvious connections to be made with the work for human rights and human dignity that Christians and other people of goodwill are engaged in.

And so we found ourselves chatting away about how Muslims and Christians think of John the Baptist, how we think about Middle East politics, the Usual Topic (human sexuality) and the interesting ways that people are arguing about it within our communities. And we talked about Scotland too – how it is changing and how we are changing in it. There were folk there from different parts of Scottish society – charities like Breast Cancer research and Alzheimers Scotland who are helped by the Shia community and services like the Fire Service and Blood Transfusion Service and there was an MSP representing the Scottish Government. Bishop Idris was representing the Trades House of Glasgow and there were loads of us from the Christian communities in Scotland – the Moderator of the General Assembly and the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Glasgow were tucking into the curry and naan with the rest of us.

I’m interested that sometimes these days the Christians meet best whilst engaging in conversation with people outwith Christianity. Ecumenism often doesn’t seem very exciting but Interfaith work sometimes makes it happen in a new and relaxed way that you don’t see coming. Last night, it was Muslims who brought the Christians together and that’s worth thinking about a very great deal.

So – thank you to the people who honoured us with their invitation last night. It was a wonderful example of religious generosity and a time when all kinds of relationships could be built.

7 responses to “The Archbishop, the gays and their sins”

fakepete

25/02/2015

Nicely put, he seems to feel entitled to freedom from criticism. It’s a censorious attitude that I thought the CoE put behind it when most of us learned to laugh at the Life of Brian and it is contradicted by the church’s own call to participation in democracy.

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Andrew

25/02/2015

The poor old Arch. He really is an old school establishment man who cant really understand where the deference has gone. The Green Report, the other Reports on the ‘future’ of the Church of England and the ‘Conversations’ all speak of a deeply controlling man who is deeply frustrated that there is no control to be had any more. When the split comes he will probably want to make what is left into a more confessional and defined group (the evangelicals have always wanted that) but I suspect the Church that will emerge will be more liberal than he likes even if it is outwardly more evangelical and enthusiast than the Church of England has been for a very long time

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1. fakepete
  
  27/02/2015
  
  @Andrew I’d switch that around. Justin Welby is someone who does not show deference to what has in Western society become The New Orthodoxy (definitions on a postcard please), this is why he provokes such puzzlement, and thus consternation and anger.
  
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2. Daniel Berry, NYC
  
  03/03/2015
  
  Andrew, I don’t see how that can be, really: he hasn’t the pedigree to be “an old school establishment man.” He’s a late vocation who had been a high-power figure in the corporate world–meaning he’s undoubtedly accustomed to having the last word.
  
  As to his attitudes toward gay people, I’m disgusted with him and the many others who accept the natural sciences’ contradiction of bible, but just can’t bring themselves to the same place with the behavioral and social sciences, and even with medicine itself–ignoring along the way that homosexuality is found in upward of 450 animal species besides our own. Otherwise they seem perfectly comfortable with dispensing with the savagery found in much of “holy scripture.”
  
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Dharma Nicodemus Cuthbert

26/02/2015

I love the line “who am I to judge them for their sins, if they have sins” makes us seem angelic compared to those who have children. Only one problem we, according to the bible commit sin just by being together. Does this mean that he is disagreeing with orthodoxy, and we are not sinning by being together.
God bless all and may his words of love bring more, troubled, souls to him.

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1. JCF
  
  28/02/2015
  
  “Only one problem we, according to the bible commit sin just by being together.”
  
  I *think* you meant “according to false translations/interpretations of the bible…” (or should have meant).
  
  “Being together”: can we call sex, “sex”? If not, why not? [And can we call marital sex (same- or opposite-sex) “marital sex”?]
  
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Daniel Berry, NYC

03/03/2015

best line for me:

You say that stuff and you are going to get people observing that there’s a lot more archbishops who claim that gay people are their friends than gay people who claim archbishops are their friends.

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