It was a postcard image of a mosaic Jesuit Father Marko Rupnik created.

She couldn't bear to have it up.

Rupnik is a remarkably gifted artist.

His mosaics adorn chapels and buildings from the St John Paul II National Shrine in Washington to the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary in Lourdes, France. And until now, our living room wall.

Rupnik stands "accused of spiritual, psychological or sexual abuse by multiple adult women over the course of almost 40 years," according to a report by Paulina Guzik at OSV News.

Many of the cases involved women under his spiritual direction.

Three years ago, he was even briefly excommunicated for granting absolution to a consecrated woman with whom he had sex, though the excommunication was lifted when he confessed and repented.

This week, we learned that Rupnik was expelled from the Society of Jesus on June 9 "due to stubborn refusal to observe the vow of obedience."

The allegations are so serious that the bishop responsible for the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, which includes the basilica, has appointed a reflection group to consider whether the towering mosaics installed on the facade of the lower basilica in 2008 should be removed.

A few months ago, I visited the Lourdes for the first time, and when I saw the mosaics, I groaned out loud.

Rupnik's style is immediately recognizable, and my first thought was that the art would forever be tainted by his crimes.

Certainly, for anyone who was abused by Father Rupnik, but also by people who other priests or religious leaders had abused, the art would never be just art.

What is the proper response when our heroes, our leaders, and our artists, let us down?

Picasso was a misogynistic creep who drove lovers to suicide.

How do we look at his painting "Guernica" now?

Woody Allen abandoned Mia Farrow for her 21-year-old daughter.

How do we look at his film "Manhattan"?

What about Roman Polanski? Jean Vanier? Bill Cosby? Theodore McCarrick? Marcial Maciel? Michael Jackson?

In the age of #Metoo and tell-all bios, we have grown adept at manoeuvring around the moral disasters of famous lives, but it is far less easy when the scandals involve someone we admired, perhaps even revered. Continue reading

It does not imply that God is nowhere outside the Church, Anglican priest and theologian Professor Nigel Biggar said in discussion with The Tablet in Dublin about the divine commission and colonialism.

Biggar is the emeritus Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford. He made the comment when he was in Dublin to deliver a talk on coping with the past and lessons from colonialism and cancel culture.

"God is outside the Church," Biggar said.

He pointed out that the New Testament makes it clear that the Holy Spirit is not confined to the Church.

"The Holy Spirit is out there in the world. The world is God's world and God was there first."

He said the Christian gospel is relevant to people of other faiths.

"First of all it can illuminate things that people already intuit but are not quite sure of. Sometimes it does result in a radical change as well as a kind of clarification."

He dismissed the assumption that "Christian missionaries were the lackeys of empire" and were "complicit in the abuses of colonial rule."

Colonial rule was not always abusive, he said.

Colonial officials, on the whole, did not want missionaries in the colonies, he explained.

He went on to cite the East India Company's ban on missionaries in India until the early part of the 19th century.

"It is often the case, whether, in New Zealand or Canada, missionaries were among humanitarians who lobbied the imperial Government to stop abuses."

Cancel culture

In relation to the so-called 'cancel culture', Biggar said those who cancel do so "because they can't answer."

He asked why management in publishing houses and universities are "so willing to indulge the illiberal clamouring of woke junior members.

"It is fine for young colleagues or any colleagues to have progressive opinions. But I don't quite understand why the adults in some publishing houses or universities yield so readily," he said.

He blamed European post-modernist philosophies for encouraging people to regard all hierarchies and all social orders as "designed to entrench oppressive power" and which must be uprooted "by whatever means possible."

Source

• The Tablet

His works are no longer relevant to the younger generations.

Admittedly he was a genius. But this genius is slowly going out of fashion, and he could also be subjected to questions.

Woke culture is coming. Universal contrition is scheduled.

Colonial Picasso! Patriarchal Picasso! White male Picasso!

As we are rewriting Roald Dahl's novels, what should be done with Picasso's paintings?

• Should we take them down because he behaved badly with his muses?
• Should we hide his iconic lithographs of the corrida, the traditional Spanish bullfight, to comply with the demands of animal rights advocates?
• Should we denounce the artist's "cultural appropriation" and his insensitivity to the suffering of the colonized?
• Will his collection of African masks be returned?

These questions might have seemed absurd at one time. Not anymore.

In fact, the Picasso Museum in Paris, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, has taken them seriously, although without ever saying so.

The answer given by Cécile Debray, the director of the Parisian institution, is very clever.

Contrary to what the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam did with poor old Rembrandt and some others Dutch masters, one will not find in her museum those edifying cartels that the deacons and abbesses of woke establishment hasten to pin up everywhere.

Debray first added a touch of fashion by entrusting Sir Paul Smith with a dressing up of her permanent collections.

The British stylist did it with a mixture of energy, vivacity, and humility.

Rather than trying to show off, he took the option of paraphrasing the works, copying and multiplying the motifs, here the checks of a harlequin, there stripes ...

It's a success. Packaging makes the buzz.

A new public is coming. And while we are talking about the decoration, well, we just forget fighting cultural wars.

Well done, right?

Beautiful, efficient, impeccable.

A model approach that could inspire others

Questions of gender or identity remain.

But while any question that haunts its time is by nature legitimate, it's usually the answers that lack consistency.

The reopening of the French museum coincides with a very contemporary but absolutely magnificent exhibition dedicated to American artist Faith Ringgold (New York, 1930).

The retrospective is entitled "Black is Beautiful", which has been translated in French, rather significantly, as "Being a black person is beautiful".

Ringgold, a feminist and civil rights activist, is a great artist.

She is perfectly at home with Picasso.

The Afro-American painter and sculptor dialogues with the Spanish-French artist of "Guernica" and "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon".

The museum has hung some other works among the permanent collections, dealing mostly with postcolonialism, to complement the Picasso's art.

Chéri Samba, born in 1956, Obi Okigbo (1964) and Mickalene Thomas (1971), engage in an admiring dialogue with Picasso.

Borrowing from the great borrower that Picasso was is more fruitful than claiming to correct or trying to cancel. And now the giant looks more contemporary, less "old 20th century".

Faith Ringgold, like Picasso, also "borrowed": from European painting, Tibetan tankas, popular art... Art is a perpetual dialogue.

What is taken does not take anything away, it's always an addition. Masterpieces are mirrors in which we look at ourselves. Our questions may not be those that the artist asked himself.

The Picasso Museum's approach is a model of its kind and could inspire many cultural institutions, exhibition curators and publishers.

Art and literature must not be put under a bell or subjected to a hypocritical mea culpa.

Questioning, shifting, and bringing them together can sharpen the critical mind.

Seeing the Picasso Museum full of teenagers of various identities and young adults, on an ordinary afternoon, was comforting. Betting on intelligence does works.

• Jean-Pierre Denis is a columnist and writer based in Paris. After a long tenure as editor-in-chief of one the leading French Catholic magazines, he is now the publisher of La Croix's international publications.
• First published in La Croix International. Republished with permission.

An outcry by conservatives and the Vatican led the U-turn on the policy, which termed the document an attempt to "cancel" Europe's Christian roots.

The EU Commissioner for Equality, Helena Dalli, said the draft guidelines had aimed to highlight European diversity and showcase the "inclusive nature of the European Commission."

The draft didn't meet Commission standards and failed to achieve its stated purpose, she said.

Commenting that "The guidelines clearly need more work," Dalli said the next version would take into account concerns that had been raised.

These concerns included Italian conservatives saying the guidelines were "cancelling Christmas".

Another voice raised against the EU guidelines was that of the Vatican's secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin.

He made his views known with an unusually sharp critique in a video Tuesday on the Vatican News portal.

While he lauded efforts to eradicate discrimination in the EU bloc, Parolin said initiatives can't involve the "cancellation of our roots, the Christian dimension of our Europe, especially with regard to Christian festivals.

"Of course, we know that Europe owes its existence and its identity to many influences, but we certainly cannot forget that one of the main influences, if not the main one, was Christianity itself," he said.

Antonio Tajani of Italy's center-right Forza Italia party and the president of the constitutional affairs commission of the European Parliament was delighted at the retraction of the EU guidelines.

"Viva Natale!" ("Long live Christmas!"), Tajani tweeted.

"Long live a Europe of common sense."

Source

• AP News
• Image:Paris Discovery Guide
  

In 2005, his research for the BBC's Newsnight identified the young David Cameron's appeal to the public as a potential Conservative leader.

The following year, the Connecticut-born consultant sent a wave of turbulence coursing through the Labour conference in Manchester with his claim — again, based on focus groups — that the then-home secretary, John Reid, would be a more popular successor to Tony Blair than Gordon Brown.

Though he no longer describes himself as a Republican, Luntz's influence upon that party's presentation and image at every level of American politics has been so great over the years that he features as a character in Adam McKay's film about Dick Cheney, Vice.

All of which is to say: his work is worth heeding.

Frank Luntz

In a survey for the Centre for Policy Studies think-tank published this week, based on 3,000 interviews, Luntz concludes that "wokeism" is set to become the most significant dividing line in British politics.

Indeed, more striking than North versus South, London versus the rest of the UK, or young versus old — on course, depressingly, to match the culture wars that have long afflicted the US.

For instance: a third of Labour voters already support the "cancellation" of people who hold views with which they disagree.

No less strikingly, 52 per cent of them believe that "the UK is an institutionally racist and discriminatory nation".

On the Conservative side, that conviction is shared by only 19 per cent, compared with 81 per cent who still believe that this is a country of "equality and freedom".

Among all voters, the trend is clear — 40 per cent believe that cancel culture enforces a "thought and speech police" that has the potential to wreck lives — though 25 per cent think it is right that those who infringe modern speech codes should "face the consequences".

More than half of adults under 30 say they have indeed cancelled someone — ceased communication with them — because of their opinions.

"The problem with woke and with cancel culture is that it is never done. The conflict and divisions never end," Luntz said.

"This is not what the people of the UK want — but it's coming anyway."

This should be no real surprise to Londoners.

We have watched as London's Mayor, Sadiq Khan, has been engulfed by ugly attacks on his ethnicity, religion, and identity — becoming, as he put it in May, a reluctant "poster boy" for the new culture wars.

And we have watched as London's schools, colleges and publishing houses have been swept by bitter and often fatuous rows over who gets to say what about whom, and what constitutes acceptable speech in 2021.

Luntz's point is that this trend is as regrettable as it is strong — and, in this respect, he is right.

So much good has already come from the new social justice movements: from the #MeToo campaign, via the simple assertion that Black Lives Matter, to the increasing recognition that gender diversity is a feature of the 21st-century social landscape.

In the global protests after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, there was a collective determination that the battle against racial and social injustice should be accelerated.

All too quickly, however, that resolve mostly dissipated into noisy but inconsequential arguments about statues, the propriety of taking the knee, the allegedly offensive names of schools and streets, even the work that art gallery shops should stock.

Such rows are deeply divisive — but lead nowhere. They do not improve the lives of the disenfranchised or the disempowered by a jot. Continue reading

The inscription translates as "I shall destroy the wisdom of the wise".

Who were the wise?

The wise were scientists and philosophers who thought that knowledge could be acquired through observation of phenomena, engaging in inductive reasoning to make general statements about the phenomena, and then moving through to increasing higher levels of generality to form what we now call theories.

From theories testable hypotheses could be derived which the "wise" would seek to falsify or disprove in experiments.

Hypotheses not falsified (disproven) added to the credibility of the theory (or modified it in certain ways).

This became "the scientific method" and its application has helped all branches of science to progress.

Aquinas knew this was wrong; the church said so and taught so.

Knowledge did not come from reasoning; it came from God. And God said that the sun went around the Earth whatever the observations of "scientists" might say to the contrary. They were blasphemers and heretics, people whose views had to be expunged from society lest they corrupt more people.

Fortunately, we don't accept Aquinas's theory of knowledge anymore (nor his cosmology).

However, since at least the 1930s we have seen much pseudo-science; findings that seem to have the trappings of genuine inquiry but on close examination are not fully in accordance with the principles of the scientific method.

The late Professor Sir Karl Popper assailed the propagators of such work as perverting science and thought their aims were ideological, not scientific.

He reserved particular contempt for Marxists and their fellow travellers who wanted to use science for propaganda, not for education or learning, or to promote freedom (see The Open Society and its Enemies).

Misuse of science and intellectual falsehoods in the name of "truth" and "for the greater good" undermined democratic values and open debate, he argued.

These days there is a lot of "this is the official line, which shall not be questioned, and is indeed unquestionable because the science is settled". For ‘‘science'' equally read ‘'history" or ‘'truth''.

I don't think that nutters and people who are plainly wrong should be allowed free rein to peddle complete nonsense which could alarm the public, but I am not sure I want to be overly vigorous about stamping out their views. Continue reading

• John Bishop is an experienced journalist across all media, business, economics, politics features, and profiles. He also has an interest in travel and writes at www.eatdrinktravel.co.nz

We are exposed more now than ever to arguments, claims and accusations of fault.

More, even, than the issue at hand is the question of who's at fault.

No-one is immune.

No matter what the extenuating circumstances may have been; no matter how irresponsible the complainant may have been; no matter how little real proof has been offered — the race to apportion fault is almost universal.

In the most tawdry of social media posts, in the only slightly less tawdry tabloids and the weeklies, in television and certainly in radio, the newspapers and even well-regarded industry magazines it seems that apportioning fault is key.

It appears that so long as we can identify someone who is at fault then justice is seen to be done, and so the matter will be addressed.

Fault can be attached to individuals, classes of individuals, nations, races, genders, clubs, companies and families.

So long as someone is to blame, we seem to feel better about it.

I notice two outcomes of this assumption in general society.

Firstly, the "public square" has become even more empty than it was before.

Simply no-one, even corporates, wants to put their heads above the parapet in order to comment on something even remotely controversial.

The viciousness of the fault-finders is just too intimidating for the public to use the public square.

As G. K. Chesterton once said "We do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press."

Secondly, the quality of public debate has diminished markedly.

Short of pointing the finger at the next sorry victim who must shoulder the blame, we seldom see a debate rise to the level of a gracious exchange of views, where different perspectives are given the dignity of having equal merit.

Debate has gone.

What we engage in is a shouting match from the outset.

Frankly, we are better than this and unless we move to change the nature of our public discourse, we will find ourselves not just less able to conduct ourselves intelligently but also far more open to believing the very worst view simply because it has been repeated most and with the greatest tone of complaint.

Hate speech laws will, I believe, only make this worse because they will provide a greater target for complaint against anyone whose views are not widely accepted in society.

This is very dangerous ground.

Jesus had a number of things to say about our speech which bring light to this issue.

The first is that by our words we build our world. Continue reading

• Richard Dawson is the Presbyterian minister at Leith Valley Church in the north end of Dunedin. He has been Moderator of the Presbyterian Church and at present leads the Combined Dunedin Churches Pastor's Community.

These days, many media outlets are talking only to segments of the population.

For the New Zealand media, 2021 has been a year of cancellations.

Finance minister Grant Robertson cancelled his weekly MagicTalk interview slot with Peter Williams. Presenter Sean Plunket left the station before there was a chance to cancel him.

Recently, the Herald cancelled historian and former Labour cabinet minister Michael Bassett after publishing (and unpublishing) a column of his. And finally, the Prime Minister cancelled her weekly interview slot with Newstalk's Mike Hosking.

Each incident is different, yet they all point to ongoing political polarisation.

You do not have to agree with Williams, Plunket, Bassett or Hosking to know that many New Zealanders do. That is why Mike Hosking reaches a large segment of society with his morning show.

Hosking's audience will now miss out on the weekly interview with the Prime Minister. That is a pity for them and for Hosking.

But the greater damage is that this cancellitis creates more echo chambers in our media.

Where politicians only speak to audiences close to them, there will be no tough questions, no hard talk and little to learn. And where journalists only interview politicians they like, they are in danger of becoming acolytes.

It gets worse. As a growing segment of online and print news is now serving left-of-centre audiences, this leaves a diverse group to their right homeless.

Yes, these groups could still listen to Hosking. They could also resort to reading international newspapers like The Times, The Australian or the Wall Street Journal. But they would struggle to find similar written content here.

According to the mediabias.co.nz research project, all mainstream media outlets in New Zealand show a left-wing bias. Continue reading

• Dr Oliver Hartwich is the Executive Director of the New Zealand Initiative

I should know; I'm one of those fans. "Buffy" is still my favorite show after all these years.

Just to show my nerd cred:

• I served a term on the editorial board for the academic journal Slayage: The Journal of Buffy Studies, which was later renamed to Whedon Studies, and maybe renamed again to rid itself of the association with Whedon.
• I presented a paper at the first-ever national conference of Whedonverse scholars. (My husband even played the piano for our huge group singalong of the "Buffy" musical episode.)
• I published a book about the vampire slayer as a spiritual guide, poring over every episode and analyzing the show's religious themes.

So yeah, I guess you could say I am a fan.

It's acutely painful anytime you realize someone you have admired has hurt people, especially when the particular ways in which that person has visited destruction on other human beings seem so ironic, so antithetical to that person's own values.

Like Whedon, who taught a whole generation about female empowerment, objectifying women and systematically disempowering women in the workplace (and, apparently, in his marriage). Or like J.K. Rowling, who brought us beautiful stories about the evils of racism and about a wise gay father figure in Albus Dumbledore, coming under fire for not extending her famous progressive stances to include transgender women.

People are complicated. Very, very complicated.

But our cultural response is not.

In fact, it has become devastatingly simple: cancel.

Burn it all down.

Whatever beauty or wisdom the now-tarnished individual has contributed to the world must be expunged, gone forever because we're tainted if we so much as look at it, let alone honor any goodness abiding there.

I find this a problematic response, though an understandable and human one.

It keeps things simple.

It keeps us from having to do the hard work of ferreting out what is still life-giving about a cultural touchstone from whatever mess its creator has also created.

When we cancel culture, we like to believe we're standing in solidarity with the people the creator has harmed, and some of us are.

Others of us are just abiding with a herd mentality, an all-or-nothing response that switches us from idolizing a creator to demonizing him or her, all overnight. It's just easier that way.

As a Christian, I've found guidance about cancel culture from a source both unexpected and zero percent surprising: the Bible.

You see, as I was thinking about cancel culture earlier this month, I had also just read Kristin Swenson's new book from Oxford, "A Most Peculiar Book: The Inherent Strangeness of the Bible."

One of the things that didn't make it into my published interview with her was her nuanced discussion of "Good People Behaving Badly" in the Bible, which was, basically, every single character except for Jesus.

Like David, who was revered as the ancestor of the Messiah and the greatest king of the Bible's history, who committed adultery (and possibly rape) with Bathsheba and then arranged for the subsequent murder of her husband.

Oh, and when one of David's sons rapes one of David's daughters, King David gives him a pass.

Or Sarah, the mother of the nation of Israel, known in the Bible for her joy when she learned, at an advanced age, that she was going to become a mother.

This is the same Sarah who condemned her slave Hagar to die, along with Hagar's small son Ishmael, by banishing them to starve in the wilderness in the cruelest of ways. She was not exactly Mother of the Year material.

And then there's Jonah, honored as a prophet of God, who brought a message of repentance to Ninevah, but only after he had fled from all responsibility and done everything he could to reject God's call.

And then when Jonah finally does make it to Ninevah, he offers a lackluster rendition of what God wanted him to say (as Swenson notes, it's the "least persuasive bit of preaching" in all of the biblical prophets) and is ticked off when it actually works and the people repent. He wanted them to die, because that's what he thought they deserved.

What does the Bible do with these rather horrible people?

Well, it's interesting.

And it's mixed.

The David story, in particular, gets two very different kinds of treatment in the Bible — the warts-and-all story we find in 2 Samuel, and the utterly sanitized version of those same years in Chronicles, with all of the unsavory bits gone.

If we only had the Chronicler's account, we would all think the sun shone directly out of David's arse.

But the Bible, wisely, preserves both versions.

Swenson told me that in writing her book about how strange the Bible is, she wanted to correct some believers' tendency to look at only a fraction of the Bible and wield it as a weapon.

But she also wanted to correct what she sees happening on the other side, in which nonbelievers see all the revolting things the Bible seems to countenance (slavery, rape, misogyny, racism and genocide, to name a few) and reject the entire book as worthless.

It's all there, and we have to learn to read it like grown-ups, rejecting what is evil and holding fast to what is good.

To only see the happy or loving aspects of the Bible is to embrace a fallacy, one the Bible itself wants to dispel.

And to only see the negative, canceling anything good because it sits cheek by jowl alongside things we know to be wrong, is just a fallacy of a different kind.

Our job is to call out injustice, and also to celebrate what is good — even when, especially when, they appear inextricable.

So I won't be torching my Harry Potter books or throwing my Buffy DVDs on a bonfire. I'd have to throw my Bible to the flames as well.

• Jana Riess is a senior columnist at RNS and the author of many books. First published in RNS. Reproduced with permission.