A wise friend recently sent me this link to a must-read column from Britain's Daily Mail. While columnist Melanie Phillips defends Christianity specifically, her larger message underscores the critical need to build understanding between faith and culture, which is the Centre for Cultural Renewal's primary mission. Let me know what you think of Ms. Phillips' arguments.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1235638/MELANIE-PHILLIPS-Just-Archbishop-right-Treating-Christians-cranks-act-cultural-suicide.html#

Adam Daifallah raised some excellent points in a National Post column last week arguing against increasing trivialization of the word “friend” in our era of faceless Facebook friendship.

Yet an even stronger argument was made only days earlier – and on Parliament Hill of all places - for giving friendship a much broader definition than our already loose definitions allow.

At the Centre for Cultural Renewal’s annual Hill Lecture on November 24, political theorist Dr. Leah Bradshaw argued eloquently that we must extend the bond of friendship to every Canadian citizen, not limit it to those with whom we are old school chums.  

Bradshaw, a professor at Brock University, warned that unless such an ideal of friendship fully informs our concept of citizenship, Canadian society will be little more than an assembly of defensive posturing among strangers.

And, no, her contention does not originate in the luminations of Oprah or Chopra or other exponents of what Daifallah rightly scorns as our “feelings-based” culture. Its source is Aristotle.

“What sustains a political community is friendship, and Aristotle claims that although citizens can never be intimate friends, they ought to understand their common bond in reference to the ties of friendship,” Bradshaw said.

 “(O)ne does not build a polis, or the relations of trust that ‘ruling and being ruled’ require, without a commitment on the part of citizens that they will shield and nurture one another.”

 In other words, while there is a distinction between civic friendship and personal friendship, the difference is one of degree, not kind. We do not share the intimacies with public friends that we do with private friends. Yet the two types of friendship share a common purpose. They both seek to create in the world around us the generous familiarity that is the source of benevolent sustenance.

Sustenance. Not just physical or economic protection. One protects one’s queen in a game of chess but even that most valuable piece is ultimately expendable. Friendship, civic or private, belongs to the realm of sustaining virtues, not to the world of values trade-offs.

Or as Bradshaw said: “Who is a friend? A friend is someone for whom one cares as one cares for oneself. True friends, according to Aristotle, have no need for justice between them because their bond transcends the legalistic terms of justice. They have affection for one another… One does not feel the same way toward one’s friend, or one’s fellow citizen, as one does toward a stranger.”

 In concrete terms, we must contribute to public goods and sustain public institutions (e.g., hospitals, schools, means of transport) in the same spirit of friendship for our fellow citizens that we would extend to our private friends in their time of need.

“Citizenship requires a movement out of one’s private considerations into a sphere shared with other citizens, and the fluidity to move back into the private.”

This balanced conjunction of the public and private is crucial if only to clearly distinguish between what Bradshaw seeks and the discredited egalitarian compulsions of socialism. As a bonus, her argument is so redolent of High Toryism as to send Canadian libertarians looking for the exits. (It's never a bad thing to keep libertarians on their toes. It keeps them from sliding into confusing liberty and complacency.)

Yet even the staunchest devotee of Ayn Rand individualism might allow himself or herself pause for an ideological reset at the teleological twist that Bradshaw’s thinking permits.

The transformation of friendship into the essence of citizenship, she maintained, has as its end not just communities that are more virtuous, but true knowledge of ourselves as individuals. 

The friendship of our fellow citizens completes us as human beings by letting us see ourselves from the outside perspective, i.e., through the eyes of others.        

Quoting the University of Lethbridge political theorist John Von Heyking, Bradshaw said: “Friendship is the expression of the human intellect whose nature is to identify with the known. In seeking to know, we also seek to be known.”

Identifying with the known, of course, requires differentiating friend from stranger. It means loving our own, and necessarily risks excluding those who do not, or will not, belong to us.

But the beauty of Canada as an open, diverse, democratic and friendly society resides precisely in the freedom we offer strangers to share what we know as our own.  What we must require is that they join us in the bond of citizenship by seeking to be known, by arriving in the name of friendship defined as broadly as the word will allow.

If you haven't seen this, it's worth checking out this link. A brilliant mind takes on Hitchens, Dawkins et al.

www.mercatornet.com/demography/view/europeans_too_selfish_to_have_children_says_chief_rabbi/  

I sometimes wonder whether what has been called the trouble with Islam isn’t more often trouble with reporters not taking the trouble to think about what they write concerning Islam.

In my morning newspaper, for example, I read a report reprinted from the Washington Post that seeks to shed light on last week’s killings at Fort Hood military base.

 The report suggests that accused mass murderer Major Nidal Hasan was a deeply troubled “conscientious objector” driven over the edge by the prospect of being shipped out to kill fellow Muslims in Afghanistan.

Intriguingly, a separate report on a facing page says Hasan’s colleagues feared he was psychotic and openly discussed whether he might, in fact, do what he is alleged to have done: open fire randomly on personnel at the Texas base.

The colleagues apparently didn’t act on their fears because they had an even greater fear of being accused of discrimination on the basis of Hasan’s Muslim identity.

Such inaction had horrifying consequences, of course. But potentially as troubling in the longer term is the media’s lack of discrimination (in the proper sense of that word) vis-à-vis the idea that the Fort Hood killings were motivated by the killer’s Islamic conscience.

Or as Washington Post reporter Michelle Boorstein posed it: “Among Muslims, the questions can be more profound: How can a Muslim participate in killing other Muslims in such places as Iraq and Afghanistan?”

Profound? The question might be understandable coming from someone who was raised in a cave by bears and has never seen a smoke signal, much less had access to contemporary media,

From anyone with the basic technical capacity to switch on the wireless and listen to a newscast at any time in the past, oh, 20 years, the question is piece of non-historical nonsense.

To have it posed by a reporter who actually works in the industry that has grown fat in part by detailing internecine slaughter in the Muslim world, is insulting to the intelligence of the audience and a grotesque slur against Islam itself.

The audience is asked to accept, and requires Muslims themselves acquiesce to, the ridiculous mythology that followers of Islam around the globe march together in a kind of zombie lockstep, a monolithic mass intrinsically differentiated from, indeed isolated from, the rest of human kind.

Last week, as it happens the day before the killings at Fort Hood, I was on a panel in Calgary that included a chap named Mahfooz Kanwar, a sociology professor at Mount Royal University who pointed out that there are, in fact, at least 72 variants of Islam around the world.

Dr. Kanwar himself is in the midst of a micro-version of that splintering of the faith since he is apparently in a quite vigorous war of words with some of Calgary’s Islamic leaders and has, he says, been pointedly told that as an “infidel” he is not welcome at local mosques.

There is nothing unique to Islam about that, of course. For centuries, Christianity has had more splinters than a wooden fence on a hot day. Even Buddhism, which by its nature seeks nothing, has its sects and separations.  As for Judaism, what is the old saying about three Jews and an empty room being all that’s required for an infinite argument?

Why then do we reflexively accept the absurd stereotype of Islam as a unitary entity and all Muslims as some kind of superhuman beings who never dispute, disagree and, yes, at times inflict violence on each other?

At a purely journalistic level, how could a reporter at a globally respected newspaper such as the Washington Post print her “profound” question about Muslims being unable to kill other Muslims without someone on the copy desk shouting “Baghdad car bombings” or “Islamabad massacre” or any of the thousands of recent examples of Muslim killing Muslim. (Again, nothing uniquely Islamic there. See: Northern Ireland. See: the Balkans. See: Rwanda. See: human history)

If I were a follower of Islam I would be deeply troubled by that neglect. I would be troubled at the thought that an apparent lone psychotic was being presented as representing my conscience. I would be troubled at the thought that reporters reporting on my faith are happy to lazily pass off non sequiturs as examples of its profundity. I would be troubled, most of all, at the assumption that the trouble is with Islam and not those unwilling to ask basic questions about it.

THE CENTRE GETS TO WORK! 

To paraphrase Mark Twain’s comment about the weather, everybody talks about work but nobody does anything about it. That’s why it was so engaging to spend an evening this week with someone whose life is dedicated to making work, well, work. Bernhard Scholz is president of an Italian-based, global organization called The Company of Works that provides everything from financial advising to leadership training for about 35,000 small and medium-sized businesses around the world.

Originally from the ancient German university city of Freiburg, Scholz has lived in Milan for the past decade and travels widely speaking, teaching and, most importantly, holding conversations about how work can be returned to its real purpose: “…the expression of human nature, the practical method through which the person creates, even through the smallest acts, a piece of a better world, one that is more livable, closer to the needs of people.”  If that sounds a little too high falutin a description of what happens when a secretary stays late to finish tomorrow’s meeting agenda for the boss, a middle-managers spends endless hours in pointless meetings or a blue collar worker picks up a layoff slip after shoveling gravel for years, Scholz says it’s because too many of us have been forced into roles as “slaves of circumstance” that need not prevail in a humane, and human-centred workplace.

As he told an audience Toronto’s venerable Albany Club, during a panel discussion organized by the Centre for Cultural Renewal and The Conversations Cultural Centre, the root of our working ills is a confusion of the true goals of workings life.  He made the blunt, compelling point that at least 50 percent of the confusion comes from a corporate world-view that sees “profits first” as the overriding goal of any well-run company.  No. Profits accrue because a company is effectively managed, but they can never be the end-all goal of a company anymore than the exclusive goal of, say, hockey players is to score goals.  The primary goal of a hockey player, (or any other athlete really) is to perform properly within a given role; to execute assigned tasks in a way that makes scoring goals (achievement) possible – indeed inevitable.  “Profit,” as Scholz put it “is an essential instrument, not the exclusive goal.”  If some doubt that essential truth, let them examine the roots of the economic irrationality (insanity?) of the past half-decade that has cost hundreds of thousands of jobs  - and trillions in government stimulus spending – in North America alone.

Yet critical as Scholz is of the profit-above-all corporate mentality, he is equally concerned about unbridled individual careerism that carves a deep hole into a life, then tries to fill it with obsessions such as promotion, advancement, authority and money. All those things are right and desirable in balance. When the balance tips, our humanity itself suffers.  “Work (in such cases) is lived like a price to pay to get us through life, as an obligation, almost like a (prison) sentence or sometimes as the opposite, exaltation. If our life is controlled by work conceived as obligation or exaltation, we happily ride the wave of success, then fall into deep depression when things go badly.”

The solutions Scholtz offered were equally thought-provoking, particularly his contention that the way work will change is not just through regulation, education or even communication as some top-down workplace improvement project. Rather, he said, what’s needed is effective conversation among all of us touched by the world of work – and that would be pretty much all of us. Scholz himself is a wonderful leader of that conversation. I hope to post the full text of his speech soon.

*** Scholz’s talk made me think of a particular passage from Canadian writer David Adams Richards’ brilliant new book God Is. Though the book is subtitled A Personal Struggle for Faith, it opens with a discussion of Stalin as the essential 20th Century figure for his inability to get away from a gnawing sense of Something despite his insistence that life is ultimately Nothing.  While that may seem a long way from the payroll department for most of us, there is a passage in which Adams Richards describes the fate of Stalin’s blood-fouled henchman, Lavrentiy Beria, who organized the execution of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of “State enemies” and expected to be rewarded for his hard work and dedication by being given the top job once Stalin died.  Instead, Adams Richards writes, he was dragged away bound and gagged, hung up on a hook and, when he started to scream, shot once through the forehead. By Khrushchev. And when Khrushchev was praised by his wife for becoming Supreme Soviet, he reportedly replied: “I am up to my armpits in blood.” He knew, Adams Richards says, knew how things worked.  In contemporary corporate culture, the blood, the bullet and the hook are metaphoric, of course, but many who’ve spent their lives in such workplaces must feel they know, too.