November Meeting

Monday 14th November October, 7.30 pm
at Hugh & Rosemary's home

Faith, Religion and Identity

At this meeting we will start by listening to part of the first of Kwame Anthony Appiah's 2016 Reith Lectures, which were called Mistaken Identities: Creed Country, Colour, Culture.

He concludes this lecture by saying:

"So here’s one thing we can agree with the fundamentalists about: Our ancestors are powerful, though not in the ways the fundamentalists imagine . For none of us creates the world we inhabit from scratch; none of us crafts our values and commitments save in dialogue, or debate, with the past.
Dialogue is not determinism, though. Once you think of credal identities in terms of mutable practices and communities rather than sets of immutable beliefs, religion becomes more verb than noun: the identity is revealed as an activity not a thing. And it’s the nature of activities to bring change. Our ancestors, as I say, are powerful then. They grip us in ways we scarcely realize . . . I found myself reflecting that in the ethical realm — whether civic or religious — we have to recognize that one day we, too, shall be ancestors. That we do not merely follow traditions; we create them. Count that a burden, and a blessing."


How he arrived at this conclusion, and what it means, may be the subject of our discussion.

You can listen to the whole lecture, and the discussion that follows, here. A transcript will be distributed to those on the mailing list.