Rediscovering Spiritual Roots:

I also contributed, along with Dr. Pierre Allard, a chapter on Christian roots for this publication (Michael L. Hadley, Editor, New York: SUNY Press, 2001)–an updated version here: Transformative Justice Vision and Spirituality

WN: This was done for a double issue of a U.S. journal, called The Justice Professional Volume 11, 1998 – Issue 1-2: Criminology as Peacemaking.¹ I began and ended with the story of Claire Culhane who, though atheistic, so represented justice to me.

PLEASE NOTE: It was lightly updated, July 9, 2024.

An excerpt:

As I write, May, 1996, Canada mourns the April 28 unexpected passing of one of its most passionate crusaders for justice, Claire Culhane, 1995 recipient of the Order of Canada, our highest honour. Her biography was entitled One Woman Army (Mick Lowe, 1992). A “pagan humanist friend” by her oft-repeated playful self-designation in correspondence, she was nonetheless deeply gripped by the Hebrew concept of “tsedeka,” though she had as a young girl abandoned any formal faith links with her Jewish background. Her entire life was however an instance of the secular applicability of the Judeo-Christian tradition, from whose wells she unknowingly drank,² in whose prophetic tradition she partly found herself.

…

I began the essay with allusion to Claire Culhane, who, though self-consciously without a religious base, nonetheless exemplified the very spirit of a Judeo-Christian approach to justice. She once told me that the difference between her and another noted Canadian criminal justice activist, Ruth Morris, was Ruth’s (Quaker) faith in God. Claire was a more consistent supporter of our work in restorative justice than most church people I’ve ever known – many of whom in fact resist the more radical aspects of this work…. When I asked Claire once, “What keeps you going?,” thinking there may be some spirituality at heart, she responded in Marxist fashion that history would one day vindicate her. I conclude therefore that hers was a this-worldly eschatological transcendence.³ And it worked! — as anyone who knew her life or attended her Memorial Service, May 11, 1996, must acknowledge.

Please click on: Rediscovering Spiritual Roots

Footnotes:

Please click on: the bibliographical notation for my essay: Northey, W. (1998). Rediscovering spiritual roots: The Judeo‐Christian tradition and criminal justice. The Justice Professional, 11 (1–2), 47–70.[↩]
Please see: Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.

Of it, we read in Wikipedia:

The book is a broad history of the influence of Christianity on the world, focusing on its impact on morality – from its beginnings to the modern day.^[1] According to the author, the book “isn’t a history of Christianity” but “a history of what’s been revolutionary and transformative about Christianity: about how Christianity has transformed not just the West, but the entire world.”^[2]

Holland contends that Western morality, values and social norms ultimately are products of Christianity,^[1]^[3]^[4] stating “in a West that is often doubtful of religion’s claims, so many of its instincts remain — for good and ill — thoroughly Christian”.^[5] Holland further argues that concepts now usually considered non-religious or universal, such as secularism, liberalism, science, socialism and Marxism, revolution, feminism, and even homosexuality, “are deeply rooted in a Christian seedbed,”^[6]^[7]^[8] and that the influence of Christianity on Western civilization has been so complete “that it has come to be hidden from view”.^[1]^[7]

It was released to positive reviews, although some historians and philosophers objected to some of Holland’s conclusions.

The ethical tools by which many critique Christianity are provided in the first place by the revolutionary moral eruption of Christian faith in the first century: over against Ancient Greek and Roman cultures, both awash in fundamental inequality and denial of human rights–except for the elite male minorities. This as said is starkly seen in Sir Larry Siedentop’s brilliant study, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism.

A reviewer, Nicholas Lezard, writes:

Like many, I had assumed that notions of individual liberty didn’t come into play until the latter end of the Enlightenment. It was something to do with Voltaire, perhaps, or the second sentence of the American Declaration of Independence. If the Church had anything to do with individuality, it was as a brake on it, or a countermeasure. We were all just anonymous units before the power of God.

Siedentop demonstrates that the picture is much more complex. In fact, he claims, it is Christianity we have to thank, and particularly the Christianity that was being formed in the dark and early medieval ages, for our concept of ourselves as free agents. He starts in ancient Greece and Rome: there, the faculty of reason was only to be found in the ruling elite, which, in effect, meant men of a certain class in a city state. If you were a woman, merchant, or slave, all you could really use your brains for were, respectively, gossip, mercantile calculation, and unthinking obedience. (A glance at newsagents’ shelves these days may make you suspect that civilisation has gone retrograde in these respects, but let us pass on that for the moment.) Even philosophers, who had no direct allegiance to a specific place, were for a while suspect. However, seeds were sown, and things got interesting when Greek- and Latin-speaking urban dwellers around the Mediterranean started encountering the Jewish diaspora:

“Just what was it that, rather suddenly, made Jewish beliefs so interesting? It was partly a matter of imagery. The image of a single, remote and inscrutable God dispensing his laws to a whole people corresponded to the experience of peoples who were being subjugated to the Roman imperium.”

This is the beginning of a thoughtful jaunt through several centuries of developing theological and legal thinking. The stars are Augustine, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham: he of the famous Razor, the injunction that “it is futile to work with more entities when it is possible to work with fewer”. (Here, the entities concerned were demons, but the principle “a plurality must not be asserted without necessity” came to be quickly understood as very much more widely applicable.)

This is not a book to take on a beach holiday; it is chewy, involved stuff, and if at times it looks as though Siedentop is repeating himself, you may well be grateful, as I was, because you might not have got it first time round. I have never hitherto had to think about, for example, medieval corporation law and its relation to ecclesiastical authority. But the book is, once you get past the superficial difficulties, not too hard to grasp, and its basic principle – “that the Christian conception of God provided the foundation for what became an unprecedented form of human society” – is, when you think about it, mind-bending.[↩]
Please see the brilliant work of Irish-Catholic philosopher Richard Kearney on this in: Anatheism: Returning to God. We read:

Kearney begins by locating a turn toward sacred secularity in contemporary philosophy, focusing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Ricoeur. He then marks “epiphanies” in the modernist masterpieces of James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf. Kearney concludes with a discussion of the role of theism and atheism in conflict and peace, confronting the distinction between sacramental and sacrificial belief or the God who gives life and the God who takes it away. Accepting that we can never be sure about God, he argues, is the only way to rediscover a hidden holiness in life and to reclaim an everyday divinity.

***

I also preached a sermon recently (April 28, 2024 titled: The God Who May Be), part of a series on “returning to belief in God,” for which you may find a video and text here: Holding Forth. . .[↩]