Richard Holloway - Wikipedia

Richard Holloway - Wikipedia

Richard F. Holloway (born 26 November 1933) is a Scottish writer and broadcaster and was formerly Bishop of Edinburgh in the Scottish Episcopal Church.

Holloway was educated at Kelham Theological College, Edinburgh Theological College and the Union Theological Seminary, New York City. Between 1959 and 1986 he was a curate, vicar and rector at various parishes in England, Scotland and the United States. He was Bishop of Edinburgh from 1986 and was elected Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church in 1992. He resigned from these positions in 2000 and is now regarded as one of the most outspoken and controversial figures in the Church,[1] having taken an agnostic worldview and commenting widely on issues concerning religious belief in the modern world. His own theological position has become increasingly radical and he has recently described himself as an "after-religionist".[2]

Holloway is well known for his support of progressive causes, including campaigning on human rights for gay and lesbian people in both Church and State. He is a patron of LGBT Youth Scotland, an organisation dedicated to the inclusion of LGBT young people in the life of Scotland. He has questioned and addressed complex ethical issues in the areas of sexuality, drugs and bioethics. He has written extensively on these topics, being the author of more than 20 books exploring their relationship with modern religion.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Holloway was Professor of Divinity at Gresham College in the City of London. From 1990 to 1997, he was a member of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority and held the position of chair of the BMA Steering Group on Ethics and Genetics. He was also a member of the Broadcasting Standards Commission and is currently chair of the Scottish Arts Council and of Sistema Scotland.

Holloway has been a reviewer and writer for the broadsheet press for several years, including The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, Sunday Herald and The Scotsman. He is also a frequent presenter on radio and television, having hosted the BBC television series When I Get to Heaven, Holloway's Road and The Sword and the Cross. He currently hosts the BBC Radio Scotland book review programme, Cover Stories. Holloway presented the second of the Radio 4 Lent Talks on 11 March 2009. On May 28, 2012, he began presenting a fifteen-minute programme about faith and doubt, following The World at One on BBC Radio 4, called Honest Doubt: The History of an Epic Struggle.

Holloway lives in Edinburgh with his American-born wife Jean. They have three adult children: two daughters and a son.

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Ex-bishop preaches a kinder atheism - By: Bert Archer Travel, Published on Sat Oct 24 2009

http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2009/10/24/exbishop_preaches_a_kinder_atheism.html#

For all the Braveheart bluster of the stereotype, the Scots are actually pretty good at the art of compromise.

Richard Holloway was head of the Scottish church until nine years ago. His book 'Godless Morality' has been a bestseller for even longer.

For all the Braveheart bluster of the stereotype, the Scots are actually pretty good at the art of compromise.

Gordon Brown was the brains behind the third-way politics on which Tony Blair made his reputation. And now, just when Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins are looking like the only intelligent opposition to anti-evolutionary lunacy, it's a Scot named Richard Holloway who reminds us that the certainty of neo-atheism has a lot in common with the certainty of religion.

As far as Holloway is concerned, religion is a "great fiction," but he places equal emphasis on both the adjective and noun. It deserves more respect than the neo-atheists pay it, he figures, and less obedience than religionists generally insist on.

Though little known in these parts, the 75-year-old Holloway – in town today as part of the Scottish focus of this year's International Festival of Authors – is a star back home. He's the smart voice of a position that many, religionists or not, feel in their gut is probably the right one. As he speaks on the phone from his home in Edinburgh, it's clear why he's gathered such a following. In a debate characterized by accusations and shrill rhetoric, Holloway speaks in calm paragraphs laced with appreciative references to church history, theology, novels from three or four cultures. And poetry, too, which he recites in English and annotates with the occasional phrase in the original French or German.

The spectacle of a bishop who's decided to leave the church because he no longer believes has played out in Britain like a personification of the secular evolution of society itself. Is he (are we) right? Is he (are we) wrong? Everyone can read along – and watch him on TV and listen to him on the radio – and find out. Holloway writes with the knowledge and authority of a bishop, comfortable with abstruse concepts such as "custody of the eye" and kenosis, taking the tools of the ancient faith he's left but not renounced to move the discussion of humanity and meaning forward. He couldn't be less like the neo-atheists, who are by comparison only dimly aware of the histories and complexities of the faiths they mock and denounce.

But he kind of likes all this pop atheism anyway.

"I've reached the state that I think the strident oppositionalism between hard religion and hard atheism is useful," he says. He describes his own position as "not a fudgy thing in the middle; if you've got thesis and antithesis, this may be a new synthetic way of living with religion without living in the way that religion undervalues other sorts of experiences."

It's that undervaluing that runs through much of Holloway's thinking. And it's a particular undervaluation – of gay priests and homosexuality in general by his former church – that propelled him out of faith in the first place, the result of an especially nasty synod of bishops in 1998 that threatened to split the Anglican church in two, and ended up losing them one of their most fluent primates. Holloway refers to it now as having been a "hate fest."

"I was hoping that we would find a way of continuing the discussion, disagree in a civilized way, the way on the whole we manage most things. Instead, it turned into something really rather terrible; there was a horrible debate on the subject and something kind of faded inside me."

After Holloway made his case for the inclusion of gays in the Anglican clergy, some African bishops started a rumour that he was only doing it because his daughters were lesbian. (They're not.) "One of the things that bedevils religion," he says, "is that it develops official truth, which is antithetical to real truth. You close yourself off from the future... It makes you disrespectful to others who may see things from a different angle and may not be stupid people."

The future he wants is one without religion, or at least religion as we understand it; but it is also one in which we appreciate the power of its mystery and myth.

"I'm not a rationalist in the ultimate sense," he says. "If you're a crusading rationalist, if you think rationality is the ultimate good, therefore, that might make you a missionary. I think Richard Dawkins is a missionary for rationalism. I think that we're much more complicated than that. I think that we have a level of rationality, but there are dark, brooding things under us as well. We die, we know we die; there are lots of inherited fears and anxieties from the depths of our pasts, so I think rationality is one tiny element in the human experience."

He feels, in other words, no particular compunction to figure everything out, or to chuck the stuff he doesn't understand.

In his latest book, Between the Monster and the Saint, a meditation on the forces of good and evil that play a perpetual tug of war with us as the rope, he writes chiefly about pity, which he calls the only weakness of a monster and the only strength of a saint. But he chooses to end the book, which takes the absence of god, the devil, heaven and hell as a given, with a peroration on gratitude. He is, he says, grateful for beauty and pity, for sunny October Scottish days and for simply being.

I ask him, as the hour scheduled for our conversation comes to an end, if he doesn't think that gratitude requires an object, someone or something to be grateful to. In response, he begins to recite a poem, and then excuses himself for a minute to find the text to make sure he gets it right. It's called "Psalm," by Paul Celan, a Jew born in Romania in 1920 who spent much of World War II in Soviet labour camps (and who, it must be said, killed himself in 1970):

No one moulds us again out of earth and clay,
no one conjures our dust.
No one.
Praised be your name, no one.
For your sake
we shall flower.
Towards
you.
A nothing
we were, are, shall
remain, flowering:
the nothing, the no one's rose.
With
our pistil soul-bright,
with our stamen heaven-ravaged,
our corolla red
with the crimson word which we sang
over, O over
the thorn.

"I think probably what I'm getting at in that book," he says after a pause, "is that if we were more grateful for our own gift of life, we might spend less time interfering in the life of others. I know I'm glad to be alive, and when I do finally check out, which I have no intention of doing anytime soon, that I'll be able to say thank you, if only to the darkness, because it will have been worth the trip."

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