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Re: Should Christ's Hospital Stop Being a Faith School?

Posted: Tue Sep 12, 2017 8:20 pm
by rockfreak
Ho ho! An evangelical from York has replied in the Guardian to my letter. He says that if Eurovision featured the tuneful songs of his local congregation we might win the competition one year. Well done sir, for a pithy and humorous response.

Several members of my family were religious as well as my sponsor to CH, so at 13 or 14 I felt some pressure to get confirmed. Towards the end of our instruction Corks suggested that we might like to do confession with The Chain. Confession! Wasn't that something that Catholics did? Whatever next, I thought. You'll be trying to sell us fragments of the true cross. Anyway I figured that, like Mary Poppins, I was perfect in every way, so I passed on the idea.

Re: Should Christ's Hospital Stop Being a Faith School?

Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2017 10:30 am
by sejintenej
Oh, , golly. golly, golly. If influences had any effect I would have been Cantuar 30 years ago. Godfather and household on par with the Archbishop, server, then Christs Hospital. Then I spoiled it all and got disowned by the family when I married an RC

Calling CH a faith school, even in my day, is like calling the UK a haven of tranquility. Yes, it gave an introduction to Christianity but you didn't come out a priest.

OTOH a friend of mine entered a boarding school at 8 and every pupil came out a fully ordained priest at the end of the sausage factory. He is now vehemently opposed to the church into which he was ordained though he remains a Christian.

Re: Should Christ's Hospital Stop Being a Faith School?

Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2017 5:00 pm
by J.R.
I left CH in 1963, a C of E Christian, baptised and confirmed.

Years passed, and I realised more people die, often violently, in the name of 'Faith'. I suppose I am basically still a 'Christian', though my wife, bought up as a Catholic is now more pagan with a dash of C of E thought.

I refused to enter a Catholic church until I attended my wifes Grandmothers funeral

I have absolutely NO time for fundamentalists or radicals in any religion.

Each to their own, in my book, and lets all try to live together peacefully.

Re: Should Christ's Hospital Stop Being a Faith School?

Posted: Thu Sep 21, 2017 5:55 pm
by Martin
Here’s my take on the boys' religious attitudes of the 50s. About 15% were keenly religious, about 20% equally keenly irreligious and most of the rest (about 70%) would describe themselves as C of E if necessary, but not care very much about such matters. Some of them would be confirmed, but for this group any effects of the confirmation did not last very long. This 70% also includes the small minority of those who were not C of E (mainly Noncomformists, with a few RCs and Jews). My impression was that the “Religious” aspect of the CH Foundation did not have a great effect on boys in general. I think these %s would differ little if CH was not “Religious.” A very few boys did move between these categories during their time at CH, but that happens in a non-religious milieu too.

I don’t know what the situation is like today. I suspect the %s have hardly changed, although there are now clearly some Muslims and Hindus at CH and probably many fewer Jews. Do any/many members of these small minorities convert to become C of E? They didn’t (to my knowledge) in my days.

Re: Should Christ's Hospital Stop Being a Faith School?

Posted: Thu Sep 21, 2017 7:51 pm
by sejintenej
Martin wrote: Thu Sep 21, 2017 5:55 pm
I don’t know what the situation is like today. I suspect the %s have hardly changed, although there are now clearly some Muslims and Hindus at CH and probably many fewer Jews. Do any/many members of these small minorities convert to become C of E? They didn’t (to my knowledge) in my days.
In the mid/late fifties confirmation was just about compulsory unless you were of a different faith.

You have to remember that for a Muslim to convert to another religion brings an automatic death sentence which is carried out in some countries; with one exception the Muslims I knew were forced to and didn't know otherwise to obey their religious leaders. The exception, married to an RC, converted in secret days before his expected death from illness and after many years of hassle from their religious leaders because the wife failed to convert or wear muslim dress..
In Hinduism the family unit (and in some cases the tribal unit) is exceptionally strong and it is very hard to break away from the family and its orders

Re: Should Christ's Hospital Stop Being a Faith School?

Posted: Fri Sep 22, 2017 3:14 pm
by J.R.
Which all goes to prove that Faith/Religion is far more dangerous than the occasional despotic dictator.

Re: Should Christ's Hospital Stop Being a Faith School?

Posted: Mon Sep 25, 2017 9:47 am
by Foureyes
"Which all goes to prove that Faith/Religion is far more dangerous than the occasional despotic dictator."

Like all generalisations that statement does not stand up to close examination. It cannot be denied that religious wars have resulted in many deaths, but, on the other hand, the "occasional despotic dictator" has included such luminaries as Mao Tsetung, Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler, whose score (for want of a better term) lay in the tens, perhaps even hundreds of millions. And all in the 20th century, which is slightly more than 'occasional.'
David :shock:

Re: Should Christ's Hospital Stop Being a Faith School?

Posted: Tue Sep 26, 2017 8:28 am
by michael scuffil
In the mid/late fifties confirmation was just about compulsory unless you were of a different faith.

That is certainly not true. Not the slightest pressure was put on me to be confirmed. It was not even casually suggested, and no one thought it odd that I wasn't. (As it happened, I had been baptized in a Catholic church -- not 'baptized a Catholic', because baptism is ecumenical -- but no one else knew this.)

Re: Should Christ's Hospital Stop Being a Faith School?

Posted: Tue Sep 26, 2017 10:15 am
by jhopgood
michael scuffil wrote: Tue Sep 26, 2017 8:28 am In the mid/late fifties confirmation was just about compulsory unless you were of a different faith.

That is certainly not true. Not the slightest pressure was put on me to be confirmed. It was not even casually suggested, and no one thought it odd that I wasn't. (As it happened, I had been baptised in a Catholic church -- not 'baptised a Catholic', because baptism is ecumenical -- but no one else knew this.)
I knew this as both my sons were baptised/christened in CofE church, with my RC wife in agreement.
One son is now practising RC and didn't have to get re-baptised.

Re: Should Christ's Hospital Stop Being a Faith School?

Posted: Tue Sep 26, 2017 1:27 pm
by michael scuffil
John, I meant that no one else knew that I'd been baptized in a Catholic church. So the fact that I had been was not the reason no one pressured me to get confirmed.

Before I arrived at CH, and before John Page said something at Duty one evening about confirmation classes, I'd never heard of the concept.

Re: Should Christ's Hospital Stop Being a Faith School?

Posted: Tue Sep 26, 2017 6:08 pm
by Katharine
At Hertford, while I was there, if you were not down as belonging to another denomination and you did not put your name down for confirmation then the Headmistress did ask you why not. As I had been confirmed, I don't know how the conversations with DR went, nor how much pressure was applied.

You were expected to be confirmed in either the Lower V or the Upper V (O level year).

Re: Should Christ's Hospital Stop Being a Faith School?

Posted: Wed Sep 27, 2017 9:35 am
by sejintenej
rockfreak wrote: Tue Sep 12, 2017 8:20 pm
Several members of my family were religious as well as my sponsor to CH, so at 13 or 14 I felt some pressure to get confirmed.
Please check your inbox, David

Re: Should Christ's Hospital Stop Being a Faith School?

Posted: Thu Sep 28, 2017 9:44 am
by michael scuffil
I remember the Chaplain (Pullen) once saying that he very much disapproved of people getting confirmed just because they had reached a certain form. And Roger Wilson, the confirming bishop (of Chichester), said he personally thought confirmation in adolescence a very bad thing. He said he thought the debate should be whether you get confirmed as soon as you are old enough to answer the questions (i.e. roughly like First Communion among the Catholics), or whether you should wait to adulthood.

First vicar: How do you keep your church clear of mice?
Second vicar: Simple. I baptize and confirm them, and I never see them again.

Re: Should Christ's Hospital Stop Being a Faith School?

Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2019 9:50 pm
by rockfreak
Remarkable article in today's papers in which the Archbishop of Canterbury (or the Rev Oilwelby as Private Eye calls him) admits to sometimes speaking in tongues when praying. This is something that Evangelicals claim to be able to do, although I'd always imagined that it was rather unusual and that so far only the twelve apostles had managed it. Of course ideally the Archbish should also have a tongue of flame on his head, which would make him look rather like Arthur Brown on Top of the Pops in 1967 and cause health and safety issues with the freeholders of the building.
What is the make-up of Christian groupings at CH these days, I wonder. They were generally straight-up Anglicans when I was there. Are there any fruitcake evangelicals able to speak in tongues? Grecians in Greek or Latin perhaps.

Re: Should Christ's Hospital Stop Being a Faith School?

Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2019 3:00 pm
by michael scuffil
Christ's Hospital chapel c. 1960 used to be very 'low church'. Not evangelical, but without any ceremony, and certainly without vestments or incense. I believe this changed in the late 60s, largely I think under the influence of Robson, and became really quite Anglo-Catholic. Perhaps someone can fill me in.

As for Welby, I find his remarks incomprehensible. He spoke in tongues, he said, 'when praying'. I find this odd, because conversations with God, I would have thought, need not be conducted in any language at all, let alone in more than one. One can of course philosophize about this. There is a school of linguistic thought (the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis) whose strong version asserts that thought is determined by language, and without language there can be no cognitive process. Another consideration is that information in the widest sense (software) can only be mediated through hardware (material): prayer is sometimes seen as the only exception. Language, however defined, relies ultimately on hardware. I wish the archbishop would be a little more specific about the tongues he speaks in.
Emperor Charles V was certainly specific. He stated that he spoke Italian to women, French to men, German to his horse, and Spanish to God.