Opening Night Speech for the Carmelite Library

Philip Harvey

In sorting through some computer files I stumbled over my Opening Night Speech for the Re-opening of the Carmelite Library, after the renovations to the building done through most of 2006. This speech was given to a large audience of Library well-wishers on Thursday evening the 10^th of May 2007.

  

  When I worked at the theology library at Ormond College there was an older lady on the staff who wanted borrowers banned from the Library because they only interfered with the work of the librarians. Her name was Pamela Carswell and some of you will remember her from the old days when she helped run the Catholic Library Bookshop Library in Elizabeth Street. Early in the morning, as the first people entered the Library, she would say, “Oh look! More of them!” or “Who forgot to lock the door?” She regarded the users as a nuisance, an interruption to the agreeable silence and the steady tap of the keyboard.

 Fortunately hers is a minority opinion. It is certainly not the case at the Carmelite Library, where everyone is welcome. Indeed, hospitality in this place is not only a value but a practice.

Most of us don’t need reminding either, that the Library is not the librarian’s possession. This is the Library of the Carmelite Province and the librarian is entrusted with a duty of care for the collection, the staff, and the users. The librarian is given the serious job of building up what is a very special collection. The needs of the Library are those of the members of the Order and of those who use the Library. Perhaps primary amongst those users are those aware that they are on the spiritual journey and those for whom the collection meets their sometimes specialised research interests.

For me personally though, making this Library run is not just a duty, it’s a pleasure. Take the building, for example. Those of you who remember how the ceiling used to look will appreciate Fr Paul Chandler’s remark that butterscotch and dove-grey were not his favourite colour combination. In the daytime this room is filled with natural light and we now have a lustrous space brought about by the design arrangement and the good use of white walls and large windows. I know that those who use the Library are going to find it likewise – a place of reflection, of learning, of retreat and refreshment.

Although the Library has always been in a sense a public library, when it was at Donvale Monastery there weren’t many who knew of its existence or would use it constantly. Now that the Library is situated in Middle Park, with a street frontage, we suddenly have a theology library that has a real public presence. It can be said that the Library is open to everyone. That said, I would like to identify four groups that the Library caters for primarily.

(1)Carmelites and the Carmelite family. With the best collection of Carmelite writings in Australia and one of the best in the world, this Library is the source for those following the Carmelite way of spiritual growth and mysticism.

(2)Researchers and students. An essential policy is that we are buying for the study needs of those at a tertiary and post-graduate level. Access via the Library website to the catalogue has improved awareness of these rich holdings, and MCDcat, the MCD’s online union list, is also solving search questions.

(3)Parishioners and the local community. It has been commented that Our Lady of Mount Carmel parish now has the largest parish library in the Archdiocese. Whatever you make of that, the Library is certainly now a book service to all of those in Middle Park and nearby neighbourhoods. Churchgoers are especially invited to be part of the new arrangement and to feel comfortable here. It has become a kind of public access that turns the Library into a feature of local life.

(4)Those on the spiritual journey. The word ‘Spirituality’ is in the Library’s name. The collection has been built up with this as its main buying area. So spiritual groups and all individuals who know themselves to be on the journey may seek out this place, knowing they will have questions answered and needs supported. Let it also be known, the Library is aware of all the great spiritual traditions, meaning its represents the writings of the several great Christian traditions, as well as representing those of other faith traditions: Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and so forth. The interfaith dialogue is an essential part of any contemporary learning.

The poet W. H. Auden once put it pithily, “may all my last thinks be thanks.”

I wish to thank the architects, builders and planners who have left this Library much improved on how they found it.

I wish to thank Fr Paul Chandler for his incredible job of forming this Library as we now have it and for his grounding the staff in the true nature of its operations and future.

This evening it is a great pleasure to thank the musicians: Marty Welch and Tim Hennessy on strings, and the choir of St Peter’s Eastern Hill.

The artists of J-Studio in North Fitzroy are long-time friends of the Carmelite Library and it is great to see them and their work tonight.

This evening would not have happened without the work of Anna Welch and our team of volunteers, some of them parishioners of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

Lastly, I would like to thank Fr Austin Cooper, who has kindly agreed to officially open the renovated and refurbished Library. And I now invite Austin to do just that.

The New Puritans of Sydney

Philip Harvey

From the archive comes this book review, which I rediscovered today in an old computer file. It is a nine hundred word response to Muriel Porter’s work ‘The New Puritans : the Rise of Fundamentalism in the Anglican Church’. The book was published in 2006 by Melbourne University Press (ISBN 0 522 85184 3) and this review first appeared in the Australian Book Review in the same year. The descriptive passages of the review remain quite familiar to those who take an interest in the subject.

A couple of years ago I attended the patronal festival at St James’, King Street, Sydney. The preacher was the Dean of Newcastle who, after the blessing, opened with ‘Greetings from across the Chasuble Belt!’ The large congregation erupted into laughter, then settled in for twelve minutes of civil gospel. This is because Sydney Diocese, alone in the Anglican Communion, requires its clergy to sign an understanding that they will not wear Eucharistic vestments, including the chasuble. The ban is but one outward and visible control mechanism of an inward and enclosed evangelical attitude that typifies the power play within the Diocese.

This timely book, written by a self-confessed Anglican ‘insider’, explains not only the seemingly quaint issue of chasubles, but the very much more serious issue of an entrenched sect-like fundamentalism that has taken control of Sydney (‘this most complex and secretive of dioceses’) and its cathedral, after years of nasty politicking and stubborn intolerance of others. The rise of the Jensen brothers, Peter the Archbishop and Phillip the Dean, signals a dramatic change in Sydney’s relationship with the rest of the Australian church, and gives new meaning to Trollope’s ‘creeping nepotism’.

Muriel Porter makes no bones of the fact that her book is polemical. The targets are those in the Sydney church who threaten the very diversity of Anglicanism, seen as its genius ever since the Elizabethan Settlement – Catholic and Reformed living together in relative harmony. For Porter, the polemic is based on personal frustration and anger.

She is angry at the loss of the broad Anglican practice of her own upbringing and the gradual takeover of a narrow, prescriptive religion, unrecognisable as Anglicanism. Angry at Sydney’s harsh opposition to feminism and homosexuality. She is frustrated at how Sydney’s fundamentalist tendencies have turned into ‘Bible-believing’ tenets that threaten the Communion at large. Frustrated at what she sees as the introduction of lay presidency as payback for the victory of women’s ordination. She writes, ‘the conservative evangelical attitude to women … would shock most thinking Australians if they understood its full significance.’

Moore Theological College is the sole training school for ordinands in Sydney, a fact that limits diversity of tradition and open discussion. Sydney will not ordain women. Porter tracks Moore’s huge influence on Sydney thinking, especially through its two patriarchs, T.C. Hammond and Broughton Knox. ‘Scripture alone’ is a first principle, a Reformation position more familiar among Calvinists and Baptists. Indeed, ‘Sydney’ is facetiously tagged Anglo-Baptist by some observers, perhaps to contrast it with the readily identifiable Anglo-Catholicism. In the Jensens’ version of ‘Scripture alone’, ‘anyone who does not accept the Christian Gospel on their very specific terms is not really Christian.’

This is arrived at by Knox’s theory known as ‘propositional revelation’. Theologian Duncan Reid defines this: “Revelation is fundamentally propositional, and the proper attitude of the Christian believer is obedience to revelation.” This approach to the Bible disallows variant readings and is potentially Gnostic, a form of Protestant scholasticism that closes down discussion. What follows is biblical inerrancy. We have the right version, we’re right, everyone else is wrong.

Sydney is putting itself most at odds with the rest of the church though, not so much by its rejection of ritual or its anti-feminist stances or questionable channelling of money, as by a doctrinal teaching known as subordinationism. This was used during the debates over the ordination of women, asserting that the woman is subordinate to the man in the same way that the Son is subordinate to the Father. This is very poor theology. It is also a replay of the 4^th century heresy known as Arianism. Porter’s dry humour comes to the fore when she remarks, “to call someone an Arian is a term of significant abuse in theological circles.” As anyone knows who has the slightest encounter with Christian belief, the persons of the Trinity are co-equal and co-eternal, not subordinated. This makes for interesting times ahead, which is an undeclared purpose of the book, not only to explain but to warn. Not all readers will be persuaded that there is a clear and present danger, but we have here a clear diagnosis of causes and effects.

For Anglicans, the book condenses essential knowledge about the ‘Sydney’ problem and its anomalous existence in the Communion. Sydney is overtly the wealthiest diocese in Australia, grows at quite a rate compared to the rest of the country, and is seen as a threat to the sovereignty of the other dioceses. Non-Anglicans can read it as a remarkable case study of what happens inside even a mainstream church when an inward-looking section of its membership gains and abuses power for its own ends. When was the last time you heard of an Archbishop who doesn’t believe in archbishops? The general reader is provided with a central reality of Sydney history, one rarely spoken of. The very extremism of this hardcore ultra-conservative movement is of a piece with the image of Sin City, where diehard ‘puritans’, hedonists and libertarians co-exist.

Porter combines the skills of a journalist with the scholarship of an historian. Polemic is by definition short and sharp with, sometimes, more heat than light, but I would have preferred a longer book. It shows the need for a comprehensive, non-partisan history of Sydney theology. It is great social history, mainly because Porter trusts her own memory and has a fine grasp of how 17^th century Christian radicalism can be alive and well in 21^st century New South Wales, but I wanted more on the historic changes. Like the present volume, such books would have to be published in Melbourne.

What is a Journal?

Philip Harvey

From the French ‘jour’ for day, a journal has traditionally been a diary, or a sequential magazine, or some record of events and thoughts through time. In library terms, journal has been a subset of the broad and not always precise term serial. Wynar and Taylor provide the conventional wisdom about a serial as close ago in time as 1992: “A serial is a publication in any medium issued in successive parts at regular or irregular intervals and intended to continue indefinitely. Serials include both periodicals and non-periodicals.” (p. 162)

The serial, or rather its bugbear companion term seriality, has been a permanent challenge to the composure of cataloguers, bibliographers  and others ever since rules had to be invented to describe serials. This is because seriality can include almost any kind of publication that is published in a manner that is judged seriatum, i.e. in some serial order, whether by date, number, letter, or by that imponderable of modern English usage, whatever. 

For if a serial can be a journal and a periodical and a monographic series and an encyclopedic set, what is an online journal, or a personal blog (like what you are reading this second), or an online newspaper blog, or any of the digital variants that appear hydra-like on our computer screens each day? Indeed, these all fit our standard definition of a serial. For academic and bibliographical purposes, they are already all serials anyway.

Recently on Atlantis, the list of the American Theological Library Association, Kevin Compton of Rolfing Library in Bannockburn, Illinois let fly with this unhappy emotion: “I wish print was dead and I wish we could cut our print subscriptions by 100%, just as I wish we could buy all of our books as ebooks, but we can't, because …  many theological journals and book publishers are very slowly moving into the digital world. We don't cut those subscriptions, some are just too important, but I'm convinced they get used much less than they would if they were available online.” This, it has to be said, is so two thousand and thirteen! That a librarian would wish print were dead only shows what a strange universe we are now living in. But Kevin’s outburst comes in the context of increasing online serials and  (so it is claimed) dwindling demand for print serials, a world in which two-stop shopping is seen as a waste of a librarian’s time.

Many libraries today are faced with decisions about which serials to subscribe to online and which print journals to delete. This has to be another reason for Kevin’s caustic outburst: surely if everything was online we wouldn’t have to worry about all these fiddly decisions. Then there is the question of whether we keep backruns of serials in print form even after we have started an online subscription, against the day when something might go astray, we are the only place in the free world with a set, or someone needs to check against the paper version. As if life wasn’t already complicated enough, there is then the realist’s conundrum which says that no matter how many serials go online, they will never all be online, and the ones that are may be out of our price range, or simply not within the serials budget for that year. They may vanish next year, or get superseded and their titles changed in the never-ending process of rebranding.

Then we have to factor in usage. If students are not interested in print and we cannot encourage that interest, then the print serials remain stationary and in fact could be converted into stationery.  Users accustomed to online searching and reading have to be educated anew in how to approach that daunting 70 page object on the display stand, open it, and read it. As with so much else in our world now, reading habits are driving usage and it is up to the librarians to gauge what those reading habits might be.

As William Badke of North Western University in Langley, British Columbia says in his email to Atlantis, “Browsing journals, indeed, is one of those academic luxuries that professors have long enjoyed.  The issue arrives in the mail, and you spend a leisurely hour or two dipping into articles and reading book reviews.  But I know of no seminary students who aspire to the same.  Nor do I hear any of them seeking RSS feeds of new journal issue contents, though we can help them with this if they ever wanted it.”

Opinion seems to be divided as to whether browsing still happens, or is a nostalgic memory. Something that shouldn’t be nostalgia is self-awareness, and it is for some librarians a constant call to make users aware of what is in a library in all forms, and of the need for users to become aware of being aware.

Meanwhile some see the advent of online open access as the inevitable result of impossible serial prices, inaccessibility on the internet, the abandonment of the print option, and the need to meet a serial’s primary goal, which is presentation of current thinking in the here and now of research. This introduces whole new worlds of seriality, even as we speak. Just as we thought a decade ago that online was a serial killer, we now know it has in fact allowed a thousand flowers to bloom and a million schools of thought to contend out there on the web. We bookmark our favourites, little thinking that this action is itself the start of a new way of cataloguing and listing serials. In fact, the cataloguer’s baleful glare at the Rules concerning Serials has just got a whole lot more glary. Compilers and editors of serial indexes must wonder if they have reached a complete impasse.

Sources

Badke, William. From his posting to Atlantis on Wed 20/02/2013 8:09 AM.

Compton, Kevin.  From his posting to Atlantis on Wed 20/02/2013 5:37 AM.

Wynar, Bohdan S. and Arlene G. Taylor. Introduction to cataloging and classification. 8^th ed. Libraries Unlimited, 1992.