THIS week’s Sunday (Radio 4) covered much late-breaking Anglican-related news items, bringing out the best of its magazine format. These included the impending resignation of the Archbishop of Wales, the Most Revd Andrew John, after failings at Bangor Cathedral, and accusations that the Bishop of Leicester, the Rt Revd Martyn Snow, mishandled the case of Venessa Pinto, a Reader convicted of stalking, to which the Beeb had devoted some investigative-reporting resources.
The Bishop of Chelmsford, Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, gave an impressively nuanced take on the Israel–Iran War, and spoke of her particular affection for the small and recently much abused Anglican diocese of Iran. This was an excerpt from a longer interview to be broadcast on the World Service later in the week.
Of the BBC’s regular God slots, Thought for the Day (Radio 4) can be particularly easy for the reviewer to neglect, but Friday’s edition with Richard Harries was a little gem, on the importance of truth in a world of conspiracy theories and fake news.
Between truth and lies, there is behaviour covered by the neologism of “paltering”: telling a narrow truth to cover a big lie. It is this that is often most corrosive of public trust in institutions. The bishop noted that, while we are lucky to live in a society where we have a variety of news outlets to balance against one another, that puts particular responsibilities on the public to be informed citizens who can assess reliably the trustworthiness of various sources.
Not everything that sits between truth and lies is a negative: human societies need myths as well as facts. So, it was appropriate that Melvyn Bragg and guests discussed the topic of dragons in In Our Time (Radio 4, Thursday). While dragon stories are widely dispersed around the world, it seems that the idea emerged in China, where they were painted as early as the Middle Stone Age. At first, they were definitely hybrids of the characteristics of natural animals. Dr Kelsey Granger, a Chinese-history don at Edinburgh, said that Chinese dragons were positive and beneficial, unlike their “adversarial” European counterparts.
Professor Daniel Ogden, of the University of Edinburgh, told us that it was impossible to prove whether Western dragon imagery developed independently of the Chinese tradition, or emerged from it. What we do know from linguistic evidence is that the Indo-Europeans of the Eurasian steppe had developed myths of fighting dragons by about 2000 BC.
In European myths, the defeat of a dragon by a saint was often associated with Roman ruins, and symbolised the end of Imperial paganism, we were told by Dr Juliette Wood, of the University of Wales. Perhaps this is why dragons are important in English and Welsh, but not Irish, mythology. The English and Welsh Churches could do with a few dragon-slayers.
