Thursday, October 8, 2009

Old Notes and Papers

I was cleaning out a pile of papers the other day, mostly receipts and boring junk like that, when I came across a load of notes which seem to be from my college days at the Birmingham Bible Institute. Most of the notes are from the hermeneutics classes with had with Dr Colin Warner, and are from our 3rd year of the course when we looked at the various liberation theologies and hermeneutics of suspicion - dealing with people like Paul Ricoeur, Habermas, the Boff brothers, Juan Luis Segundo and Gustavo Gutierrez. This brought back fond memories of working on a lecture given by myself, Phil and Cristi, and someone whose name escapes me.

Another load of papers were the sketches and beginnings of various articles about the nature of the church and its relevance to modern society, and yet more were sermon notes and even a couple of poems I wrote - I still have floating around somewhere in the flat a book of notes and poems I wrote in the very darkest days of my struggle with the brand of Christianity I bought into at the time. It is interesting to note that not once in any of my rantings and ravings did I question faith in God himself, rather in the expression of that faith as I saw in the churches I went to. As you probably know, I eventually found peace from that conflict in the Episcopalian church, until that culture came a calling to Prague's Anglican chaplaincy and again the conflict flared up inside me.

I think over the next few posts I will share some of those sermon notes, poems and articles on Diamonds and Rust, mainly as a kind of spiritual catharsis for me, to try and see where I have come from and maybe get an insight into where I may be going.

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