Virtual Methodist

Just finished an event that I was dreading this morning. I was speaking at the launch of a booklet produced by the Centre for Contemporary Christianity, entitled "Divided Past: Shared Future" which consists of two essays - one by Rev. Professor Nigel Biggar of Christ Church in Oxford, which he originally delivered as the keynote address at the CCCI conference in November 2007 entitled "Divided Past: Shared Future", and the other by me, entitled " Divine and Human: Nurturing a Spirituality and Culture of Forgiveness." Why was I nervous when I regularly stand up and talk in front of much larger groups of people? Well, for a number of reasons. First because I originally wrote the paper 3 years ago as a part of my sabbatical studies, which I spent as an intern with CCCI. That 3 year gap meant that I am not as conversant with the finely reasoned (?) logic of the essay as I was at the time, but also because the discussion of forgiveness is quite contentious in t...

During the recent consultation on the theology and practice of reconciliation that I was periodically writing about before things fell apart pre-Easter, Derek Poole from the Centre for Contemporary Christianity in Ireland , made one of his usual "where did that come from" asides. For those who do not know Derek, he has a unique ability to speak apparently off the cuff (though I believe he practices for hours at home, pontificating to the bathroom mirror) at length, on almost any subject... and generally sounds like he knows what he is talking about! But quite often, one image or sentence will stand starkly out from the rest, having a greater resonance than that around it, and, since he never writes anything down, unless you have been taking verbatim notes, it will be nigh on impossible to trace the reasoning that tied this brilliant, but tangential comment to the rest of his stream of consciousness. For those who do know him (and indeed Derek himself), am I being unfair? Anyw...