Well, it was good to arrive home on Saturday after a few days gadding about in Englandshire. I’d been in Cambridge to act as a respondant to a colloquium on affirming the Jewishness of Jesus in Christian preaching which had been organised by the Centre for the Study of Jewish Christian Relations. There’s more about the colloquium on this page. It was an interesting couple of days and some of the things that were under discussion are likely to surface in later blog posts and sermons.
These kinds of things are always just as interesting for the people you meet and the things you get to do on the way as for the formal content. This one gave me the chance to engage with the work of Amy-Jill Levine who was a fantastic tour de force of a speaker. She describes herself as a Yankee Jewish feminist who teaches in a predominantly Christian divinity school in the buckle of the Bible Belt. If you want a flavour of the kind of thing I was engaging with, there’s a lecture on youtube that should do the trick. It was good too to meet with Bill Brosend who teaches homiletics (ie preaching) at Sewanee University and with Clare Amos who has a theological education brief at the Anglican Communion’s HQ in London.
I also managed to get to Choral Evensong once at King’s College, which was a mixed treat. The choir were fantastic, the rest of it was a bit disappointing. One did feel somewhat herded and the liturgy books were some of the worst I’ve known. Most of the congregation (which was hundreds strong) were bewildered.
Travelling through London also enabled me to catch a couple of plays, which was good. I learn more about how to do my job at the theatre than in most formal educational opportunities that I get. This time it was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at the Theatre Royal and One Man, Two Govnors (a reworking of Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters) at the National. Both were excellent – the latter being one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on any stage. Gut hurtingly funny.
What else? Oh yes, an all too brief encounter with London Pride and back to Scotland, educated, entertained and with a lovely collection of foot blisters to show for my trip.
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