The Holy Spirit - a conference theme?!

It makes me smile to say it, both good humouredly and also a little sardonically, but yes - the Holy Spirit is the theme of an academic conference this year: I'm sure He'll be pleased to know. The Society for the Study of Theology (UK) starts its annual conference tomorrow at the university of York and runs until thursday morning. Yours truly will be there and will hopefully blog a few thoughts (I said that last year but was so overwhelmed by offering my first conference paper that I never got round to it). Plenary speakers include Rachel Muers, Graham Ward, Alan Sell, and Amos Yong on issues such as envorinmentalism, pentecostalism, santification and various other topics. I'm really looking forward to it! Perhaps see some of you there?

p.s. Yes. I know I haven't blogged for a little while - it's been really busy in parish for various reasons and Ihaven't had time. But I have been reading some interesting books, including John Piper and Don Carson on ministry and academia, Nigel Biggar on behaving in public, and Ellen Charry on happiness. Will blog reviews in the future.

p.p.s. For those of you following a little bit of my career and what I get up to, I have recently become a member of the Grove Ethics Group responsible for the commissioning and editorial work for Grove Ethics booklets in the UK. This is a good move for me and I hope for the Group (that at least I can bring some ministerial experience if not as much scholarly rigour as some of the members), and having been to my first meeting I really enjoyed it and was amazed at the level of thoughtfulness and academic rigour that goes into the ethics group. SO, if you don't already look at Grove Ethics, then do think about a subscription. It's good value and high quality.

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Paul Nimmo on Schleiermacher

Once again it's been a while since I blogged anything, but I thought I would flag-up this clip from the increasingly successful Modern Theology Timeline created by Tim Hull at St John's College Nottingham, UK. This is a recent interview Tim did with the Edinburgh based scholar Paul Nimmo on Friedrich Schleiermacher. It is a really good interview, and will go a long way to rehabilitating FDES for those who mis-read Barth and reject him outright. Happy watching!

When religion stops us seeing clearly...

I spent a few minutes after morning prayer on Saturday wandering around the church building, enjoying the silence. I also had a look at the stained glass windows - most of which are Victorian. It's something I don't get to do very often because I'm too busy. My favourite window in our church building is very recent, only three years old, and is a brightly coloured rendition of Jesus welcoming children to himself. It is in the baptistry, an appropriate place for welcoming children into the family of God. I discovered another window today too, which I've never really noticed before - something that surprised me because ours is not an overly large building. It is a large plain window, with clear glass. You can see straight through it to the outside world: across the grave yard to the A-road that runs through the middle of the parish, and on to the homes beyond. I stood for a while watching people heading to the shops, the saturday morning traffic held up by the changing

Humble Confidence: The Appropriate Theological Attitude

I've just got round to reading January's International Journal of Systematic Theology (IJST). I really look forward to it coming in the post: it is the universal problem of research-students-who-are-within a-few-months-of-submission that we become so engrossed in the topic at hand (in my case Karl Barth) that other things pass us by. So, IJST affords me the opportunity to lift my head from the Barthian-pit and read a few other things and have those bits of my mind that remember what it was like to read freely in any area of systematics re-enlivened (avoiding the Barth essays within the journal...for now). Normally I skip over the editorials and head for the articles, but last night I read Steve Holmes' editorial for the January edition. In it Holmes, senior lecturer in Systematic Theology at St Andrews University, considers with what attitude the discipline of theology must engage with other academic disciplines. He outlines two, before settling on the third.

Michael J. Leyden

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