Sea of Faith Christchurch Group

Our website has a new look for 2009; I liked the ‘theme’ that the Dunedin group selected, so I changed to it. The pages are busier: we now have two columns on the right. It helps if you realise that the first column gives you links to pages on the website, the second column links to other websites. Also, there’s a row of links along the top; these are for relatively unchanging content.

When I began this website for our group, I was not aware that any other SoF groups had done anything similar. Not long after, I discovered that there were three or four UK SoF groups with their own websites, and they were all blogs, like ours. I have just checked back here, to find that there are 13 local UK Sea of Faith groups with their own blog.

Many of you have heard me enthuse about Eugen Drewermann. Now our website has a link to my new website about him, so that you can browse to your heart’s content and have some idea why I am so enthusiastic.

There are also links to websites by Brian Lilburn and Noel Cheer, not to mention a website about Don Cupitt and a YouTube video of the TVNZ interview with Lloyd Geering. I’m rather pleased at having found all these. It’s amazing what’s there if you look.

Laurie Chisholm talked recently to the group about Lloyd Geering’s and Juliet Batten’s talks at Conference. The following is a tidied up and abbreviated version of his comments on Lloyd Geering.

For many years, I have had mixed feelings about Lloyd Geering’s message. He is, of course, a towering intellect, and has single-handedly done much to make New Zealand aware of modern thinking about religion. I well remember standing in a queue at a Presbyterian General Assembly, to record my dissent from the Assembly’s decision to distance itself from his views.  So while I have little sympathy for the position of those who have been critical of him, I generally find his views unsatisfying. The following is an attempt to articulate that dissatisfaction by focussing on Lloyd’s talk to the Sea of Faith’s national conference in 2008. Continue Reading »

Laurie Chisholm imagines a parallel universe, in which another Lloyd Geering gives a speech that critiques the conclusions of our Lloyd Geering. Instead of telling us how God is disappearing and a new mysticism is emerging, this other Lloyd Geering tells us how old-fashioned notions of a mystical union with earth are disappearing. Continue Reading »

Recently, TVNZ showed a programme with the above title, featuring Lloyd Geering. The following deliberately tries to provide provocative counter-theses to the title and the nine ideas that the programme presented. They were intended as a discussion starter for our meeting but were not used. Continue Reading »

At our last meeting, Hugh Thorpe reported that the Queen’s Birthday honours awarded his invalid wife Rhona the QSM for services to migrant and refugee communities. He also passed on to us an opinion piece from Garrison Keillor of Prairie Home Companion fame that is relevant both to his wife’s situation and to the forthcoming elections: Let the leader lead.