Gathering

Perhaps I had better avoid blogging about cricket for now, maybe I'll try again after sunday.

Thesis is going quite well now I have prioritised it, I've got some good wordage for the historiographical section, and I am working on the write up of my own investigation. The most interesting bit will be the application of the latter to the former.

I spent the weekend in Birmingham - Newman House, at a very pleasant SCM Gathering, it was a little under populated (normal for spring apparently) but that kind of worked out because we had a lot of business to get through, and the people who came were mainly hardcore SCM. I was paying a lot of attention to the two workshops I went too, Movement editorial, and Marketing the Movement. I am now writing papers on them both. The former a Discussion paper, the latter just writing up what the feeling of the session was. There are disadvantages to doing this, but It is the best way of getting things across without delaying the GC meeting, which was plenty long enough.

GC was quite pleasant though, productive if nothing else, lots of exciting things are happening in the movement, I hope I can hang around to see them come to fruition. I get the feeling that there is the potential for something real exciting to happen, for us to reach a tipping point and start bringing together all the brothers and sisters in Christ who need each others support to realise their faith in a complicated world.

I also invented a new description for my politics. When I say that I am a Liberal people assume too much. I hung on to Liberal Capitalist for a while, but it isn't much better, most people interpret that as 'half arsed capitalist', also Liberal has religious connotations I am not happy with, because it is used so poorly byboth self identifiers - and by those who sling it as an insult. From now on I am going to be a Radical Capitalist. I am still a Liberal really, and it is Liberalism that fuels my political philosophy; but I want to reclaim radicalism for the center. Religious position is harder to describe. I'm a Methodist, I am Liberal, but don't want to define myself as either. I'd like to think of my Churchmanship as 'Free', and maybe my theology as 'Radical', but I am not so sure what I mean by Radical in relationship to my theology. I'll get back to you all.....