[Dialogue] Pat and I are off to Dallas for a week ...

[Ken Fisher]

Friends, 

Pat and I are off to Dallas for a week to participate in Gene and Joyce Marshall's Realistic Living's annual event.  I was last there in 1991.  As you may know, it has been occurring since 1984.  His many books and articles are my 'go to' context for Christian theology and political engagement.  Below is a brief description of what we will be playing with.

Ken


For more information go to:

Realistic Living resources: http://www.RealisticLiving.org
And view our blog: http://www.RealisticLiving.org/blog/ 



The August 2011 Leadership Training School and Research Symposium

Post-Patriarchal Christianity will be the topic of the Leadership Training School
conducted on August 18-21

The Great Goddess sensibilities in the history of human veneration reach back at least 25,000 years and these sensibilities have the power to reach beyond the death of patriarchy for millennia to come. Patriarchy is a mere newcomer, less than 6,000 years old. But patriarchy has been the cultural, economic, and political backdrop in which Christianity and all the other classical religions were born and expanded to worldwide impact.

In addition to examining the depth of the radical feminist address to Christianity, our Training School this August will examine the 20th Century Theological Revolution led by such theologians as Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and H. Richard Niebuhr, all of whom retained some elements of patriarchal hangover. Can the awakenment that so many of us experienced under their guidance be integrated with a fresh appropriation of radical feminist sensibilities?

We see this topic as an opportunity for both women and men to explore more deeply their personal lives and their religious practices. We will divide into Men’s and Women’s Circles for part of our time together.

The themes of the Training School will be carried over to the

Research Symposium
August 21-24.

We will tailor the Spirit reflections during the Symposium meeting to the themes of the Training School, and we will assume that our research will reflect the energies and insights shared in the Training School. We anticipate both full group and small group work in the Symposium schedule.	The breakout groups will focus on these three topics that are the long-range research arenas that have characterized our 12 years of Symposium work: (1) Theological Edge, (2) Christian Resurgence Circles, and (3) Social Ethics and Mission.

Preparatory Study

For those attending the Training School and/or the Symposium, we recommend reading Chapters 5 and 6 of Feminism and Religion by Rita M. Gross (Beacon Press, Boston: 1996). We will study and discuss these two chapters in the Training School. This classic overview of these issues is written in an accessible, scholarly, passionate, and yet objective style. This is an important book to read even if you don’t attend these meetings.

To prepare us to review the Christian heritage that has been central to our research, read four lectures by Joe Mathews published in Bending History: Selected Talks of Joseph W. Mathews (info at ResurgencePublishing.com).

1. “The Recovery of the Other World” (page 164) This talk is about the new basic metaphor (or Religious Mode) that takes the place of the old two-story metaphor (gods and goddesses, angels and devils) in which Christian scriptures & classical tradition were originally expressed.
2. “The Christ Lecture: The Christian Self-Understanding of Death and Resurrection” (page 55)
3 “The Freedom Lecture: Biblical Faith and the Ethical Revolution” (page 69)
4. “The Church Lecture: The Dynamical Understanding of the People of God” (page 76)
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