Part 326. A ramble.

In the 1980s I read Faith in the City, a report commissioned by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Robert Runcie. It was a study in deprivation and marginalisation in urban areas and listed recommendations on how the Church of England should press for change to overcome the causes of poverty and exclusion.  It was followed by Faith in the Countryside.

One aspect of the earlier report intrigued me: the call for not simply 'ambulance' work, helping individuals at point of need, but also a demand to engage with politicians to tackle causes of the ills set out in the report.  The report made reference to Liberation Theology. Thus it was that I became much more aware of and drawn to the writings of Gustavo Gutierrez and Leonardo Boff. I was drawn into reading the ideas of Jurgen Moltmann and then into the writings of Martin Luther King Jnr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, James Lawson, Desmond Tutu, Dominic Crossan and Richard Rohr. 

Gutierrez, Moltmann and Lawson died this year. They leave a legacy of love, and hope, for the downtrodden, the oppressed, the marginalised and discriminated against.

Alongside the importance I attach to social justice issues and the need for Christians to engage in demanding systemic change has been a shift towards support for concepts found in liberal, progressive, radical and deconstructivist thinking.  Thus it is that I have been influenced by concepts articulated by, amongst others, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jacques Derrida, Don Cupitt, Marcus Borg, Walter Brueggemann, John Robinson, Jim Rigby, Jim Palmer, Colin Coward and John Caputo.

I no longer describe myself as Christian.  I seek to understand, follow, and promote the concepts of love and social justice attributed to Jesus in the synoptic gospels.