Religion, evil and forgiveness: some thoughts off air

Sunflower. Photograph (c) Marcin Szala, used under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Sunflower. Photograph (c) Marcin Szala, used under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Twice in as many weeks, I’ve provided an expert voice to aid discussion on local radio. The first invitation was to talk about Martin Luther and “what he’d ever done for us”. The most recent, to discuss religious notions of evil and forgiveness following the death of an unrepentant serial killer. Continue reading “Religion, evil and forgiveness: some thoughts off air”

Postgraduate, Part I

After my first degree, I studied at the then Centre for the study of Jewish-Christian Relations (CJCR), now a part of the Woolf Institute, Cambridge. Before graduation, I had taken a paper on Responses to the Holocaust; it is an odd thing to say, but I wrote well on the subject. A combination of that, my acquisition of Biblical Hebrew, and an earlier study visit to Israel-Palestine (with the Council of Christians and Jews) took me onto postgraduate study.

“we were more The Choir than Great British Bake-Off.”

It was a formative year. Continue reading “Postgraduate, Part I”

Theologian

Photograph of the Chapel at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. Credit: Mihnea Maftei. (CC 2.0)

To my undergraduate peers, I was a “Theologian”. This (and I guess still is) was the standard shorthand for those pursuing a degree in Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Cambridge. It felt like an odd label, and only two of my fifteen module choices contained “Theology” in the title. Continue reading “Theologian”