Monday, March 16, 2015

Tweeting Charles Taylor missionally: discussion questions

This semester, I’m Reading Charles Taylor missionally. Taylor’s work has been called “the most the academic event of the decade.” (here). He’s one of the most insightful cultural thinkers of our time and so I’ve offered a learning party – a invitation to read Taylor in community and to consider what it thus means to speak of church, mission and faith in a secular age?

On Wednesday, we focus on Taylor’s, The Ethics of Authenticity.

I chose to start here first because it’s short. At 120 pages, it is a much more achievable place to start than the 900 pages of Taylor’s, A Secular Age. Second, he was challenged to express himself as clearly as he could, so that makes The Ethics of Authenticity a good place to start.

Today I emailed the class with some preparation: my (current) list of questions I’ll be using to start discussion.

  1. Can you think of a story from your experience that illustrates one of the three malaises of society described by Taylor in chapter 1.
  2. Can you each please bring one quote (printed on a separate sheet of paper) that you really liked.
  3. “Each of us has an original way of being human.” (page 28; page 61).  Discuss.
  4. What is one question from the book you would most like to ask the group to explain to you.
  5. I have a friend who last year had a go at tweeting (160 characters max), a summary of every book of the Bible. It was a great exercise in summarising. So together, we will work on Wednesday on a twitter summary (160 characters) of each chapter.  So bring a draft prepared.  I hope we’ll actually enjoy this enough that we’ll decide we’ll actually tweet them.

I do hope that this last question will not only be fun, but will also develop student skills in summary. And it might well yield some terrific tweets on my twitter feed come Wednesday!

Posted by steve at 09:58 PM

1 Comment

  1. Hi Steve – just a quick skim of the review has this line jumping out at me… “Christian life has been impaired by a theoretical concern with certitude and rational justification; its renewal, he maintains, can be found only through a spirituality of transformative love.”

    Yes Yes Yes

    Comment by Peter Armstrong — March 17, 2015 @ 8:37 pm

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