Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Uk adventures 3 – Durham familiar

Monday I navigated my way from Manchester to Durham. I’m thousands of miles from home, yet there is some welcome familiarity – back in a place I was a year ago, back among networks: Pete Ward who examined my PhD, John Swinton who shaped my PhD methodology, Paul Fiddes whom I’ve met through Baptist worlds.

So there’s a welcome familiarity in knowing where to turn when leaving a train station, where to find coffee and wifi, catchup to be had.

I’m in Durham for the Ecclesiology and Ethnography network.

The what?

Yep, well, to quote Neil Ormerod in The Routledge Companion to the Christian Church, there is a “major divide in ecclesiology, between those who study … an idealist Platonic form in some noetic heaven, and those who study it more as a realist Aristotelian form, grounded in the empirical data of historical ecclesial communities.”

My interest, and the interest of the Ecclesiology and Ethnography network, is the latter. What actually happens in church? Research as ethnography, as talking to real people in real places?

Posted by steve at 11:22 PM

2 Comments

  1. Steve, I’m at the conference and just listened to you give your paper. Good stuff. Very helpful. Look forward to chatting at some point over the next few days.

    Comment by michael volland — September 21, 2011 @ 1:50 am

  2. Thanks Michael. Was good to be forced to articulate some ideas aloud. I’m around till Thursday arvo, so love to catch up and share notes.

    steve

    Comment by steve — September 21, 2011 @ 3:40 am

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