Mar

Celebration of Research

Laidlaw College Ōtautahi/Christchurch is pleased to invite you to a Laidlaw faculty research presentation evening - Let it be Beautiful and Finding Our Way.

Hear from Rev. Dr Maja Whitaker, and interdisciplinary lecturer Miriam Jessie Fisher, who will share recent work that they presented at the San Diego conference for the American Academy of Religion. If you are interested in embodiment, creativity and spirituality that is lived in the midst of our everyday lives, take the opportunity to come along.

Their papers titled: Perfectly beautiful, slim, and able?: Confounding expectations of eschatological embodiment and Mapping Pilgrimage – stitched cartography as spiritual practice and sacred reading will be offered with time for questions and answers, and shaped to offer theological ideas in accessible and inclusive ways.

Coffee and cake provided.

Please RSVP via the form below, to help us appropriately cater for this event.

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Where	Christchurch Campus
When	7:00pm - 8:30pm
Cost	FREE & open to the public
RSVP	Via the form below

PRESENTERS

Rev Dr Maja Whitaker

Maja is Laidlaw’s academic dean, a practical theologian, and pastor with a passion for research that helps us think better about the fullness of our lived lives. Her work is both timely, encouraging and challenging. She will explore the ideas we have about resurrection bodies and how these speak to current Western cultural assumptions about bodies and body shaming. Offering a new vision for Christians to engage with bodies and embodiment – their own and others - this presentation will offer deeply theological and beautifully accessible ways of exploring our ideas around bodies, identity, shame and celebration. This discussion will also explore ideas around disability, disabled bodies and the fullness of human identity. Maja’s recently released edited book: Pursuing Perfection: Faith and the Female Body will also be celebrated and available on the evening.

Miriam Jessie Fisher

Miriam Jessie is an arts-based researcher and this presentation offers a way of thinking about spiritual pilgrimage through the vehicle of stitched cartographies and poetry. She will explore ideas of how God meets us in particular places, in whenua, in the actualities of our lives and invite people to reflect on their own journeys of pilgrimage. Three maps will be presented exploring narratives of the ‘Prodigal Son,’ the life of Elijah, and a personal ‘archipelago of faith.’ The ways in which our faith is an ongoing journey where God is present invites theological reflection on salvation as an ongoing divine work. Meditations on landscapes of spiritual significance, insights, homecoming, exile and wandering as human aspects of being in a world as seekers and those sought will be offered. Listeners will be invited to consider the cartography of their lives as a means to witness to their spiritual pilgrimage. Original work will be displayed and prints of a particular work may be ordered on the night.