The beginnings of a remembered reading list for Vision4life

So this is a bit of a cheat really because this post is also over on the women in ministries blog here where we've been blogging and talking about blogging and creating blogs all afternoon. Fortunately I'm not the only blogger so that really helped. You can read Kate Gray's blog here. We are however still have connection problems which is quite a blogging challenge - as you can see we are coping - though I'm not coping so well with the UK keyboard - my ys and zs are getting mixed up.

One of the great things about all meeting up as a group is that we get to talk about books we're reading, have read or might like one day to read. Over supper on our first evening Sheila Maxey talked about a Book of Silence by Sara Maitland that she's reading. As is the way when talking about books and remembering this led some of to remember other books by Sara Maitland and I think that the one many of us remember reading first is Walking on the Water: women talk about spirituality from 1983 which she edited together with Jo Garcia. (I have to say that none of us could actually remember the title but thank goodness for google which helps us piece our failing memories together!)
Meanwhile Janet Lees prepared a booklist to help us make connections between the Vision4Life year of the Bible and techniques for remembering the Bible and we'll post the whole of that to the blog as the dazs progress but at our Tuesday morning session she showed us some of the wonderful work of Sheffield artist Dinah Roe Kendal and her book Allegories of Heaven: An Artist Explores the Greatest Story Ever Told Piquant, PO Box 83, Carlisle, CA3 9GR (www.piquant.net) ISBN 1 903689 12 0. The pictures are wonderful and helped us share and meditate on some classics by the old masters that we'd been given in our scrapbooking treasure boxes the previous evening.
Janet also encouraged us to read two books by William Herzog Parables as subversive speech. Jesus as pedagogue of the oppressed and Prophet and teacher an introduction to the historical Jesus. She encouraged us to think about his perspectives on the strucutres of society in 1st century Palestine and the differences between that time and British 21st century culture. Weaving and enabling the remembering of the Bible we have to be aware of the connections and the diconnections between that time and society and our own.
Anyway, now we've done the beginning we can promise more of the middle and the end of the reading list as we progress. In the meantime I'm hoping that once I've posted this some of my colleagues here may make some suggestions in the comments section about other books they are reading.