The Sacred Art of Storytelling
Thursdays: May 9, 16, 23, & 30th
1:30 - 3pm ET online
The sacred art of storytelling is present in every aspect of human life and faith. Stories can heal us. Stories can illuminate our limitations and failures. Stories can encourage us and bring us hope. They can draw us into deeper ways of following Jesus.
Come and learn from academics and practitioners in a Learning Centre series about the power of story and the way it intersects with repentance, evangelism, formation and community building.
Learning Centre sessions are recorded and made available afterwards for those who sign up but cannot attend in person
Week 1 (May 9)
As more and more stories are shared about oppressive, marginalizing practices within the church, it can leave us feeling defenseless, downhearted, and just plain angry. What do we do in the face of spiritual abuse, church hurt, and religious trauma? How do we move forward together? Andrea shares her research into spiritual abuse, and creating healthy church cultures by learning from our past to move into our future.
Week 2 (May 16)
Week 3 (May 23)
Recent trends in theology, neurobiology, and human geographies give attention to the emergent qualities of life through shared experiences, everyday routines, embodied movements, and what might otherwise be viewed as "unexceptional interactions" with people and places comprising our lives. Attention to these everyday encounters helps draw us away from the 'framing' and 'fixing' of people and places that closes us to the unique possibilities and full potential emerging among them. In short, while everyday experiences and "unexceptional encounters" offer only small hints of what becomes of them, they are nevertheless the very soil in which life and its possibilities emerge. Ethnographic research - including autoethnographies and storytelling - offer helpful insights into such "unexceptional encounters" by allowing the formative elements of one's experiences, rhythms, movements, and places to be seen, heard, and known for what they truly are. This move toward non-representational thinking is a necessary component to research and relationality as it acknowledges the self-evident uniqueness of human lives and opens us to new possibilities of knowing and living together in authentic community.
Week 4 (May 30)
Tim Bratton is the playwright and performer of the show, My Little Plastic Jesus. Join Tim at the Learning Centre to hear about how telling his own story, through the story-rich medium of theatre helped to address big ideas and complex situations with grace and laughter. The show is described as "a solo living room show, where Tim Bratton finds hilarity and heartache as he unpacks his upbringing in evangelical pop culture, examining its folly and redeeming its faith. Experience an insider’s quest to unravel his own existential crisis by deconstructing the culture he grew up in, with both satire and love."
Register
There are two options to access the New Leaf Learning Centre: a monthly subscription or a one-session pass (below). For the monthly subscription, please visit here.
The suggested amount is $40 ($10/week); simply choose your amount in the drop-down menu and “sign up now”.
We would like for you to join us, so if you can’t afford the registration at this time, please reach out to us and we will make sure you are able to participate: admin@newleafnetwork.ca
