Five years on

It would appear that On boundaries is five years old. Given my readiness to hide away for periods of time and Reivers’ general unwillingness to communicate through the medium of words, it is a small miracle that we have managed to keep this blog going for a reasonable length of time and contribute to a number of debates, albeit in a small and rather quiet fashion (at times very quiet). Some posts are good, some are not and some are downright rubbish. There are, I think, several pieces which are as relevant now as they were then so to speak, and I want to highlight my selection below.  Reivers is also compiling a list. His will be more amusing, I promise.

New experiences: faith informs work and vice versa

Having been giving conference and seminar papers for the past eight years, I am very used to speaking in front of an academic audience or at least an audience already very interested in medieval history. For the first time ever though, I gave a non-academic talk a couple of weekends ago on women and the religious life in the middle ages. What made this more interesting was that the talk was in place of a sermon at choral evensong at my local church. I was, as one might expect, very nervous, especially as there were two history professors in the congregation: how would they react to a paper on an academic subject treated in an essentially non-academic way?

The experience was strangely liberating. Part of my interest in the religious life, especially concerning how religious and laity interacts, stems from my upbringing as a daughter of the parsonage. Equally, my historical interest in the Church allows me to take a longer view and broader perspective of some of issues confronting the good old CofE currently from sexuality to the more mundane concerns of the place of pews in church. For the first time I could blur the boundaries a little and bring these two aspects of life together, making points I couldn’t get away with in an academic paper and coming to a greater understanding of how faith influences my work and vice versa.

The sacred and profane

One of the main dichotomies I wrestle with in my work is that of the sacred vs the profane: temporal authority vs spiritual. More often than not, the dichotomy is shown up, if not to be false, then not really meaningful. Recently, both through my teaching and through reading other comment and blog sites, I have begun looking at this dichotomy afresh in terms of modern British society, or to put it another way, are we living in such a secularized or individualistic society, that there is no place to seek understanding of or tolerance of faith or ideologies in society?