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Monthly Archives: November 2016

Self-Transformations: Poetry Reading Celebrating Scottish Interfaith Week

Georgi Gill introducing the poets, Storytelling Court, November 18, 2016

Ten participants gathered together at the Scottish Poetry Library on three Thursdays in a row this November to explore their faith journeys and to write of their transformation towards or out of faith. At each workshop led by a different poet, they tried their hand at Haiku and free verse in timed exercises and in free flow. Word associations and images suggested at the workshops stirred thoughts and emotions later in the week and several participants wrote poetry, some for the first time, some after a long gap and others who were old hands at poetry probed this new combination of subjects—faith,

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Religious language in the interplay of faith communities in Russia

Guest Post
Gulnaz Sibgatullina
PhD candidate at Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (the Netherlands)

I had known about the project “Conversion, Translation & the Language of Autobiography” (CTLA) long before coming to the University of Edinburgh in November 2016. But only during my stay here as a visiting graduate student, did I finally have a chance to meet the scholars who conceived this project. In my discussions with Hephzibah Israel and Matthias Frenz I felt as if I was sharing ideas with my academic “soulmates”: despite considerable differences in spatial (India vs. Russia) and temporal (the 18th-19th centuries vs.

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Explorations through Being Human Festival 2016

How can we explore in meaningful ways how languages construct concepts related to the sacred?

Looking for creative means to approach this rather abstract question, I came across the work of Active Inquiry (http://www.activeinquiry.co.uk/) and contacted Gavin Crichton its artistic director to see if techniques from Image theatre might be of any help. Gavin thought that this was certainly possible and was enthusiastic about giving it a try. We discussed theatre techniques that had been developed by the Brazilian theatre practitioner Augusto Baol (1931-2009) and whether these could be used to pick apart and analyse concepts considered central to religions.

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