Critic Cal

“What is it again that you're doing?” Is the question I’m ever eschewing; But it’s time to face fears Cos in two-point-four years I’ve got one hundred thousand words due in… When asked what I’m up to these days, I typically reply with a confus(ed/ing) flurry of apologies and caveats. [1] So I thought I’d have a go at actually answering the question, for those of my friends who are polite enough to still be interested. Yes, so, I’m doing a(nother) PhD. [2] A sort of “activist” one, motivated by popular and (to me) troubling influences within my immediate and wider Christian circles. Three years full time, at Aberdeen University via Bristol Baptist College. I love being a part of the college and usually spend around 3 days a week there, using the library and exploiting the friendliness and wisdom of staff and fellow students. I have an excellent supervisor here in Bristol and an also-excellent co-supervisor with whom I interact remotely. The Baptist college is partnered with a nearby...

Jordan Peterson gets ALL the YouTube views but PLEASE don't think that makes him emulation-worthy!  I recently received an email invite to an event named "Preaching like Peterson: Can a preacher learn anything from the rhetoric of Jordan Peterson?" Now, I don't know how the event organisers plan on answering this question. I am quite willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they have prepared something rigorously critically attentive and resistant to Peterson's toxic and dehumanising ideologies.  I'm considerably less willing, however, to actually go and find out for myself... My own answer to what Christians can learn from Peterson about preaching is quite simply "how not to do it." Dog-whistling, contrarianism, fear-mongering and distorted, reductive, pseudo-intellectual, agenda-serving interpretation of the Bible and other venerated sources of authority? Nah, yer alright thanks.  In fact, the very first essay I submitted for m...

Right from the start of my MA I knew I wanted to "get to grips with" biblical hermeneutics – what it is I think Christians are  doing (or should be) when we read and interpret the Bible. And though I've got more than enough remaining questions to keep me going through a PhD (and no doubt the rest of my life whatever I do afterwards), the course was a great help towards making sense of sense-making. I've said before  that I'd like to write down some of the things I've come to understand about hermeneutics as it relates to LGBTQ+ inclusion within the Christian community. Because I strongly believe it's vital to begin with an appreciation of the complexity of the Christian canon and of the weighty task of receiving it in diverse, Spirit-led community together. There's no single definitive "biblical position" and no "safe side" answers: all interpretations involve interpretation, and all of them have consequences.  Realistically, it fee...

IF YOU’RE KILLED ON ZOOM YOU DIE HERE This is your body Breaking up At 50 megabits-per-second Straight to my front room A three-by-four of eyes and mouths Unanswerable sound I love you for an hour every day The pixels of our faces numbered We are better than a multiplex of data Gathered Each one to our own home On the night you were betrayed We took the slice and blessed it Everything is what you make of it A host of fragments un-assembled At our private suppers I have eagerly desired to be left alone Forgive me For I do not know what we are doing Carolyn Whitnall, 2020 The other day I requested a Zoom link that I never received. It was for a church thing. The common sense response would've been to ask again, over a different channel. But I was tired and lonely and sad and so I just skipped the session and chalked it up as the latest episode in the lengthy, rambling narrative of rejection that, when I'm tired and lonely and sad, feels like the en...

Of all my poems, this might be the one that’s closest to my heart. I wrote it in the aftermath of Christmas 2018, and was chuffed to have it appear in the  Winter 2019 edition of Preach magazine . THIS HOUSE   Oh come, oh come Emmanuel, and hurl Our order into holy disarray: Upend the tables where we wheel and deal, And scatter our accrued prosperity. Awake us, dancer on the dancing deep, From placid slumber; rock the boat; disturb The peace that we content ourselves to keep, And make us see the chaos we transfer. Confound our clarity, cut short our too long Prayers, take back the narrative and heckle Sermons preached to itching ears. Throw down Each stone in every separating wall. Do what you’re here to do … but, come what may, Rebuild the ruins of us, please – and stay.  Carolyn Whitnall, 2019. And then the pandemic. And the stuff of it all got a bit real. And no, I don’t mean any of the following: that “God has done this,” or that I wished f...

A LADY WALKS IN AS I’M LEAVING, AND Pause. “Am I … where I am supposed to be?” Petite, the pastel-two-pieced figure bars My exit, eyeing me confusèdly And blushing as it dawns on her she errs In one of two both-mortifying ways. I muster my most womanliest smile And, firmly unoffended, meet her gaze: “I know! We’re used to queuing!” I freestyle. She breathes relief. I take my person out The unambiguously coded door – As order mollifies her nagging doubt – And lose the mask. I shrug it off, secure In my admission by the status quo; But every body needs some where to go. Carolyn Whitnall, 2019. I’m cautious to write about gender because I don’t want to seem to weigh in on matters that are outside of my comfortably protected (cis female) experience. But one thing I do know a bit about is anxiety, and I see a lot of it (especially among Christians) in response to increasing societal awareness and embrace of gender diversity beyond the assigned sex binary. Every now a...

The other day I enthusiastically embarked on a book by a male theologian popular with some people whose opinions I rate considerably. It took me to the end of the preface to start wondering whether it was too late to cancel the Kindle purchase. Of the 30+ luminaries, mentors, colleagues and assistants mentioned by name as having helped make the book happen, precisely one was female. [1] Now, such cases are hardly rare: I've read plenty of similarly-prefaced books without batting an eyelid, and probably many more where the data would have been on a par had they been available. But for some reason – perhaps because I'd had such high hopes for the author – I just couldn't let this one go. Here was a book which purported to instruct the church, and yet it seemed as though the author was quite content to disregard half the church in the writing of it. Was it even worth my reading? How relevant could it be to me, if I was irrelevant to it ? Meanwhile, Christian feminist Twitt...

Today I'm going to talk about you, and how woefully inadequate it is. Other languages have better options. The embarrassingly small handful of 'foreign words' I learned in school included the French tu (informal singular) and vous (formal singular, formal or informal plural), and the Spanish tú (informal singular), usted (formal singular), vosotros (informal plural) and ustedes (formal plural). Olden-times English disambiguated too: thou and thee for (subject, object) singular, and you and ye for (subject, object) plural. The latter could also be used in the formal singular case, just to confuse things (if anything we think of thee and thou as highfalutin now, at least in the south of the UK). But somewhere along the line we decided that we had suffered under the tyranny of common sense grammar rules for long enough and broke away from our European neighbours. The consequence being that second person subtleties are lost in modern English rendering, with int...

            THEN                         Later, there would be doctrine.                         After whispers and mayhem;             After dinner in a locked room and a show of hands;             After “mass hallucinations”, private consultations,             Promises and re-commissions;             After sea and sand and sunrise,             And a parting in the clouds.                         After fire falling, filling, overspilling;             Raging and enraging;             After news and bread and bodies breaking.         ...

I recently heard it suggested that church should aspire to be like the butterfly: beautiful and carefree, our days of darkness and enshroudedness past, existing only to reproduce and to bring joy. A lovely image – and I’m sure it resonated with those who needed it. For me, though, it registered a little … partial. There is so much about my Christian journey – raw, real, difficult-but-hope-filled good stuff – that is not described by such an analogy: times of personal struggle and limitation (often, for me, in the form of depression and anxiety) in which my faith is no less real, and God is no less faithful; times of heartache as I learn to lament the brokenness of a world in which there's no getting away from the fact that new creation life is ‘not yet’ as well as ‘now’ . It’s also, if you stretch the metaphor, a little bleak – the existence of a butterfly is famously fleeting, while the Christian hope is of something altogether more enduring. As I pondered this, a different ...