At the beginning of March, I was honoured to be the guest of the Wendt Character Initiative at Dubuque University in Iowa. The university hosted a conference on “Character and Place” and I presented the plenary public lecture at this conference. It gave me the opportunity to think further on the shaping (and deforming) of character in the present context of declining empire. Not surprisingly, I found myself drawn to song to help me bring together the themes of the lecture. And so I turned to the Martyn Joseph/Stewart Henderson song, “Whoever it Was that Brought Me Here Will Have to Take Me Home.” The lecture ends with Martyn’s “Let Yourself.”
Receive this as my interim sabbatical report.
Brian is an activist theologian, a retired CRC campus minister, the founder of the Wine Before Breakfast community, and farms with Sylvia Keesmaat at Russet House Farm.He engages issues of theology and culture, and has written a couple of books you might want to check out. His most recent offering is cowritten with Sylvia Keesmaat and entitled Romans Disarmed: Resisting Empire, Demanding Justice.