This weekend Mackintosh Evangelical Church is having its weekend away. Philip Fayers is picking me up at three o’clock this afternoon to give me (among others) a lift down to Brunel Manor near Torquay. It should be a good weekend – I really feel at home at Mack: they’re a good bunch of people and it’s a good fellowship. We’ll be looking at Ephesians, so that will hopefully be interesting and challenging!
It’s a pity that the CU new leader’s training weekend is at the same time. I’m now on the newly-formed CU Publicity team, and as such could go on the weekend, but wasn’t told until Wednesday last week, which is not particularly advanced notice. From what I hear of last year, it’s a good weekend, and it would have been fun to meet CUers from other universities in Wales, including a certain Rich Andrews from Bangor. Oh well, I can’t do everything, no matter how hard I try.
Before then I need to get a few things done, such as packing, picking up my English results for last term and giving a talk on “The Death of the Author” to the Christians in Humanities group. I wrote my Critical Theory essay on Roland Barthes’ essay of that title, and my talk is a Christian response to what he says. He’s quite explicitly anti-Truth and anti-God:
“Literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text) liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law.”
Despite that, he does have some sensible and pertinant things to say on the concept of authorship, though he goes to an opposite extreme in his own views. But I’ll hopefully discuss that in more depth soon.