inspiral blog

I’ve been wrestling with the idea of atonement that I grew up with (you can see some of my rants here, here, and here) for a while now, and so have been exploring various alternative ideas about atonement, particularly nonviolent ones in which God is not responsible for the killing. Jane Carter was also interested in thinking further about these ideas, so we decided to make an evening of it and involve everyone.

We particularly centred discussion around James Alison’s Girardian ideas (as outlined here) and I attempted to outline them for those who hadn’t read it. I think the biggest thing is getting out of the headspace of a particular way of looking at texts and interpreting them, especially when they’re so deeply ingrained. It was interesting that Anthony, not having the same background of assumptions, didn’t struggle with that at all.

Anyway, a useful beginning to exploring ideas that we don’t generally think outside the box on. Trying to do that with integrity, while keeping everyone’s heads in the room, is a continued challenge.

This week we all pitched in to help Anthony move house. He doesn’t have a whole lot of stuff, so with four cars it didn’t take very long at all. He’s moved into a house near us with another inspiral member.

Nonetheless, a bit of a chaotic week with people coming and going and having the kids in a different place! But lots of fun, and great to do something different somewhere different.

Heard from Jane C this week – fantastic stuff.

Great to have Ciaron O’Reilly with us this week, telling some of his stories of nonviolent resistance to empire. He’d been a real encouragement the whole week actually, spending time with the Doveton crew and John Jensen’s mob out west.

After Ciaron talked we had dinner and we had some really open discussion from one of our members about where he was at – really honest, raw stuff and the kind of thing we’re about. It was great for Ciaron to have that kind of insight into the mob too, and for us to have the opportunity to open up to him as much as he had with us.