Many thanks to David White for sending us this report:
On the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, the 4th of October, the Dearmer Society of Ireland, which is a student society at the Church of Ireland Theological Institute, invited the biblical scholar, Dr Margaret Daly-Denton to share some of her recent research. Her presentation was titled, ‘Ecology and the Fourth Gospel’.
Dr Daly-Denton is also an organist and an internationally published composer of liturgical music. Among her lecturing posts, she teaches on the MA in Ecology and Religion, which is now based at All Hallows College. She is currently tasked with writing the commentary on the Gospel of John for the Earth Bible series.
She has developed seven principles for an attentive ‘green’ reading of John’s text, namely, Intertextuality, Realised Eschatology, Temple Eschatology, Liturgical Hermeneutics, Knowledge and Context, Relationship to other Johannine writings and the Reception of the Text in the Tradition of the Church.
The ordinands who took part in this dialogical presentation were impressed by the enthusiasm, passion and knowledge of the speaker, and look forward to the publication of her commentary. David White and Edna Wakely, the Convenors of the Society, summed up the evening in a sentence from Dr Daly-Denton’s article in the Summer edition of Search: A Church of Ireland Journal: ‘To listen with this kind of attentiveness to the role of other-than-human living things is surely to experience the Gospel as good news for all of God’s creation.’