A three-tikanga invitation to share ideas about human wellbeing and biblical wisdom.
An informal discussion with Cassandra Burton-Wood in the embryonic stages of her research proposal.
In our late modern context we regularly feel the “cry for wisdom” (Fiddes 2013)—the vague sense that the vast sea of information in which we are drowning is still somehow not the full picture of what will lead to wellbeing and flourishing. The search for wisdom is also a persistent theme of Scripture.
One particular account of wisdom literature (defined as Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job) is that it suggests that our knowledge of what makes for wellbeing will be localized, patchy, and ad-hoc, rather than universal and law-like, and that this knowledge will be sufficient for the pursuit of wellbeing in the conditions we find ourselves in (Kelsey, 2009).
For this project I would like to critically engage with Kelsey’s claims about the nature of wisdom, and to reflect on contemporary practices that aim for human wellbeing in light of Kelsey’s approach to biblical wisdom. I am particularly interested in the practices of person-centered counselling and mātauranga approaches to wellbeing—perhaps looking at whakataukī particularly.
Because I am engaging with practices that are either not my own profession nor my own tikanga, I would like to invite practitioners in these spaces to comment on this project at this early stage (i.e. prior to submission to a university). Furthermore, because research is time and resource intensive I welcome input from all three tikanga of the Anglican church, so that my work is best placed to be of benefit to our three-tikanga church.
Bio: Cassandra Burton-Wood is a Chaplain at the University of Canterbury and has contributed to the Anglican Women’s Studies Centre in various capacities for the past three years. Her interest in the status of human knowledge and the process by which we come to know what we know began in her study of memory within the discipline of Psychology and has persisted into her study of Theology. Her previous research involved an interdisciplinary conversation between a biblical theology of spirituality and current perspective on the embodied, embedded, and enactive mind in Philosophy. :
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