Description
“Once upon a time, words began to vanish from the language of children.” So begins the preface to The Lost Words, written by Robert Macfarlane and illustrated by Jackie Morris. This fairy-tale preface alludes to the 2007 edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary, which had culled “outdoor and natural” words deemed irrelevant to modern-day childhood—words like acorn, adder, bluebell, conker, dandelion, fern, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, newt, otter, and willow—and replaced them with “indoor and virtual” words like blog, bullet-point, chatroom, and voice-mail. The Lost Words is Macfarlane and Morris’ creative protest, which endeavors to re-enchant us into the world of these lost creatures.As it plays with various genre, through word and image, The Lost Words re-enchants us into a vision of the natural world which is remarkably consistent with a biblical theology of creation. This lecture attends to Macfarlane and Morris’ playful exploration of three themes which are central to the biblical account of creation: forming, filling, and naming. It elucidates how Macfarlane and Morris’ playful exploration of these themes re-enchants us into a participatory engagement with the natural world which does not claim mastery, but marvels at mystery—and thereby compels us to orthopraxy in creation-care.
In its analysis, this lecture draws on the work of Alison Milbank, Meredith Kline, Bruce Waltke, Owen Barfield, Charles Taylor, James K. A. Smith, Richard Bauckham, and Wendell Berry.
| Period | 18 Oct 2024 |
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| Held at | L'Abri Fellowship, Canada, British Columbia |