Next month Rev. Karen Hering will kick off our summer writing workshops with her four-day session, Awakening Theological Imagination in the Congregation: A Spiritual Practice of Writing with Karen Hering. Karen is a chaplain, consulting literary minister, and author of Writing to Wake the Soul: Opening the Sacred Conversation Within, a book about the spiritual practice of writing. A recent review of Karen’s book in the Christian Century identifies Writing to Wake the Soul as a valuable part of the spiritual writing tradition. The reviewer also comments, “what sets Hering’s book apart is its second half, in which she offers ten chapters with themed writing prompts on faith, prayer, sin, love, justice, redemption, grace, hope, reverence, and hospitality.” (See the full review in the March 5, 2014 issue of the Christian Century.)
Below is the final of three video clips from our interview with Karen; we previously posted two portions of the interview during our winter series on faith and writing.
» Watch part one and part two of the interview.
This video is divided into multiple sections, as outlined below (the links will take you a particular section of the video on YouTube’s website):
Writing as a spiritual practice 1 (00:10) | Writing as a spiritual practice 2 (01:28) | The sacred whisper (02:27) | Ellipses (05:06) | Metaphors (07:15) | The tangle (09:04) | A word (11:06) | Listening to the meaning of your life (13:11) | Reluctant writers (14:31) | The broken watch (16:11)| Fluency and translation (18:26) | Commonalities and differences (20:19) | Sermons with holes in them (21:30) | Seeds (23:52) | The unfinished sentence (25:41) | Time set apart (27:55)
Image: cropped Seashell by Moyan Brenn courtesy of Flickr, using a Creative Commons license.
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How inspiring! Thank you, Collegeville Institute and Karen, for making these ideas available to a larger audience. I hope to bring some of these practices to my congregation in the fall and would love to attend workshops with Karen in the future.