30 August 2024
The Sarum College stall at Greenbelt was a popular place over the festival last weekend.
The Sarum team — Jayme Reaves, Susie Snyder, Michael Hahn, Alison Webster, and Ian Macdonald — had a fantastic time engaging with Greenbelt festival-goers about the many opportunities to study at Sarum College as well as posing a few questions of their own over the weekend.
“We wanted to run a bit of an experiment at Greenbelt, so we asked a similar question each day with only one word change each day,” Jayme explains. “On Friday, we asked people ‘What is your most pressing theological question?’ and they shared with us a multitude of questions over the course of the day. On Saturday, we asked ‘What is your most pressing spiritual question?’ and then on Sunday we asked ‘What is your most pressing religious question?’ We were very curious to see if we got different questions each day or not, as each of these words mean different things to different people but also often end up getting lumped together.
“While there was a slight shift each day, the differences were not as stark as one might have expected. On Friday with the theological question, we had more Bible-related questions and more deeply Christian theological questions. On Saturday with the spiritual question, the responses did have a slightly more experiential focus but many of the questions asked could have been asked on the other days as well. (It is worth noting that on Saturday it also rained quite heavily, so not as many people stopped to chat as they did on Friday). On Sunday with the religious question, we expected perhaps more interfaith questions or questions related to religious practice or other traditions, but instead we largely got more of the same types of questions that would have fit on either of the two previous days.
“It is worth noting that people asked how we defined the three terms, and we also observed that 1) Most who participated only did so on one day rather than each day; 2) The engagement on day 1 (theological) was the most active with each subsequent day decreasing; and 3) We had several who thought about the question from one day and returned on another day to submit their question, sometimes to cries of dismay that we had changed the question (we still took their questions, of course!).
“Visitors asked what the plan was for these questions while many expected answers there and then.” she adds. “The plan is to collate the questions and have the wider academic community at Sarum respond, so stay tuned for the follow up!”
A small flavour of some of the questions …
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