Join Dr Peter Merrington for small-group adventures in creativity.

Ongoing 2008 registration (next course starts Thursday 17 April) for Poetry and the Christian faith. We meet for one two-hour session per week over eight weeks, 19h00 to 21h00. Reading materials (and refreshments) are provided and the interactive sessions are backed up with audio-visual material.

Contact peter@merrington.co.za, 021-797-9482 or 083-324-1470. The fee for the course is R800. R400 deposit on registration, and the balance at commencement. Venue – garden library off Doordrift Road, Timour Hall area (Plumstead). Daytime and evening sessions offered depending on interest. Each session is limited to a maximum of ten people.

Poetry and Religion – a two-month course (weekly two-hour sessions) on poetry and Christian faith. We begin with the Anglo-Saxon ‘Dream of the Cross’ and explore samples of poems about faith from the middle ages, the renaissance, the eighteenth century, the romantic period, the Victorians, and the twentieth century.

The course will be interactive, with slide illustrations from art and architecture as a background to discussion.

The purpose of the course is to appreciate some of the finest poetry written about Christian faith, to explore the symbols of faith, and the changes in consciousness that are Iinked to shifting historical views of doctrine and belief.

Traditions of meditation, the dream-vision, Courtly Love, chivalry and the Grail Quest, the protestant conscience, love and individualism, rebellion and submission, sacrifice and duty, the blending of ancient classical myth and Christian doctrine, the elements of pastoral, modernity and its existential crises – are some of the topics we will touch on.

This is a course for believers and for seekers.  Sceptics are welcome but must honour the intention, which is to explore and appreciate aspects of the poetic expression of faith.

Peter Merrington is a Professor Extraordinaire in the English Department at the University of the Western Cape, and Visiting Fellow, University of Sussex. His first book of fiction, Zebra Crossings: Tales from the Shaman’s Record, was published by Jacana Press in March 2008.