Learning from Langland: theo-poetic resources for the post-Hind ...

Reading Hind: rhetoric and response
I have outlined the main features of the Hind settlement: its agenda of regional
reconfiguration; its decision to continue to work closely with HEI’s; its promotion of a
‘learning Church’ rather than simply a well educated clergy. I have also suggested some of
the obstacles which have prevented its proposals being smoothly implemented. As a next
step, I want to look more closely at Hind One and to outline the way in which the rest of the
thesis will proceed.
In the Introduction, I suggested that Hind One has a difficult task in that it tries to reconcile
various different discourses, one example being theological language and the language of
management. In expanding on that observation in the light of my description of its
settlement, I want to go further and argue that Hind One tries to harmonise some
incompatible positions and to elide some contradictions, and that it is possible to detect
places where this occurs through basic discourse analysis. 41 I intend to work in the course
of this thesis with three particular tensions which inform the Hind project. They are as
follows: firstly, language to do with the formal accreditation of learning, including the
provision of grids of staged development, in tension with the less measurable notion of
formation as a journey which does not proceed consistently. Related to this is the report’s
stated desire to provide both flexibility in training which recognises the ordinand as an
individual, and the establishment of bounded criteria which need to be met for professional
progression. Secondly, the report exhibits tensions between a model of ministry as the
41 I want to operate with a hermeneutic of retrieval as well as of suspicion, and to resist
taking an entirely deconstructive approach; critical discourse analysis confronts the reader
with his/her own location with regard to the power issues of a text, and as someone who is
professionally responsible for responding to Hind’s proposals, I am part of the institutional
structures it represents and addresses.
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