Dr. Peter C. Blum
Thursday, November 12, 2015 at 7:30 pm
Public Lecture, Chapel, Conrad Grebel University College
“Where Two or Three are Gathered, but Who's Counting? Discipleship as if I am Multiple Agencies”
This will be an experiment in thinking about discipleship , as understood in the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition, in light of the idea that there is irreducible multiplicity in the individual. “Discipleship as if I am multiple agencies.” Freud opened the twentieth century with the announcement that there are opposed/conflicting powers or agencies in the psyche, and that these agencies operate mostly behind the back of consciousness. Subsequent phenomenological and sociological reflections have reinforced the idea of the self as multiple. I will present an outline of this theoretical trajectory, and explore some ways in which Mennonites might draw from it in thinking about the relationship between the individual disciple and the gathered community (church). A central question will be: Who counts?