Extension Education

This work offers some justifiable measure through critical examination of the preacher, writer, speaker and broadcaster the Revd Dr Colin Morris: a practical, communicative theologian and often a controversialist. It carefully examines distinctive features of his diverse preaching, speaking, writing and broadcasting while in pastoral ministry, Northern Rhodesian/Zambian politics, global mission affairs and BBC senior management, to name but four contexts. The project draws some of its findings from Morris’s published work, but the majority from original source material (900-1000 items) supplied by Dr Morris specifically for this thesis and now catalogued as the Colin Morris Collection (CMC). The thesis recognises that amidst such diversity there is commonality too. Morris attends to certain vital recurring themes and these are examined in depth, specifically in chapters on apologetics, missiology and communications. Overall, the work affirms communication to be the rallying and unifying concept across diverse platforms, and voice the prominent metaphor which enables us to hear and heed Morris’s distinctiveness. A methodology of radical looking, listening, reading and questioning guides the whole enquiry. The thesis evidences how Morris’s words become flesh, espoused and operant, in his vocations as Methodist minister, field missionary, pulpit preacher, political campaigner, popular orator, media contributor, presenter, interviewer and analyst, and how his ‘scripts’ speak into and out of many spaces. Chapter seven draws conclusions about Morris’s modus operandi as a communicator using the notion of transcriptive space. Thus, a measure of the man and his work as at 2013 is offered to the Academy and the Church, leaving ample room for further discovery by future researchers through the Colin Morris Collection of archived materials.

exposed to and schooled in through Western philosophy, anthropology, theology and political science: the myriad words and ideas, took on flesh with intelligibility, simplicity and dignity in the form of those with whom he sat, ate, wrote and debated.

This paper was presented to the 37th Asia-Pacific Conference of Correctional Administrators, Denarau, Fiji, 9 Nov 2017. The Conference theme was 'Restorative justice – a tool for effective rehabilitation'. The paper argues that restorative justice is needed for the sacred scriptures of the world faiths as there are too many examples of them being used manipulatively  and without sufficient understanding. Biblical examples are drawn upon and a controversial court case in Fiji is recalled in which scriptural abuse was used as justification for the physical abuse of young women. The paper calls for pastors and leaders to have sufficient levels of theological and biblical education to equip them responsibly for preaching and teaching.