friend and mentor

My interest in language and literary form as a route into theology led me to study for a number of years under the tutelage of Dr Janet Martin Soskice.  Her groundbreaking book was Metaphor and Religious Language (O.U.P. 1984); a list of her publications is here. One of the best experiences in life is when a hero becomes a mentor, and a mentor becomes a friend.

Janet Soskice is Reader in Philosophical Theology at the University of Cambridge. When I began my postgraduate research, I remember her saying that a Reader, traditionally, is someone who knows how to read, and who teaches others how to read. This struck me as novel - after all, I had been "reading" ever since I was three or four, so I thought I could read pretty well by the time I began postgrad work. But it seemed in retrospect that I had no idea how to read anything at all until I began to work with her. I learned to read faster, slower, between the lines, across generations, across cultural and language divides, in ways I never imagined possible. I learned to read what was not written as carefully as what was. When you change the way someone reads and writes and thinks, you change their whole life. Supervisors can be good, bad, indifferent or completely maddening. She was (and is) more than good - second to none.

Comments

[bobbie]

thank you for the introduction maggi, she sounds wonderful. what an honor to be able to study under/with someone like her. are any of her articles online? she sounds incredible!

[Kristin]

I read Metaphor and Religious Language in seminary some years back. Got so excited I recommended it all around. Thanks for this reminder...gotta go find that book again!

[Chris Tessone]

That book is definitely on my reading listI think Sarah Coakley cites it in her Powers and Submissions, which is where I picked it up.

[Kathryn]

She's there on my bookshelf...AND I've read her :-)
Lucky you to be taught by her, though...I kind of wish I could do my first degree all over again now, with some of the amazing people whom I probably didn't appreciate sufficiently then. Youth wasted on the young, yet again (sorry Serena!)

[rowan]

You don't even have to be THAT young- Janet's my director of studies!

[Serena]

Kathryn - oi, cheeky! Just cos not all of us are smart enough to do theology degrees and turn into mini-Maggis doesn't mean we're wasting our youth ;)

[Christopher Shell]

And very much a gentlelady. Can't wait to find out about Lewis and Gibson - they sound a bit like a female version of Lewis and Clark - pioneering adventurers and explorers in Victorian tweeds