In this workshop we will read and write all the brilliance and beauty of what we have survived and what we are building. Using prompts, free-writes, the magnificent muck of our lives, and the full wing-span of our imaginations, we will create new writing across genres. Be prepared to dig deep. In our writing, we …
View course details “Gay Magic: Writing Down Our Queer and Trans Lives”

Why Not Sing? A Weekend Immersion in Community Singing When you get up in the morning, why not sing? When you’re sitting down for dinner, why not sing? When your heart is full of grief, you could find some relief If you sing, why not sing?                                                             – Barbara McAfee Singing is an ancient and …
View course details “Singing Creation: Exploring your Full Voice through Song”

Fast-Track Development With Andy Piercy (UK), Rachel Wilhelm (United Adoration), & Mike O’Brien (Vineyard) In this three-day seminar, Andy Piercy and friends will offer workshops and teaching for any active volunteer and staff worship leaders looking for practical and easily accessible advice to improve, deepen, and refresh their ministries. Join others involved in music ministry …
View course details “Worship Leader Training”

Vancouver School of Theology Attend in person or via Zoom Access recordings through June 30 The creative visual, musical, literary, and performing arts help shape ideas and beliefs. Sometimes, art can communicate more quickly, powerfully, and universally than words can. Within spiritual traditions, arts express stories, attitudes, and emotions. Teachers use arts to introduce their …
View course details “Sacred Arts in a Pluralistic Society: An Inter-Religious Conference”

The poet Dana Gioia once asked in a book of this title, “Can Poetry Matter?” That question of course begs another question: matter in what ways? We may read poetry for any number of reasons, but this class considers how poetry nurtures, and enriches, our spiritual lives. By our close reading of poems together from …
View course details “Reading Poetry Devotionally: How Poems Nurture Our Spiritual Lives”

How we read may matter as much as what we read. What can we learn from the tradition about how to read the Bible spiritually? In this course, we will look in particular at Dorothy L. Sayers’s way of reading. Raised by an Anglican priest, Sayers was well-versed in the tradition’s way of reading Scripture. …
View course details “Reading as a Spiritual Practice”

For centuries many have perceived a strong bond between the work of the Spirit and artistic creativity. Talk of inspiration, spirituality, and the life of the spirit abounds when the arts are in view. This course asks why this might be so. What is it about the arts that lends themselves so easily to “spirit-talk”, …
View course details “The Holy Spirit & the Arts”

Christian Poetics is an exploration of literary aesthetics, delving into what defines the nature and quality of literature. While this is primarily a course in literary criticism, students of art, literature, and culture will delight in discovering the interplay between form and function in the works of classical and Christian thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, …
View course details “Christian Poetics”

Performance and Teaching The NBSI Academy for Biblical Storytelling (ABS) provides you with support and training in both the performance and teaching of biblical stories. ABS encourages you to find your individual style as well as appreciate the stories in the form they’ve been “traditioned” to us. The ultimate goal is to send you out …
View course details “Academy for Biblical Storytelling”

Can art prepare Christians to face death with hope? In this course, we will identify key works of art and theological texts that depict suffering and death, exploring how they grapple with these realities, and come to appreciate how art may spiritually form us towards Christian hope. Artistic reflections will centre on paintings, medieval woodcuts, …
View course details “The Art of Death and Theology of Hope”