Tea-ology

Creativity & Spirituality: A conversation series

Exploring big ideas, big questions, and what it means to be human.
All faiths, all views welcome

Time: 5–7 PM Tea and snacks provided

Wednesday 16 September - Dr Mark Amsler
'Ambigendered Spirituality'

Spirituality has a history. Medieval Christianity was an especially fertile—and sometimes explosive—site of gendered spiritualities and their transcendent, material and embodied connections.

Despite patriarchal institutional structures, Jesus and God the Father were imagined not only in binary terms, but also in nonbinary, maternal and intensely embodied ways. Jesus as mother became a powerful image of spiritual resistance in medieval art, devotion and theology.

Drawing on Bernard of Clairvaux, Julian of Norwich and the material traces of contemplation in devotional manuscripts, Mark explores the heterogeneous power of these alternative spiritualities—and stories of the ambigendered soul.

Mark Amsler was Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Europe Institute at the University of Auckland. His research brings language, discourse and critical theory into conversation with medieval literature and culture.

Wednesday 7 October - Faumuinā Torisse Laulu I Storyteller, entrepreneur, film producer and founder of Lalaga

Lalaga is a Moana-centred conversation card game and movement built on talanoa—the Pasifika art of storytelling and dialogue. Its guided questions invite people to connect more deeply across generations and cultures, preserve taonga stories, affirm diaspora identity, and bring whānau and aiga closer together.

In this Tea-ology conversation, Torisse will share the kaupapa behind Lalaga and explore the creative power of storytelling to carry culture, nurture connection and honour the stories that shape who we are.

Proudly tracing her Samoan heritage to Afega, Lefaga, Sala‘ilua and Falealili, Māngere-based Faumuinā Torisse Laulu is also an acclaimed producer and director. Her work includes the award-winning TVNZ series Still Here, Chief of War, The Last Samoan Zombie and the documentary Oamaru.

Wednesday 14 October - Dr Yael Cameron
'When Eve met Medusa: Creative Writing and the Other Bible'

In this session of Tea-ology I offer vignettes from my creative-critical works in biblical studies as a place to start our conversation. My writing merges critical biblical studies with creative writing, exploring what is at stake when dis/agreeing with the sacred text. I will touch on: the erotics of the Song of Songs, writing the new story of Zimri and Cosbi, when Eve met Medusa (a love story), and most recently, Losing my religion—a Circumfession. Each of these vignettes explores a particular struggle with the text, and with faith, offering moments of failure, resistance and hope.

Yael Thomas Cameron is a senior lecturer in public pedagogy at AUT, interested how religion and mythology continue to permeate and inflect popular culture. She is the author of Jouissance: A Cixousian Encounter with the Song of Songs (Sheffield, 2015) and many other book chapters and articles, including editing the book Theology, Religion and The Witcher last year. She is a poet with poetry appearing in the French Literary Review, Tarot, Meniscus, and StylusLit. Yael is lead editor of Tua Ira: Journal of Queer Studies Aotearoa.

Contact the host of Tea-ology: Creativity & Spirituality