Lloyd Geering
Lloyd Geering is a ground-breaking and controversial commentator on theological issues. He was a Presbyterian minister before turning to teaching, and he has held a number of significant academic positions in New Zealand. He is a Companion of the British Empire and in 2001 was named a Principal Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. Geering’s writing often addresses key questions concerning contemporary religion.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Geering, Lloyd (1918 - ) is New Zealand's best-known and most controversial commentator on theological issues. A Presbyterian minister, he turned to theological teaching in 1956. He is an Emeritus Professor of Victoria University of Wellington, where he taught for many years in the religious studies department, and was formerly Professor of Old Testament Studies and Principal of Knox College Theological Hall in Dunedin.
In 1968, he was awarded third place for God in the New World at the Goodman Fielder Wattie Book Awards.
Geering is best remembered by many New Zealanders for the high-profile 1967 trial in which he faced charges of heresy for his controversial statements.
He is a Companion of the British Empire and in 2001 was named a Principal Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. In 2007 he was admitted to the Order of New Zealand.
The 20th century has witnessed the failure of the conventional idea of God. In Christianity Without God (2002), Geering responds to some of the pressing concerns of contemporary religion. His autobiography, Wrestling with God, was published by Bridget Williams in association with Craig Potton, 2006. The Lloyd Geering Reader, edited by Paul Morris and Mike Grimshaw, was published by Victoria University Press in 2007.
Geering's most recent work is Such is Life!, published by Steele Roberts in 2010. In his new work, Geering ingeniously brings Ecclesiastes to life in a series of dialogues, showing that he was a free-thinker, a humanist and an existentialist.
Genre:
Skills:
Branch:
Wellington
Location:
Lower Hutt
Publications:
Wrestling With God The Story of my Life
Wrestling With God tells the story of the man who came to personify New Zealand’s debates over the role and meaning of religious belief in increasingly secular age.
In the public eye ever since his famed heresy trial in 1967, Lloyd Geering describes his journey from a Depression era childhood, through working as a young Presbyterian minister, to becoming Victoria University’s foundation professor of religious studies and a bestselling author.
Showing the rigorous commitment to truth and concern for others that have characterised his work, Geering also sets out his views on the spiritual life of Western culture in the early twentieth-first century, and the centrality of the human relationship with an endangered planet.