A little bit about the person…

Husband, father and grandfather and loving every minute of it!

A long term student of the rhyme and reason behind the contemporary world, most seasons of my life, and especially the last fourteen years, have been intertwined with academic research as a theologian and social commentator. For this reason I love the internet which has made this kind of motivation for living so much easier than it used to be!

But I do most of my thinking on foot. I am passionate about hill walking and head out most days, come wind, come weather, with a little notebook in my pocket and a head full of ideas. By the time I return they have usually taken shape, sometimes still discernible as scribbles on wet paper (we live in the foothills of the Cumbrian mountains and when it rains, it does it well.)

I abhor ivory towers! I am a practitioner by nature and only enjoy ideas for the difference they can make to ordinary lives. I have travelled widely, love cultural difference but hate injustice and endemic poverty.

And I revel in the uniqueness of people. I have received so much by journeying with others, the more different from me the better, whether (usually!) younger, of different ethnicity or gender. I have always enjoyed the two-way flow of relationship in any mentoring relationship and am very much at home with the post-modern preference for relational coaching.

Cultural and social changes fascinate me; the factors which initiate and guide them, the direction they take and the drive of the powerful to annexe them energise my study. And engaging in these discussions and this broad context with men and women of good heart and leadership skill is always a joy and privilege. It gives hope and faith that historical inequalities can be addressed and the future be rewritten with today’s poor at the centre of tomorrow’s opportunities.

A little bit about my experience…

I began my working life teaching small children, but research study at university level has been a driving force during substantial segments of my adult life.

• I have a BA in English
• A Masters in International Literature and Society
• Early doctoral research in Sociology
• A PhD in Religious Studies as the result of my doctoral research in the sovereign power structure of the West and the possibility of a kenotic alternative or kenarchy.
• I am the author of a variety of published books and articles, the most recent of these being Church, Gospel & Empire: How the Politics of Sovereignty Impregnated the West, Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock 2011; The Fall of the Church, Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock 2013; and Discovering Kenarchy, Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock 2014 (edited with Julie Tomlin Arram).
• Other books and papers can be found on my Academia site: https://wtctheology.academia.edu/RogerHaydonMitchell.
• After seven years as an honorary research fellow in the Lancaster University Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion where I worked with the Richardson Institute for Peace Studies, I am now an honorary researcher in the Sociology Department Centre for Alternatives to Social and Economic Inequalities. I continue to be Political Theologian with the Westminster Theological Centre.
• My main research and writing now focuses on The Kenarchy Journal, of which I am the lead editor, and a series of historical fantasy novels looking at how a properly radical Christianity might interface with the past and present. The first of these, The Day of the Labyrinth: the Blind Seer and the Gift of Love is now published (home page: https://dayofthelabyrinth.com and publisher: https://collectiveinkbooks.com). The second, The Day of the Labyrinth: The Love Crusade is due for completion later this year.