The parable which we know as as ‘The Parable of the Prodigal Son’ and which the Germans call ‘Das Gleichnis vom verlorenen Sohn’ is the best loved of all Jesus' parables. It has given inspiration to Rembrandt and countless other artists. It has provided the theme for novels, ballet and film. It touches the human condition like no other story. It holds a mirror up to ourselves, whether we identify ourselves with the returning prodigal or see those around us unmasked as the elder brother. The parable has been examined by the best exegetes of the past and present.

Hell is a doctrine that has always had its uses. The range of those uses can be conveniently traced by examining a passage from Cold Comfort Farm, the comic novel by Stella Gibbons, first published in 1932. The novel is set in rural England during the third decade of the twentieth century, a time when automobiles were not entirely unknown but not yet widely in use. The scene to be examined involves Flora Poste and Amos Starkadder. Flora is a young, sophisticated woman who has gone to visit her relatives in the country, and Amos is her gray-haired, grizzled cousin, a Scotsman who lives on the farm with other kinfolk and who serves as a lay preacher in town at the Church of the Quivering Brethren. Flora accompanies Amos to a preaching service one evening. They arrive by horse and buggy, enter the hall, and take their seats. Flora sits in the back near the exit, Amos by the platform up front.

Our topic is theology and music — the conjunction expressing the modest hope that some useful demarcations and interactions maybe identifiable here. We are in no position to attempt, even in outline, a theology of music. Theologies of lay claim to a non-theological field in its entirety; they attempt to annex it, to re-establish it on what are taken to be its authentic theological foundations. They tend to find their most congenial subject-matter outside the normal sphere of the theological disciplines. But no theological annexation of music is conceivable or desirable. The question is rather whether any theologically worthwhile relationship between the two disciplines can be established at all. To pose this problem in its strongest form, I shall have little to say here about the use of music within the Christian community and its worship, confining myself to the more-or-less ‘secularized’ music of the European classical tradition of the past three hundred years or so. And I shall omit all consideration of the broader topic of ‘theology and the arts’. It does not seem particularly helpful to assume that such diverse practices as music, sculpture and drama are best considered in parallel to one another.

The title of this article contains a paradox which I have chosen deliberately and the meaning of which will become clear during the course of it. The topic is ‘Women in Dissent’. A number of meanings could be attributed to this title. It could either be understood as ‘Women in the dissenting or non-conformist tradition’ or it could mean ‘dissenting women’ which is the option I have chosen. I want to discuss whether or not feminism, or to be more precise, feminist theology, can be understood as a form of dissent or in what respects it differs from the forms of dissent that would normally be studied in the dissenting or non-conformist tradition.

In 1993 Frank Press, President of the United States Academy of Sciences estimated that in a typical year ie. one without a major catastrophe on the scale of the Kobe earthquake or Sahel droughts, some 250,000 people will die and losses of US$40 billion will result from natural disasters (Press 1993). In recent years much has been written about the physical causes of and human responses to natural disasters (see: Hewitt, 1983a, 1983b; Alexander, 1993; Chester 1993; Blaikie et al. 1994 and Chester et al. 1996, for extensive bibliographies), and this vast literature reflects increasing concern over disaster losses and a growing realization that most losses are preventable. Prompted by this concern the United Nations has designated the nineteen-nineties the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction, or IDNDR. With the exception of a training manual for foreign mission workers published by the Evangelical Interchurch Relief and Development Alliance (Davis and Wall 1992), trenchant reflections by Austin Farrer (1966) and limited treatment in works focusing on wider ecotheological issues (eg. Russell 1994: 35–50), theologians have been conspicuous by their absence from what is now a global debate on natural disasters and their mitigation.