Curriculum Vitae
I grew up in a manse in St.Andrews, the grey city by the sea, in the years after the war. My parents had returned from Madras where they were missionaries in 1946. The four of us children were born in India. We went to school, the three boys, to Madras College, a school with Indian roots. Our family was not well off. Most people weren’t in those days. But St.Andrews was a privileged place to live in and by the time I was in my teens we had been on camping holidays to the south of England, to Florence and Rome. I had also stayed for a week with a French family in Taizé and spent two summers hitch-hiking in Germany and Switzerland visiting friends of my parents and singing at choir festivals in Bayreuth and Passau. Later on, in the mid-sixties, when I was a theological student in Edinburgh, I visited East Germany and Prague for the first time and my long-lasting connections with Czechoslovakia began.
After completing a traditional Scottish Arts degree in English and Moral Philosophy at St.Andrews University I went with Voluntary Service Overseas to Peshawar in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan to teach English for a year. Edwardes College was an Anglican Mission boys high school. I had no training as a teacher, but I was not much older than the students I was teaching and, besides teaching, I enjoyed playing tennis and squash with them and excursions into the Hindu Kush, as well as holidays in the far north, Chitral and Gilgit. I read Hendrik Kraemer on mission and had my first encounter with Islam. At Christmas time I made the long train journey down to Madras to visit the place of my birth. But the year convinced me not to try to follow my parents and two generations of missionaries before them in the mission fields of India. That world had changed for me.
I returned home overland by local transport. In Afghanistan the road was still being built between Kandahar and Herat and I hitched a lift with a convoy of empty lorries returning to Iran from Baluchistan: two days of bouncing across the desert and through mountain passes, eating roast goat at a Bedouin encampment and sleeping under the stars. The journey across Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank, Jerusalem and Israel took me three months. I crossed the Mandelbaum Gate, for the year was 1964, and sailed from Haifa to Venice. Three weeks I spent visiting the Holy Land with two New College students who I met in Jerusalem, Graeme Auld and George Newlands; they were good company, and it helped me prepare for my divinity studies in Edinburgh.
These experiences of mine happened before... before the war between East and West Pakistan; before the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the present Afghan wars, before the Iranian Revolution, before the Gulf War, long before Bush and Blair’s invasion of Iraq and its terrible consequences, before the 1967 War when Israel occupied East Jerusalem, before the subsequent Arab-Israeli wars which kept reducing the territory of Palestine; I’m tempted to say with John Berger, before ‘evil became a constant ineradicable reality’ in the Middle East.
I went up to Edinburgh University. I used to say that Tom Torrance taught me all the theology I know and Roland Walls taught me what to do with it! But that is unfair to the other wonderful teachers and students of New College during those exciting and chaotic years, 1964–68. I spent a summer working as a guide on Iona when George MacLeod was there, a divinity students’ week with Cameron Wallace in the shipyards of the Lower Reaches of the Clyde, Holy Week services singing the Psalms with Père Gélineau at the Church of St.Severyn in Paris, a summer semester at Tübingen University under Ernst Käsemann. I also spent six months in and out of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital with breakdowns and depression! In 1968 I married Fiona Williams who was also a theologian, and we were married for over thirty years. With her I crossed the Atlantic in 1969 and visited Mexico where her father lived, the USA, and Canada where other members of her family lived. That is when I first came across Ivan Illich and subscribed to his journals from Cuernavaca. And my father died in 1968 as well.
I was Scottish Secretary of the Student Christian Movement from 1969–72. This gave me a grounding in practical theology, politics, culture and revolution. I loved to travel and during those years led half a dozen student study visits at Easter and in summertime to Czechoslovakia and the GDR, France, Italy and Sicily. The rest of my professional life, which is the background for the essays in my book, ‘The Hint Half Guessed’, took on the pattern outlined below. In the early seventies, my dream jobs were as a factory worker or ‘worker priest’ following the lead of the Community of the Transfiguration at Roslin; European Secretary of the WSCF, like my SCM mentor Milan Opo?enský; and Warden of Scottish Churches House – inspired by Ian Fraser. The chances and changes of my life led to the fulfilment of all three ambitions, and more..
1972-77 Worker Team Member, French Protestant Industrial Mission. Working as a welder/boilermaker in Roubaix and Paris Grenelle.
1977-83 European Secretary, World Student Christian Federation, with Fiona. Movement support, conference organisation, worldwide ecumenical network.
1984-91 Secretary, Scottish Churches Action for World Development, Edinburgh. Cultural critique of ‘development’, international solidarity work.
1991-99 Executive Secretary, European Ecumenical Commission for Church and Society, (latterly, the Conference of European Churches: Church and Society Commission), Brussels. Seconded there by the Church of Scotland. Including being Coordinator of the European Commission’s initiative, ‘A Soul for Europe: Ethics and Spirituality’.
2001-03 Administrative Secretary, Centre for Theology and Public Issues, New College, University of Edinburgh. Part time.
2003-08 Warden, Scottish Churches House, Dunblane. Hospitality, mission and ecumenism, church and society theology, the arts and volunteers.
My daughter Estyn was born in Edinburgh in 1971. My son Garth was Parisian by his birth in 1977. I sometimes think that the most important and wonderful thing I ever did in my life was to give life to them, with Fiona, because in their creation ‘I am involved in Mankind’, as John Donne puts it, in a special way. You can check them out on www.estynhulbert.com and www.safetycatch.co.uk
I met Liz Law, my second wife, in Dunblane. She was Co-ordinator of the Scottish Centre for Nonviolence which was based in Scottish Churches House. Her work involved conflict resolution, peace education and training in non-violence. She was much involved in the protest movement around the G8 in Gleneagles in 2005, and in training for peaceful demonstrations. Liz is a Quaker and a graduate in Peace Studies from the University of Bradford. We married at the Dunblane Quaker Meeting in May 2007, a lovely simple ceremony with many friends and family present to celebrate with us. Now that I have retired and we have moved back to Edinburgh, Liz works as a self-employed workplace mediator. Her website is www.lizlawmediation.co.uk.