Bering Academy provides a broad array of courses and as well as workshops on theological and pedagogical method designed to develop teams of contemplative scholars capable of fully engaging the significant challenges or our postmodern condition without retreating into the mythologies of the past or succumbing to those of the present. Bering Memorial United Methodist Church has generously supported us during our first few years of existence. We are now willing and able to offer courses at other sites throughout Houston as needed.

Bering Academy focuses on theological thinking and its counterparts, grounded being and confident doing. Theological thinking is any thinking that is pressured by a call to unrestricted inquiry, a pressure that appears in traditional religious formulations like God, Ultimate Reality, “that than which nothing greater can be conceived,” Brahman, and Nirvana. It can also appear, however, in ethical formulations like “justice” and “democracy” or philosophical formulations like “infinity” or “chaos.” To the degree that these formulations violate the closure we impose on the achievements of our understanding, they are theological.[1]

Many of Bering Academy’s teacher/students are people who have become uncomfortable with the way that organized religions have deadened the destabilizing power of theological symbols and have transformed them into metaphysical or magical entities that offer false comfort in exchange for blind allegiance. At the same time, these people are unable to escape, deaden, or distract themselves from the pressure that works from within these symbols and the questioning it generates. Bering Academy offers such people a space where they can honestly explore this questioning alongside others whose questions both reinforce their own and unsettle them.

If you have become uncomfortable with the tidy boxes of conventional thinking offered by secular and religious ideologies of all stripes, unrestricted inquiry may be calling you. If so, we invite you to explore Bering Academy’s courses for yourself. Your questions and your passion are welcome here.

Alan Richard, Ph.D.
Dean, Bering Academy


1. Winquist, C.E., “Lacan and theological thinking,” in Lacan and theological discourse, E. Wyschogrod, D. Crownfield, and C.A. Raschke, Editors. 1989, State University of New York Press: Albany. pp. 26-38.