I am not skilled to understand

I am not skilled to understand. Dora Greenwell* (1821-1882). From Greenwell’s Songs of Salvation, a small collection of evangelical hymns published in 1873. This was the first hymn, and is the only one of that collection to have become widely known. Its opening declaration is a reminder that Greenwell was living in a world in which the theology was made by men. The hymn can be taken as a straightforward concentration on Christ as Saviour, but it can also be seen as the cry of a woman whose education was unsystematic, and whose writing was belittled by her patronising brother William, a Canon of Durham Cathedral. The hymn deserves to be taken as a pre-feminist text, as well as a...