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| | | I’ve never been much of a purveyor of bon mots, but here’s one from Voltaire’s that may be an apt description of our theology: ‘doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.’
Last week I got involved in one of those slightly irritating conversations where my theological approach was labelled ‘reductionist’. Of course, if you don’t accept your opponent’s fantasy baggage about God inevitably you reduce their picture of how things are. Sometimes it seems necessary to dismantle a theological edifice brick by brick before reassembling it in a different, more honest, way. For example, I know a medic who’s been studying and operating on the human brain for thirty years who says he has found no evidence for life beyond brain death. His scientific experience persuades him that the physical life we have, our sense of self and being, ends with physical death. This assertion is bound to seem reductionist to traditional Christian theology with its emphasis on resurrection. In the ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’ Wordsworth says: ‘The poet will be at the scientist’s side, carrying sensation into the objects of science.’ That bon mot is the counter to the accusation of reductionism. There are ways of nuancing what science tells us that are poetic without being religiously biased. In other words, truth-telling is multi-faceted, various, and generative. It is not only traditional Christianity that critiques scientism with the exclamation, ‘there must be more to it than that’; literature, music, dreams, all do so. All of which doesn’t let traditional Christianity off the hook: we have to engage with all kinds of scientific and imaginative insight or Christianity itself becomes the reductionist, which with the Church, I’m afraid, is very frequently and increasingly the case.
I haven’t had so many emails lately from readers of my book, Christian Atheist, but I did receive one this week which said, ‘The area I think you missed and you might find worth exploring further is the catastrophic void and tilting of axis that happens to someone who loses their faith but still likes the church community. How to maintain integrity. I don't think I have read a book that covers this.’ There’s a challenge then. |
| RIP Anne Hart
Anne
Hart, who was sacristan at SMV for many years, died peacefully in
hospital last Sunday afternoon. Her funeral will be at 12 noon on
Thursday 5 November in the chancel. The service will be a requiem mass
and all are invited to attend.
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| | | All Souls Day
There will be a sheet on the notice board at the back of the church (outside the office) for the names of people you wish to be remembered at the All Souls service. The service will be at 12.15pm on Monday 2nd November in the Chancel.
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| | Services this Week
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Tuesdays & Thursdays
12.15 pm Lunchtime Eucharist
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Sunday 1st November 2015
All Saints' Day
9.30am Family Service (David & Goliath)
10.30 am Choral Eucharist
Mass Setting: Palestrina, Missa Aeterna Christi Munera
Communion Anthem: Palestrina, Vidi turbam magnam
Preacher: Revd Alan Ramsey
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| | Forthcoming Events
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Tuesdays 8pm, Vaults & Garden: Bible Study
The Bible Study for students meets in the Vaults cafe every Tuesday evening in term time.
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| | On Death Series
Why do we want to talk about death? Does facing our mortality help us live better? And how do we want to be remembered?
University Church presents a series on the theme of death. Each
evening will include a talk, Q&A, and discussion over cheese and
wine.
7.30-9pm, 22nd Oct, 5th Nov, 19th Nov
In the Vaults and Gardens.
5th November What's next for me? Dr Jonathan Jong
Since the first Death Café was held in Hackney in 2011 the concept has spread right across the world. At a Death Café people gather to eat cake, drink wine and discuss our mortality
(or the idea of an afterlife) from every possible angle. Join our one-off Death Café with Revd Dr Jonathan Jong, an experimental social psychologist and an experienced Death Café host.
Revd Dr Jonathan Jong is Research Fellow and Deputy
Director of the Brain, Belief and Behaviour research group
at Coventry University, and Research Associate at the
Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology,
University of Oxford. His research focuses on the role that
fear of death plays in religion. He is also Assistant Curate at
St Mary Magdalen, Oxford.
Full details here.
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| | Fireside Tales series
A six-part series combining creative workshops, talks and performances, looking at the tradition of storytelling throughout the timespan of University Church. From the earliest Christian verse, relayed by Old English bards; by way of the familiar essay, unlocking complexities of thought on religion and philosophy; to the early modern puppetry designed for an illiterate congregation – this series gets to the very heart of storytelling.
Each session will be preceded by a one-hour creative writing workshop, 5.30–6.30pm, to which all are welcome. The talks and performances begin at 6.45pm and last approximately 45 minutes. Events take place in the Old Library unless otherwise stated.
Wednesday 28th October
Penny Boxall, Education Officer at University Church, explores the enticing storytelling
tradition of the Victorians, from the time of the Oxford Movement. Enter into the golden
age of the Christmas tale, the narrative poem and the serialised story. The talk will be
preceded by a creative workshop on gossip (5.30–6.30pm).
Full details here.
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| | Forthcoming Events
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Saturday 7th November 8pm
Oxford Chamber Orchestra
Mozart: Overture to Don Giovanni
Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in E Minor
Beethoven: Symphony no 6 (Pastoral)
Tickets £15 (£10) from Tickets Oxford
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| | Poetry corner — “Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,—or from one of our elder poets,—in a paragraph of to-day's newspaper. She was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister Celia had more common-sense. Nevertheless, Celia wore scarcely more trimmings; and it was only to close observers that her dress differed from her sister's, and had a shade of coquetry in its arrangements; for Miss Brooke's plain dressing was due to mixed conditions, in most of which her sister shared. The pride of being ladies had something to do with it: the Brooke connections, though not exactly aristocratic, were unquestionably "good:" if you inquired backward for a generation or two, you would not find any yard-measuring or parcel-tying forefathers—anything lower than an admiral or a clergyman[…]”
The opening to George Eliot’s Middlemarch introduces us to the wonderful Dorothea Brooke, a young woman of keen morality and empathy. Immediately placed within a context of religion, she is also firmly rooted in her neighbourhood: “she was usually spoken of”, says the narrator, “as being remarkably clever”; those speaking of her are her “close observers”. They, too, make the judgment of the Brooke family being “unquestionably ‘good’”. Dorothea’s religious feeling – sincere enough – is nevertheless subject to intense gossip and scrutiny.
On Wednesday 28th at 6.45, Tom Sherry (Head of English at Ruskin College) and I will have a conversation about Middlemarch, gossip and the church. All are very welcome. It is preceded at 5.30-6.30 by a prose writing workshop on the theme of ‘gossip’. Either or both sessions may be attended.
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