LECTURES AND COLLOQUIA
RECOLLECTION LECTURE SERIES
Recalling the major themes and thinkers of Christian history.
Recollection Lectures take place in the Ursell Room at Pusey House at 4pm generally (unless noted otherwise). Tea and coffee is served in the Hood Room between 3.15 and 3.45 pm.
Wednesday 17th April 2024 (Noughth Week)
The Gospels Against Slavery: The Jesus Tradition in the 19th Century Abolition Debates
Esau McCaulley (Professor of New Testament, Wheaton College)
Everyone knows about the role Paul's Epistles played in the abolitionist/slavery debates of the 19th century. Less attention has been paid to the function of the Jesus tradition in the slavery debates. What might the use of the teachings and life of Jesus by abolitionists reveal about the role of empathy, imagination, and canonical interpretation in theological debate? This lecture explores how retrieving abolitionist exegetical methodology paves the way for a revival of pastoral care and theology in biblical studies.
Wednesday 24th April 2024 (Second Week)
The Meaning of Mourning
Mikołaj Sławkowski-Rode (Research Fellow, Blackfriars Hall). Organised with the Humane Philosophy Society.
Over the past one-hundred years or so, traditional mourning practices have slowly fallen out of favour in the West. Wearing black for extended periods, keeping the anniversary, or remembering the dead at family celebrations were all intended to help mourners “carry the weight” of their grief by making a place for the dead in individual and community life. This is now being displaced by one that focuses and more on liberating the bereaved from the burden of continued bonds to the deceased. This lecture argues that there is a rarely acknowledged problem with this development, which can have severely detrimental effects on both communities and individual lives.
Tuesday 30th April (Second Week)
Christening Donne
Peter McCullough (Fellow in Renaissance English Literature, Lincoln College).
Professor McCullough is the General Editor of the new Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne. His lecture will offer some introductory reflections on this new presentation of Donne's greatest prose works, and on the sermons' claims to the attention of both literary scholars and ecclesiastical historians. It will then turn in more detail to Donne's sermons preached at christenings - a body of work long neglected but containing vital evidence of his sacramental theology, and of his responses to Calvinist and Roman Catholic thought.
Wednesday 1st May 2024 (Second Week)
3:00pm – 5:20pm
How the Science of Middle-Sized Restores Purpose
Professor George Ellis (University of Cape Town).
Professor Ellis will discuss how the universe can seem a purposeless and amoral place if one looks at it exclusively on very large or small scales. Indeed, many scientific specialists of the very large or very small have claimed that there is no purpose in the universe. Paradoxically, however, they are ignoring the nature of their own lives on the middle-sized scale at which they exist; more specifically, how their existence within the physical world as ‘open systems’ enables purpose, meaning, and ethics to be effective in causing physical outcomes. The middle-sized scale is particularly important for biology where meaning and function are often denied due to focussing on the molecular scale alone.
and
Is Aristotle's Philosophy of Nature Scientifically Obsolete?
Professor Robert Koons (University of Texas at Austin).
Aristotle’s philosophy of nature dominated much of the world’s science from late antiquity until the 17th century and beyond. In this Aristotelian world, human beings and the middle-sized objects that we perceive and manipulate were among the first-class citizens of nature, imbued with real causal powers and potentialities. The period of “classical” physics (from Galileo to Rutherford) seemed to eliminate the need for key elements of Aristotle’s scheme, including substantial forms for composite objects, natural powers and potentialities, and teleology. I argue that the Quantum Revolution has altered the epistemic landscape in ways that re-open questions of natural philosophy that have long been taken to be settled, laying the foundation for a neo-Aristotelian or “hylomorphic” interpretation of quantum theory. This interpretation successfully bridges the gap between the domain of quantum entities and the world of actual experiments and observations, and, as a further bonus, reconciles what Wilfred Sellars called the manifest image of ordinary human life with our best scientific image of nature.
Followed by a Question and Answer Session introduced and moderated by Jonathan Price.
These public lectures are part of the colloquium 'Why Middle Sized Matters to Science, Theology, and Metaphysics, held in cooperation with the University of Texas at Austin. More details here.
Wednesday 8th May 2024 (Third Week)
Modernity, Disenchantment, and the Mediaeval Discovery of Nature.
Hans Boersma (Professor in Ascetical Theology, Nashotah House).
Jean-Marie Dominique Chenu famously located the “discovery of nature”—and the source of modern disenchantment—in the twelfth century. This lecture picks up on Chenu’s argument by tracing the separation of nature and the supernatural beyond the late Middle Ages to the theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas. In light of the theological changes introduced by Aquinas, we should sympathetically reappraise the traditionalist Bishop Stephen's condemnations issued in 1277. In short, the secularism of modernity requires that we read creation not primarily as substance but as relationship: the harmonious chant of the love that is God.
Wednesday 22nd May (Fifth Week)
Is a Universal History Possible?
Prof David Engels (Brussels & Poznań).
Must a systematic comparison of civilisations automatically lead to a historical relativism where truth becomes a mere matter of style? Or is it possible to identify, behind the uncompromising workings of history, a subliminal metaphysical sense that is neither a Eurocentric variation of the history of salvation, nor a vulgar theory of accumulation and process?
Wednesday 29th May (Sixth Week)
Piety vs. Polemic: The Paradox of Elizabethan Satire.
Jane Cooper (All Souls).
In 1597 Joseph Hall – later a Bishop – declared himself England’s first satirist, writing in the manner of Juvenal and Horace in his satire Virgidemiarum. His declared purpose was to attack impiety in contemporary English society out of a sense of unavoidable moral duty (in Juvenal's words, difficile est saturam nōn scrībere). The Bishops' Ban of popular satire (1599) shows satire's vituperative style and personal attacks were considered too rancorous, licentious, and even seditious for the Christian public. How did satirists respond to this tension between Christian piety and Roman-style rancour? With pseudonymous personae, whose opinions matched the satirist’s, but whose heightened style the satirist could disown.
Wednesday 12th June (Eighth Week)
The Public Authority of the Church of England: Its Theological Foundations.
Joan Lockwood O’Donovan (Hon. Reader at the School of Divinity, St Andrews).
The talk examines the exception presented by the legally established Church of England to the restraints placed by secular liberal pluralism on the church’s ‘public authority,’ understanding ‘public authority’ as both 'the power to influence' and 'the moral power to rule.' It considers the theological understanding of the Church’s dual authority of proclamation and jurisdiction contained in the foundational Reformation formularies of the Book of Common Prayer and Ordinal, and the Thirty-Nine Articles.
Upcoming Colloquia
Why Middle-Sized Matters to Science, Theology and Metaphysics
Weds 1st - Fri 3rd May, with The Civitas Institute (University of Texas at Austin).
A colloquium on the significance of 'middle sized' entities in the sciences, metaphysics, and theology. Participants should be familiar with physics and metaphysics. Applications by graduate students and academics welcome at: pusey.conference@stx.ox.ac.uk.
Speakers include: George Ellis (Cape Town), Robert Koons (UT Austin), Timothy O'Connor (Indiana), Javier Sánchez Cañizares (Navarra), Vera Hoffmann-Kolss (Bern), Alyssa Ney (UC Davis), Mark Harris (Harris Manchester), Daniel De Haan (Blackfriars & Campion Hall), William Simpson (Pusey House & UT Austin), John Pemberton (Durham & LSE), Philip Goff (Durham), Aaron Cotnoir (St Andrews), Christopher Oldfield (Cambridge), Robert Verrill (Blackfriars Cambridge), Jonathan Price (Pusey House & St Cross), and Emily Quershi-Hurst (Pembroke).
More details about the colloquium can be found here.
Liberty and Natural Law
Wednesday 15th May, in cooperation with the Revue de Philosophie du Droit.
This is a one-day Colloquium aimed at graduate students and researchers in Law, Philosophy and Theology, considering the principle of liberty from the perspective of natural law theory. Papers will be published in the Revue de Philosophie du Droit (n° 2/2024). The colloquium is hosted by the Centre for Theology, Law and Culture at Pusey House, and co-sponsored by the Oxford Faculty of Law and the Canterbury Institute.Speakers include: Clemente Recabarren (St John’s), Sébastien Neuville (Toulouse), Henri Torrione (Fribourg), Jonathan Price (Pusey House & St Cross), Nathan Helms (Oriel), Dominic Burbidge (Regent’s Park), Arnaud de Solminihac (Paris II Panthéon-Assas), Conor Casey (Surrey).
This is a one-day colloquium.
To inquire about attendance, please contact pusey.conference@stx.ox.ac.uk.
McDonald Conference – Public Legitimacy of the Church of England
Pusey House and the Centre for Theology, Law, and Culture is also pleased to be hosting the McDonald Centre Conference on the Public Legitimacy of the Church of England, in partnership with the Centre for Cultural Witness at Lambeth Palace and the Oxford Faculty of Theology and Religion, on June 10th 2024. More information can be found on the McDonald Centre's website, here.
LECTURE ARCHIVE
See below, or GO TO OUR YOUTUBE ACCOUNT, for all our recorded lectures.
