Can a novel be Christian even though the author is not? What makes us consider Pilgrim's Progress and The Brothers Karamazov to be Christian novels? Is it because the authors professes certain beliefs or because the novels possess certain features of form or content? Is a novel Christian because it presents morality and mortality in a particular way? Should we accept Alastair MacIntyre's suggestion in After Virtue that Jane Austen and Dante wrote comedies precisely because of their Christian faith? Could a novel never be truly Christian if its story is a tragedy?

The Centre for Theology, Law, and Culture at Pusey House would like to organise a conference to discuss these questions on Wednesday 13 May in Oxford.

We will gather academics from English studies to speak about how they might answer some of these questions by talking about a particular novel or novelist. We also invite novelists to discuss how they consider some of these questions in their own writing and what it means to be a Christian novelist today.

For further details and information about how to purchase a ticket, please click here.

Speakers:

• Professor Randy Boyagoda (University of Toronto): What is seen, what is believed: Belief in/and the Novel.

• Professor Bonnie Lander Johnson (Downing College, Cambridge): Mysticism and the Modern Novel.

• Professor Alison Milbank (University of Nottingham): What makes a Gothic novel Christian: From Dracula to Sarah Perry's Melmoth.

• Ms Grace Oliver (Wilson Hill Academy): Elizabeth Gaskell and the Christian Imagination: Prayer, Scripture, and Character Formation in Gaskell’s Works.

• Professor Lori Peterson Branch (University of Iowa): What if the Novel is Secular? The Novel as Secularism’s Theology.

• Professor Holly Ordway (Word on Fire Institute): ‘Fundamentally religious’ – or Not? J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and the Question of Authorial Intent.

• Ms Beatrice Scudeler (Fairer Disputations): The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Eschatological Hope in Dorothy Sayers' Detective Fiction.

• Professor Clare Walker Gore (Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge): Revealed Truths and Reserved Plots: Charlotte M. Yonge and the Tractarian Novel.

Presented in partnership with the Canterbury Institute and the Aquinas Institute of Blackfriars Hall.

The death of Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (12 January 1929 – 21 May 2025) provides all who are indebted to his work with an opportunity to consider how he has made them rethink those areas of philosophy to which he made outstanding contributions.

The Centre for Theology, Law, and Culture at Pusey House is partnering with the Canterbury Institute and the Aquinas Institute at Blackfriars Hall to organise a conference to consider how we ought to commemorate the work that MacIntyre began, whether that be by developing and deepening it, by refining and correcting what he overlooked or dismissed, or by sharply disagreeing with the positions he held. It will consider how his work provokes us to redefine our positions in light of the arguments he made.

As he wrote in his last book: ‘In philosophy it is only rarely that anyone or any argument has the last word. Debate almost always continues, and this is notably so with the topics and issues with which I am concerned in this book’ – MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (2016).

There will be two keynote lectures in the Pusey House Chapel at 4pm on both days of the conference that will be open to the public and do not require registration to attend.

Keynote lectures:

• Thursday 11 June, Professor Tracey Rowland (Notre Dame, Australia), 'MacIntyrean Insights for the Leonine Era'.

• Friday 12 June, Professor Jason Blakely (Pepperdine), 'Last of the Utopians: Alasdair MacIntyre as Radical Humanist'.

The rest of the conference will take place in Campion Hall and Christ Church and registration is required to attend the other sessions. To register your interest in attending, please email: andreas.masvie@chch.ox.ac.uk

Evensong at 5:30pm after each of the keynote lectures will have a guest preacher. The preacher on Thursday, 11 June will be The Rev'd Dr Nicholas Austin SJ (Master of Campion Hall), and on Friday, 12 June, The Rev’d Dr Richard Conrad OP (Blackfriars Hall) will preach.