Deus Scientiarum Dominus
A place of sacred learning and worship in the heart of Oxford.
Sunday High Mass 11am - Open to all
LECTURES THIS TERM
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 3.45pm.
Wednesday 25th October 2023 (Third Week)
Augustine the Poet
Rev’d Dr Cally Hammond (Gonville and Caius)
Augustine of Hippo was a man with a visionary prayer life. Cally Hammond explores devotional elements in his writings as a kind of poetry which gives shape to expressive forms of faith.
Wednesday 8th November 2023 (Fifth Week)
‘God did not choose to save the world by talk’. E.L. Mascall on the Incarnation and its consequences.
Rev’d Christopher Smith (St Alban’s Holborn)
‘Actions speak louder than words’, said Mascall, ‘and this is consummately true of the redemption of the human race.’ Christopher Smith examines aspects of Mascall's Christology, and in particular the consequences of the permanence of the Incarnation for our human nature and for the Church.
Wednesday 15th November (Sixth Week)
Augustine’s Asceticism and the Malaise of the Modern Self
Rev’d Dr Mike Michielin (St John’s, Kingston, Canada)
Mike Michielin argues Augustine’s notion of the self in the Confessions and De Trinitate is shaped by Christian asceticism. He compares this to contemporary acedia, prescribing a rule of prayer as a treatment.
Tuesday 21st November (Seventh Week)
The Idea of an A Priori Law
Dr Ralph Walker (Em. Fellow, Magdalen College, Oxford)
Kant believes in a moral law that is not given by God: it is something in its own right. The truths of logic and arithmetic seem to have a similar status. In the case of morals, of course, it is often held that they have their source in the will of God, though Aquinas – aware of the Euthyphro Dilemma – is clear that they have their source in the nature of God, not His will. This talk develops this strange but familiar concept of an a priori law.
Wednesday 29th November (Eighth Week)
That You May Have Life: On the gift of life in creation.
Rev’d Prof Simon Oliver (Durham)
Life is central to Scripture, and until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was seen as the fundamental purpose of the whole universe. Increasingly, life came to be seen as a strange aberration in a dark corner of an otherwise lifeless universe. Can the Christian doctrine of creation, in conversation with twentieth century philosophers such as the Jewish thinker Hans Jonas and the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, provide a more integrated and intelligible understanding of life?
FAITH IN PUBLIC LIFE
LECTURES
Monday 13th November, 6:30pm (Sixth Week)
Covenant and Community
Maurice, Lord Glasman
Lord Glasman is a Labour life peer, the Director of the Common Good Foundation, and the founder of Blue Labour.
Formerly a lecturer in political theory, he completed his PhD in Florence where he first encountered Catholic Social Teaching. He has remained loyal to the institutions of his formative years - family, the synagogue, the Labour Party, and Tottenham Hotspur.
In this lecture, Lord Glasman will discuss the importance of faith in his personal life, as well as the influence of Judaism and Catholic Social Teaching and the role of the Church of England in the development of Blue Labour as a political philosophy and political practice.
LECTURE ARCHIVE
See below, or GO TO OUR YOUTUBE ACCOUNT, for all our recorded lectures.
