The received wisdom is that the experience of Revolution in recent centuries is inimical to Christianity. It brings in its wake hostility, disruption, and persecution, as one, usually secularising, value system bids to displace a religious one. The Church and Counter-Revolution walk together. But should we be more cautious about this conclusion? Deploying three categories – the dispossessed, the collaborator, the indifferent – the lecture suggests that, amid the upheaval and the suffering, the experience of Revolution can also be creatively purgatory for the Christian Church, bringing about new growth, organisational leanness, and inspirational instances of martyrdom.

Professor Koons is a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin and specializes in metaphysics and philosophical logic, with special interest in philosophical theology and the foundations of both science and ethics. Professor Moschella is Professor of the Practice, Philosophy, at the McGrath Institute for Church Life based at the University of Notre Dame. Her work spans the fields of ethics, political philosophy, and law and her areas of special expertise include natural law theory, biomedical ethics, and the family.

How and why did Greek speaking Christians write epic poetry? After a initial foray into the debates and anxieties about Homer in early Christian teaching, this talk dives into some of the earliest surviving examples of hexameters composed on Biblical themes. In these little-known poems, the language and values, substance and style of heroic epos and Christian scripture collide and combine in specific and surprising ways, showing the first steps towards a new form of an ancient genre, and a different approach to the inherited literary tradition.

Paideia, or education and literary culture, was a major point of friction in the fourth-century pagan-Christian Kulturkampf. Partisans on both sides were constantly invoking exemplars of virtue and vice drawn from mythology, literature, history, and Scripture. This talk examines the role such exemplars played in writings of a small group of fourth-century writers from Cappadocia. Central here are St. Gregory Nazianzen and his nemesis (and sometime coursemate), Julian the Apostate Emperor. How and why did they present such figures as Zeus, Abraham, Socrates, Alexander the Great, Jesus, or Trajan to their audiences? What about those of their contemporaries whom they turned into exemplars? How exactly were listeners and readers meant to relate imaginatively to these figures? What were they to do with them? Addressing these questions will clarify the nature of exemplarist ethics in some of the most prominent culture-shapers of the later Roman empire. It will also shed light on exemplarism more generally, and, by way of conclusion, raise questions about relation between exemplarist mimetics and the Christian understanding of theosis.

The development of theology in the first centuries of the Church goes hand in hand with educational practices: Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian (for example) all present themselves in the guise of teachers - not as clergy. Their literary production and claims to authority rest within the educational structures of antiquity, and are best understood in the contest of Greco-Roman agonistic paideia. Early Christianity was not a religious outsider, but an educational competitor - along with rhetorical and philosophical schools - for the allegiance of the wealthy international youth who expected through their education to taste a variety of different teachers and sects before settling into final allegiance and/or professional life.

In this lecture, Professor Biggar, who first met Peter Toon in 1976, will consider what makes it possible to contribute, as an orthodox Christian intellectual, to the public life of the UK.

Zsolt Németh is a Hungarian economist and politician, who acts as Chairman of the European Conservatives Group and Democratic Alliance at the Council of Europe. He became a member of the Hungarian National Assembly in the 1990 parliamentary election and served as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs from 2010-14. Mr Németh was president of the Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights, Minorities and Religion from 1993 to 1994 and of the Parliamentary Committee for Foreign Affairs from 2002 to 2010.

From murders in vicarages, and curate narrators, priest detectives and sleuthing monks, to the Detection Club of Chesterton, Sayers et al - perhaps it's not entirely fanciful to describe the enduring popularity of Detective Fiction as a 'hunger for Holy Mystery Stories'. Is there really a theological, even sacramental, driver for our insatiable appetite for crime writing?