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.

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.

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.

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. Part of the colloquium 'Why Middle Sized Matters to Science, Theology, and Metaphysics, held in cooperation with the University of Texas at Austin.

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. Part of the colloquium 'Why Middle Sized Matters to Science, Theology, and Metaphysics, held in cooperation with the University of Texas at Austin.

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.