Past and Forthcoming Events
WATCH: Linda Woodhead’s recent public lecture Towards the Conversion of the Church of England by the Rest of England
Featuring a response by John Denham.
The Third Dimension of Our Environmental Crisis: The Time for Public Theology | Webinar
Thurs 4 December, 6-7pm, Online, Free
Join Dr Richard McNeill Douglas in exploring why we have failed to act on the warnings made by environmentalists five decades ago.
Since the Limits to Growth report was published in 1972 it has been widely known that a commitment to endless growth was putting us on course for environmental disaster—so why have we failed to take decisive political action in the half-century since then?
In this talk, Dr Richard McNeill Douglas will argue that the key to overcoming the blockages that prevent effective political action on the environment lies in theology – and in cultivating an expanded sense of what it means to be human.
Drawing on research in his new book, The Meaning of Growth, Douglas will present an argument as to why we have collectively failed to act on the warnings made by environmentalists five decades ago. Fundamentally, the idea of environmental limits undermines foundational principles of modernity – to be understood as a kind of secular religion – without offering an alternative faith that could act as its replacement.
Without looking at things on this level, Douglas will suggest, political inaction on the environment appears mysterious, and the prospects for effective political action almost hopeless. What we need, he believes, is to understand that there are three dimensions to environmental crisis.
The first is physical – these are the increasingly undeniable impacts of human activity on global ecosystems, and the increasing impacts these are having on our lives in return. The second is political – manifests itself in increasingly irrational denialism and breakdown of a shared understanding of public reality. The third is spiritual – our spiritual incoherence in a modern secular age that is itself losing coherence and belief in its foundations and future.
But it’s on this spiritual level that we need to turn and from where practical progress has a genuine chance of springing: ultimately, Douglas will suggest, the time is ripe for a kind of inversion of William Temple’s injection of Christian ethics into social policy. It is social policy that needs to become spiritualised now, since the progress we need cannot be realised in material terms as before.
Public Lecture: ‘Towards the Conversion of the Church of England by the Rest of England’
Tues 28 October, 7-8.15pm, Online, Free
This event sees two of our leading commentators from the world of academia and policy discuss the implications of our new Temple Book, Towards the Conversion of the Church of England by the rest of England. We were delighted to be joined by leading sociologist Professor Linda Woodhead and former politician and founder of the Centre for English Identity and Politics, Professor John Denham.
The book is the product of a roundtable of distinguished commentators from a wide variety of different disciplines reflecting on the types of challenges and opportunities facing the new Archbishop of Canterbury Bishop Sarah Mullally as the Church of England seeks to understand its relationship and purpose to the huge diversity of citizens who reside in this country and who identify to a lesser or greater extent with this country and the notion of Englishness.
View the event recording here.
Composting Christianity: A Radical Re-Imagining from the Grassroots
Weds 17 September, 7-8.30pm BST, Online, Free
In turbulent times, full of uncertainties in our global and national context, the concept of ‘Composting Christianity’ (Al Barrett, Brie Stoner) is being adopted by some as a grounded metaphor to challenge our ways of being Church. The metaphor resonates deeply with nature-based, environmental practices and biblical stories, encouraging us to reflect on those things that may have been good for previous seasons but need to be laid aside and allowed to decompose, thereby providing space and nourishment for new things to flourish.
– What is being composted in local contexts and how can we practically embody ‘composting faith’?
– What theological themes might help us to discern the times and the seasons of the new landscapes we are working in?
View the event recordings here: