All in essay
August 11 is the feast day of St Clare of Assisi. The Revd Dr Chris Dingwall-Jones writes about her theology of poverty. Fr Chris is Chaplain of Jesus College, Oxford.
As vaccination efforts are well under-way, at least in the USA and UK, Br Jim Woodrum reflects on mission during the COVID-19 pandemic. Br Jim is a Brother in the Society of St John the Evangelist (SSJE), as Anglican religious community founded in the parish of Cowley, Oxford in 1866. He lives in the community at the SSJE Monastery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Earlier today, the Archbishops’ Anti-Racism Taskforce, set up in 2020, released their long-awaited report, providing recommendations to the Church of England for combating racism and promoting racial justice. Fr Jonathan Jong provides commentary on this report.
August 16th marks 14th anniversary of Barry Miller’s death. Miller was a philosopher and Marist priest, and our series on divine simplicity gives us a good opportunity to discuss his work. Fr Jonathan Jong tries to explain Miller’s quite difficult ideas on this topic.
Images of God in Christian art, have regularly reflected a lack of imagination when it comes to the diversity of God’s people. Art, it could be said has a crucial role to play in challenging racial prejudice in the world and in the Church today.
The Physiologus is a strange hybrid of genres, at least to modern eyes. Much as the Gospels are neither quite straightforward biography as we now understand the genre, nor entirely pious fiction, the Physiologus is neither quite natural history nor entirely a collection of just-so-stories.
Next in our series on Christian symbolism, Mthr Arabella Milbank writes on the depiction of angels and their function and significance in the life of the Church.
After having provided what he takes to be valid proofs of God’s existence, St Thomas Aquinas takes what is, to modern eyes, a surprising turn. At the start of the third question of the Summa Theologiae, Thomas observes that usually when we have shown that something exists we can go on to ask what that thing is – we’ve discovered the Higgs Boson; great that’s a subatomic particle of a particular sort, it fits into our best physical theories in particular ways, and we can do some more science to find out more about it! But things are not like this with God, thinks Thomas, we cannot know what God is, only what God is not.
These are some of the words given by the Church of England for administering the sacrament of anointing. The sacrament of anointing might be more familiarly known as ‘extreme unction’, but this is misleading. There’s nothing extreme about this Sacrament. Anointing with oil has long been, and continues to be, an important part of the Christian life. As ‘Christians’, we are followers of the ‘anointed one’. […]
The School of Theology’s central mission is to encourage and equip Christians to do theology together. We recognise, however, that the history of Christian theologising has been a heavily gendered one. Even now, there is significant gender imbalance among academic staff in Theology and Religion departments in the UK. This represents an impairment to our goal of doing theology together, that is, with the wealth that diversity brings. In this essay, Charlotte Gibson discusses a way forward, not just by increasing the number of individual women writing theological books, but by women doing theology with one another for the edification of the wider Church.
Fr Simon Cuff continues with our Easter reflections this week by considering two further questions Jesus poses: Who do you say that I am? and For whom are you looking? As with the previous entry, this piece began life as addresses at a retreat in Berkeley.
The events of Easter compelled the disciples to reconsider who Jesus was. This question about who Jesus is has endured down the centuries, and remains important even to those who accept the creeds and formularies that the Church has laboured over. In the next two essays, Fr Simon Cuff helps us to meditate on this question.
Even if we are not able to attend Holy Week services this year, we will hopefully be praying alongside each other, contemplating Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection; perhaps we will recall familiar parts of the liturgy, which have made an impression on us. At this, the apex of our penitential season and its resolution, the Revd Prof Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski reminds us to be mindful of the ways in which our liturgical practices might themselves require repentance.
There has been some kerfuffle since the Archbishops called for churches to close, but whether or not priests are saying masses in their parish churches, most other people will not be receiving communion for a while. This has led to increase talk of “spiritual communion”. Fr Jonathan Jong provides some background to this idea.
The Annunciation must be one of the most commonly depicted scenes in the history of art. From paintings, to music, to poetry and narrative, the story of Gabriel’s message to Mary—infused with doubt and belief, joy and sorrow, fear and comfort—has proved to be remarkably generative for both the life of faith and the creative impulse. It is a story sharing space with both devastation and hope, and this means it is a story for all of us, whoever we are and wherever we are in life.
Divine simplicity is a deceptively named concept. Far from simple, it’s a concept which is difficult to understand. There is good reason for this. At its heart, divine simplicity reminds us that God is like nothing we encounter in creation. Whereas everything we encounter is ‘composite’ or made up of parts, God is not. God is simply God. There are no bits to him or aspects of himself that are prior to him. He is simply what or who he is.
Yesterday, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York issued a statement about the necessity of suspending the administration of the chalice. This gave Fr Jonathan Jong an opportunity to write about the doctrine of concomitance and the utraquitist controversy in the 15th century.
“What should I give up for Lent?” is a question many of us ask at the beginning of Lent. Fr Jonathan Jong thinks through this question in a reflection on Luke 4.1-13, medieval penitentials, and the Church Fathers’ thoughts about abstinence and almsgiving.
We start off this penitential season, appropriately enough, with a meditation by Fr Stephen Hearn about Jesus’s injunction in Matthew 5 to be perfect.
In June of 2019 the UK Government published Regulation for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, its White Paper on technology and artificial intelligence (AI). Why refer to industrial revolution? There are those who suggest AI’s advent is more significant than the invention of the steam engine, that it is a technological breakthrough as momentous as electrification. Some see in this new industrial revolution the possibility for a technology driven nirvana with robots finally able to…
