The Bampton Lectures

Dr Martin’s title for this year’s Bampton Lectures is Four-Dimensional Eucharist. She will be thinking about the eucharist both as sacrament and as ritual theatre, and asking some unusual questions of it.  She will be considering its physicality in a time of increasing online presence, the abiding Christian tension between presence and absence it already contains, and its efficacy in a modern culture which veers unstably between scepticism and enchantment.  Her range of reference will be wide, reaching from fantasy genres and virtual reality to Eucharistic theology and the anthropology of ritual.

The lecture series is structured by the metaphor of geometrical ‘dimensions’: from the point (or line) to the flat shape, to the three dimensions of situated theatre, to the layerings of personal and sacred time.

About the Lecturer

The Revd Canon Dr Jessica Martin has been Residentiary Canon for Learning and Outreach at Ely Cathedral since 2016, following six years as priest-in-charge of a multi-parish benefice in South Cambridgeshire.  Before that, she was Fellow in English at Trinity College, Cambridge, where her research focus was on early modern piety and the early history of literary biography.  Her most recent book is Holiness and Desire (2020), which considers the roots of human desire and the consequences of its modern commodification.

The contemporary relations between science and religion are often thought of in terms of competing factual claims or ways of knowing—evolution vs creation, reason vs faith.  On this understanding, apparent conflicts between science and religion are to be resolved by argument. But such arguments rarely turn out to be persuasive to those not already committed to their conclusions.  

Professor Harrison's suggestion will be that this is because these arguments are not doing much real work, but are the outward expression of implicit commitments to narratives about science and religion that have a historical form:  "The most common of these stories is the ‘conflict narrative’, which proposes an enduring historical conflict between science and religion.  While historians have debunked this narrative, it still exercises a pervasive influence on science-religion discussions. Less commonly remarked upon is a ‘naturalism narrative’, according to which the successes of science have shown us that there is nothing in the universe but physical forces and entities.  This narrative operates less by opposing specific arguments than by simply making traditional understandings of divine action unthinkable.  In these lectures I will trace the historical emergence of these powerful narratives about science and religion, with a particular focus on the rise of modern naturalism.  I will then turn to the specific ways in which these narratives have unhelpfully shaped contemporary arguments about divine action and purpose."

The lectures took place on 12th February and 19th February 2019. They were followed by seminars in the Old Library. The first seminar was on 'Evidence and Religious Belief' and the second seminar was on 'Divine Action in a Disenchanted World'.

About the Lecturer

Professor Peter Harrison is a past Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford.  He is now an Australian Laureate Fellow and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. He has written numerous books and articles on the historical and contemporary relations between science and religion. In 2011 he delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, now published as The Territories of Science and Religion (2015).  His most recent book is Narratives of Secularization (2017).