The Bampton Lectures

 An Ambivalent Ideal: Challenges to an Ethic of Solidarity
Tuesday 27 February at 11.30am at the University Church

Does the ideal presuppose too smoothly convergent an idea of social interests? How is actual conflict of interest negotiated in this framework? The lecture will examine critiques of some aspects of a solidarity-shaped ethic from various writers, including Kenneth Leech and Gillian Rose, and will look at ways of clarifying the discourse around the subject to allow for a more critical and nuanced model.

Solidarity Against Tribalism: the Contemporary Challenge
Tuesday 5 March at 10.00am at the University Church

A 'solidarity' model necessarily stands in opposition to political 'tribalism' and the fragmentation of the human good into diverse and competing programmes. Is it possible to pursue an ideal of solidarity that takes seriously the facts of 'intersectional' injustice and suffering without being trapped in an 'identity politics' that divides or paralyses the work of building a genuinely shared public space? The lecture argues the need for a radical theological foundation for any such aspiration by way of the exploration of understandings of human 'dignity'.

Solidarity, Rights and the Image of God: Ethics and Christian Anthropology
Tuesday 5 March at 11.30am at the University Church

If the idea of human dignity rests, theologically speaking, on the divine image, the idea of human rights rests on the consideration of what is justly or properly due to that divine image. Ultimately, human solidarity is grounded in a shared and equal dependence, and a shared and equal claim to be seen in the light of God's reflection in the created world.  This final lecture outlines a theology of human rights based on this model of responding 'fitly' or 'justly' to the claim of divine presence, and a theology of solidarity that interprets this in terms of the mutual assurance of goods or well-being or life-giving, so that a theological ethic of solidarity becomes ultimately an ethic shaped by the reality of the Body of Christ.

Deconstructing the Fearful Condition

Tuesday 23 May at 11.30am at the University Church

This lecture meditates on the problem of fear as both currency and virus enhanced by the structures of the build environment. What does it mean to have fear built into the built environment? I posit an answer to this question by drawing a connection between a fearing or fearful body and forms and configurations of fear designed into place. How might we reconfigure place to welcome the stranger, refuse the anticipation of hostility, and draw the body into new practices of hospitality that work themselves down to the ground? Turning again to the life of Jesus, especially the events following his resurrection, I outline the work of draining fear from place.

Overcoming the Delusion Condition of Home Ownership

Tuesday 30 May at 10.00am at the University Church

We have entered the delusion condition that we can individually or even as collectives own what belongs only to God, the creation. Modern colonialism forced upon us a new kind of possessive logic that mutated indigenous understandings of land and place possession. Rather than a vision of possession that means being possessed by land and animal and a place through which they speak through us resourcing our identities, the colonialists pressed the vision that first articulated possession of land and place as a commodity and thereby formed body and building inside that mutated vision of possession. Home ownership has become the site where the find the outworking of this mutation and with it visions of the self that breed narcissism, obsessive managerial logics, and various forms of chauvinism. This lecture considers the life of Jesus as an intervention into ownership precisely as a site of sharing. It is that reality of a shared life in Jesus that must work its way down into the dirt and out to the shape of ownership.

Addressing the Hateful Condition of the Line

Tuesday 30 May at 11.30am at the University Church

My final lecture returns to Thurman’s reflection on the love-ethic of Jesus but now to consider Jesus as a site of love and the ethical dimensions of that site for addressing the problem of the line, that is, the ways in which bordered, and boundary existence resources hate. Hatred is from the beginning an ancient characteristic of sin, yet the production of the line (property line, border line, prison line) all help to materialize hate in profound ways. Considering the redemptive character of Jesus’s peregrination, I want to rethink the relation of mobility to hospitality, and the ethical demand to transgress the line. Here I want to consider again the so-called great commission of Matthew 28, to go into the world and offer witness, making disciples of all nations which I will designate as garden disciples, disciples that learn to touch the earth and the peoples of the earth in ways that give witness to thriving life and shared living.

The Age of Hitler

Tuesday 10 May at 11.30am in the University Church

This lecture will show how, during the lifetime from the 1940s to the present, British, American and many European cultures have (in revealingly different ways) rebased their moral currency on the secular narrative of the anti-Nazi struggle. The story has played out differently in the Anglophone world and in formerly occupied Europe, and differently again in Germany’s far more painful and sophisticated reckoning with its past. And yet across the western world, the Second World War has become our Trojan War and our Paradise Lost: a shared cultural point of reference; the source of the only moral absolutes which pluralist societies recognise; a rich and complex set of events which have an unparalleled grip on our collective imaginations and emotions, and which we find ourselves perpetually retelling and reinventing (and, often, trivialising). In the Anglophone world, in particular, the war and its moral lessons have become pervasive in the fictional narratives on which generations of children have been raised, from Tolkien to Star Wars and Harry Potter. The practical foundation of post-1960s secularism is that we may still believe that God is good, but not with the same ironclad certainty with which we know that Nazism and all it stands for is evil.

The lecture will conclude by arguing that this western moral consensus is now unravelling. The war itself is falling off the edge of living memory; new crises are disrupting old certainties; a war between professedly Christian European powers no longer resonates so powerfully in plural societies and in a postcolonial world. Or perhaps it is simply that the inherent tensions of a value- system built on the anti-Nazi narrative can no longer be contained. In recent years it has become plain that our age’s moral consensus is fracturing, with old truisms being questioned and new ones being asserted. Even anti-Semitism, the old horror that the anti-Nazi era defined itself against, is re-emerging on both the Left and the Right. The postwar moral world is coming to an end: the question is what will come next.

Heroes and Villains

Tuesday 17 May at 10.00am in the University Church

For those of us who have grown up formed by its certainties, the fracturing of the postwar moral consensus is unnerving. This lecture will offer some cold comfort, by examining the weaknesses and inadequacies of the Second World War and of the mythology of anti-Nazism as a basis for our value systems. It will argue that for those weaknesses and inadequacies to be addressed, we will need to draw on deeper resources, which in the western world must mean principally theChristian moral frameworks that are still buried deep in our culture’s foundations. It remains to be seen whether this will be done well or badly.

The inadequacy of the Second World War as a basis for our ethics is not a matter merely of the moral messiness of the struggle itself (the Bengal famine, Dresden, Hiroshima); nor of the problematic lessons the war has taught us (the phobia of ‘appeasement’ almost annihilated the planet during the Cuban missile crisis). More fundamentally, the very fact of replacing a positive moral exemplar with a negative one has left us with a social consensus that knows what is evil but has no agreement on what is good, and indeed with a severely impoverished notion of the good. One result is a worsening shortage of those pragmatic moral lubricants, repentance and forgiveness. Another is an almost comical tendency, especially in Britain, to read complex problems, from the COVID pandemic to the climate emergency, through the lens of the Second World War – as if all true evils have villains at their heart. A third is a persistent inability to find a cultural place for religion, especially for religions that do not feel the need to emulate postwar European Christianity’s tamed social role. The lecture will argue that these inadequacies are amongst the reasons why our postwar value system is failing, and why we ought to be glad of the fact. It will also argue that, while Christianity cannot be the only set of moral resources drawn on to address these problems, it can and should play a distinctive and decisive part in doing so. And it will draw on examples from around the world that suggest this is already beginning to happen.

A Crossroads

Tuesday 17 May at 11.30am in the University Church

As the postwar moral era comes to an end, Christians find themselves divided as to how to respond. With the assertively secular values of the post-1960s era beginning to feel brittle, it is unsurprising that many Christians across the world have sensed an opportunity. The result is an acceleration of culture wars, with certain kinds of Christianity positioning themselves in opposition to particular forms of secular modernism. The instinct to turn back the clock and to return to the old certainties of Christendom’s value systems is very understandable. This final lecture will argue that it would nevertheless be a grave error; that even (or especially) doctrinally or socially conservative Christians ought to seek a constructive engagement with the anti-Nazi values of the postwar age, which are much less antagonistic to Christianity than their construction as ‘secular humanism’ suggests. This is partly because, in such a culture war, assertive Christendom-Christianity will lose. Indeed, it emboldens its secularist ‘enemies’ by giving them precisely the kind of opposition they crave. Yet this approach is flawed theologically as well as tactically, based as it is on a hollowed-out Christian identity politics as brittle as any secular alternative. The lecture will suggest some alternative, subtler ways in which Christians can engage with fracturing secular values, breathing life into those values’ inadequacies but while also learning from them. As numerous commentators involved in the revival of virtue ethics have suggested, deploying and modelling unfashionable but essential practices such as humility and repentance both makes it possible to learn the very hard-won moral lessons of the modern era, and to demonstrate that, essential as those lessons are, they are not enough. The lecture will conclude by pointing to signs of an emergent Christian politics, especially but not only in parts of the global South, which suggest that such a constructive synthesis between Christian and secular values is not only necessary, but already happening.

Flat Eucharist: Schemes and Screens

This session thinks about the different 2D modes and conventions upon which we rely for our access to the Eucharist.  It considers the linear nature of ‘argument’ for making Eucharistic meaning, and its limitations.  It looks at the conventions of written, printed liturgy, at how the technology of the page filters, orders and confines what happens.  Informed by the recent experience of the pandemic, it discusses screened Eucharists as technologically-enabled representations which may - or may not - falter on the threshold between communion and its simulation.

The Eucharist as Theatre: Place and Space

This session thinks about ‘place’ as it plays out in a piece of ritual theatre constructed partly around absence – how vital physical gathering and genuine communal eating might (or might not) be for the realised Eucharistic drama of communal feast and remembered loss.  It considers the ways that liturgy makes things happen, as an event in a particular space with particular performers. It asks how ‘real’ representation can become if we are physically absent from one another, and what influence the deniability of symbolic acts has on our ambivalent relationship to acts of communion. 

The Eucharist in Time

This session asks about the nature of memory in Eucharistic action - not only in its bringing together of Jesus’s fleshly present with our own, but in the smaller and more particular meetings of personal past and present which happen for worshippers.  It thinks about the meetings and partings, the presences and absences, of private lives and loves, which are part of the power of liturgical reiteration. It finishes by pondering what is different, and what the same, between the connections of love set up in non-eucharistic memorials or records of the vanished past and the relationship which Eucharistic liturgy establishes between loss and meeting. 

Science and the Disenchantment of Nature

Nature and the Idea of the Supernatural

Religious Belief and the Myth of Scientific Naturalism