Westcott House

David Conway contests that “La Juive ... tells us nothing about Jews in nineteenth-century France or any other era; still less is it intended to prompt any serious reflections prompting a liberal view of multi-cultural society.” (Jewry in Music, 2012, p. 218). This essay explores the cultural significance of intermarriage in Halévy's France and his opera, offering a reading of the work in which the reverse of Conway's statement seems to be true.

This study investigates the effectiveness of combining the curricula for Music and Citizenship into the same scheme of work. Students in Year 9 created, in small groups, a piece of music theatre about knife crime, and the engagement of four students in the class was assessed through interviews, classroom observation and written ‘exit-cards’. The results show that the combination of curricula can foster engagement is both subject areas and this can be effective for students who struggle with engagement. However, it also showed that, whatever the potential benefits, the structure of the timetable at the study school was not conducive to cross-curricular teaching and learning.

This paper sets Awaiting the King against the background of the previous volumes in Smith's Cultural Liturgies trilogy, and outlines this book's argument for readers not familiar with it, bringing out the influence of St Augustine and Oliver O'Donovan. It draws attention to Smith's responses within the book to earlier critics and, in turn, points towards two lines of critique of it. Keywords James K.A. Smith, political formation, participation, citizenship James K.A. Smith's latest book, Awaiting the King, completes his three-volume 'Cultural Liturgies' series. In the previous volumes, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation and Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works, 1 Smith set out the goal of the series as the renewal of Christian practice in the light of what he calls a liturgical anthropology, in which humans are identified as fundamentally worshipping creatures. Smith is particularly seeking to contest what he sees as the very cognitive 'worldview' approach of his own Reformed tradition, which, he argues, in emphasising knowledge and understanding as leading to wise living, tends to create the impression that humans are primarily thinking beings. Against this 'bobble head' anthropology, 2 Smith draws on Augustine to argue that we are actually creatures made for worship and constituted by what we desire, and that knowledge follows from desire, not vice versa. Acknowledging this pre-cognitive mode of being as foundational means recognising that what we love is formed not primarily through conscious decisions, but through bodily practices. Smith therefore argues that Christians must learn to attend better to and to exegete the 'liturgical' practices in which they participate daily, whose teloi are often at odds with those of the kingdom of God. To this end, Smith seeks to expose and diagnose the ways in which our cultural, economic, and political practices are not neutral activities that we undertake but are always doing something to us, shaping us towards one implicit vision of the good life or another (see, for instance, his descriptions of the formative power of shopping malls).

This contribution addresses pressing questions about English national identity and belonging through exploring Anglican polity and its relationship with place. I argue that the Church of England's 'territorial embeddedness' has resources to offer to the present turmoil over what it means to belong to a national civic community. However, identifying these resources involves reckoning with the ways that the Church-in its relationship with territory-has itself historically displayed possessive and hierarchical tendencies. Through reckoning with this history I retrieve a theological account of the place of the church as undefended territory, in which there is genuine attachment to particular places that is (or should be) noncompetitive. This non-competitive account of belonging is explored in terms of, first, federated modes of polity and, second, forms of collective responsibility for all the people of a land and all of that land's history. In grappling with Anglicanism's mottled identity, therefore, fruitful resources emerge for understanding belonging and responsibility within a place-tethered communityresources which can help to offer an alternative to narrow forms of nationalism and attendant civic alienation. In this way, there is scope for the Church of England to distinctively contribute to the cultivation of a truly common national life.

This contribution addresses pressing questions about English national identity and belonging through exploring Anglican polity and its relationship with place. I argue that the Church of England's 'territorial embeddedness' has resources to offer to the present turmoil over what it means to belong to a national civic community. However, identifying these resources involves reckoning with the ways that the Church-in its relationship with territory-has itself historically displayed possessive and hierarchical tendencies. Through reckoning with this history I retrieve a theological account of the place of the church as undefended territory, in which there is genuine attachment to particular places that is (or should be) noncompetitive. This non-competitive account of belonging is explored in terms of, first, federated modes of polity and, second, forms of collective responsibility for all the people of a land and all of that land's history. In grappling with Anglicanism's mottled identity, therefore, fruitful resources emerge for understanding belonging and responsibility within a place-tethered communityresources which can help to offer an alternative to narrow forms of nationalism and attendant civic alienation. In this way, there is scope for the Church of England to distinctively contribute to the cultivation of a truly common national life.

Throughout his retirement, John Hick, the Philosopher of Religious Pluralism, collated a collection of papers in his home office, which had built up over the course of his career. Until now, the contents of this collection remained unknown. The collection totals 40 boxes of material and has been donated by the Hick family to the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham.1 It is a remarkable collection, which contains a lifetime’s work, including: unpublished manuscripts, journal articles, lectures, interviews on VHS and DVD, sermons, and diaries which he kept during his work with the Community Race Relations Committee, and SACRE (Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education). Of particular interest have been the correspondences Hick has kept with his former colleagues, interlocutors, critiques as well as other notable figures. Some of these correspondences include letters written, to use Hick’s own words, in ‘almost undecipherable’2 handwriting from Norman Kemp Smith, Donald MacKinnon, and Ramu Gandhi. Further letters are from other key figures in Hick’s life, including: T. E. Jessop, H. H. Farmer, H. H. Price, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Peter Heath, and Paul Knitter. There are other letters from some notable figures such as: John A. T. Robinson, Karen Armstrong, and Desmond Tutu. A few of the letters contain quite a fierce exchange, noting in particular those between Hick and Antony Flew, Don Cupitt, Charles Hartshorne, and the then Cardinal Ratzinger. The John Hick Estate and the Spalding Trust have generously funded my research into the archived papers.

Since the publication of Zizioulas' seminal text, Being as Communion (1985), succesive theologians have turned to his work to postulate a social-trinity. The past decade has witnessed a significant repudiation of social-trinitarianism, but such criticism has an implicit tendency to identify Zizioulas as a social-trintiarian. My paper shall consider Zizioulas' ecclesiology in relation to its reception by social-trinitarianism, and ask whether both his social-trinitarian advocates, and their critics, do justice to the problems considered by Zizioulas. Whilst acknowledging that there are significant similarities in their initial engagement, and recognising the limitations of Zizioulas' project, this paper shall maintain that Zizioulas is not ultimately a social-trinitarian because his social-trinitarian advocates are posing different questions to the relationship between the Trinity and the Church than posed by Zizioulas. Although the social-trinitarians draw from Zizioulas' work they do so to answer their own questions, which they resolve by projecting a revised trinitarian schesis, rooted in perichoresis, onto ecclesial and social structures. By attending to the nature of Zizioulas' ecclesiological questions, I shall make the case that Zizioulas exhibits a logic of question and answer that belongs to the neopatristic synthesis which emerged in Orthodox theology in the twentieth century. Zizioulas relates the Trinity to the Church on the basis of theosis as Christification. Consequently, Zizioulas and the social-trinitarians operate within different logical complexes.

During the 1980s and 1990s it was common to juxtapose a supposedly Patristic retrieval of a ‘social-trinity’ as opposed to a Latin and Augustinian ‘substantial trinity’- a juxtaposition known as the de Régnon paradigm. This social trinity was used to reconceive personal, human and ecclesial relationships along more egalitarian and relational lines- perichoresis was the operative term. It inspired a great outpouring of ethical and ecclesiological work. As Kathryn Tanner explains:

‘When contemporary theologians want to form judgements about social and political matters they often turn immediately to the trinity for guidance. Rather than Christology, a theology of the trinity is enlisted to support particular kinds of human community- say, egalitarian, inclusive, communities, in which differences are respected- or to counter modern individualism by greater regard for the way personal character is shaped in community’

Miroslav Volf, Colin Gunton and Paul Fiddes are prominent examples of theologians who postulate a social-analogy of the trinity to justify an egalitarian free-Church ecclesiology. All of whom have turned to Zizioulas for a Cappadocian conception of the trinity. This paper examines Stephen Holmes' argument which seeks to abrogate a social trinity on the basis of delineating the problems related to projecting a trinitarian schesis onto ecclesiology. His premise is that Zizioulas and Miroslav Volf are social trinitarians; and although they share a methodology rooted in trinitarian analogy they derive widely different ecclesiologies from the trinitarian communion. Namely, that in the ecclesiology of John Zizioulas the Bishop is a projection of the monarchy of the Father. Whereas the ecclesiology of Miroslav Volf justifies an egalitarian ecclesiology based on the mutuality of the triune persons. Thus, there is a fundamental flaw in the social trinitarian method if the doctrine of the trinity produces different ecclesiologies. However, whilst sharing Holmes' concerns about social trinitarian projection, this paper argues that Zizioulas does not postulate a social trintiarian methodology based on analogy. Instead, Zizioulas argues for theosis on the basis of participation in the person of Christ, and this participation is the foundation for his ecclesiology in dialogue with the historical commitment to apolostic succession in the episcopacy.

In this paper, I have challenged the consensus that Zizioulas is a Social Trinitarian. My thesis has made quite a simple point that I believe what Zizioulas seeks to achieve in his eucharistic ecclesiology is different from social trinitarianism. The question I would like to consider in this talk is, ‘why is it important to distinguish between Zizioulas’ eucharistic ecclesiology and social trinitarianism?’

In 2024 I delivered a talk on the eucharist for the Society of Catholic Priests in the Church of England. This talk considers how the modern Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas conceives of the Eucharist as both a participation in the Eschaton, which he defines as divine human communion, and a participation in the person of Christ in the Spirit. I ask what Anglicanism can learn from this perspective on the Eucharist.

Robert Crouse is a noted Patristic and Medieval scholar, and a teacher and priest in the Anglican Church of Canada. Through his committment to the texts of our spiritual and intellectual tradition, Father Crouse has instilled a deep love of learning in generations of students. He is also a noted priest and spiritual guide, a bulwark of orthodox faith, and has even been described as "the conscience of the Canadian Church". His passion is the poet/ theologian Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). This book is a collection of his Sermons.

Scholars of reception history often look to extra-canonical narratives about the apostles for evidence that the canonical Acts of the Apostles influenced later Christian literary output. This is particularly the case for those seeking to understand the enigmatic “we” narrators of the Acts of the Apostles and Acts of John. This article reevaluates the internal (first person) narrator of the Acts of John and argues that the widespread scholarly characterization of its narrative voice as “sporadic” constitutes a misreading of the text. Scholarly study of the canonical Acts of the Apostles has influenced interpretation of the later work. Also considered are questions of genre, referential claims, literary dependence, and the reasons why “we” narration has been employed.

This essay discusses political perspectives in several extrabiblical stories about the apostles: the Acts of Peter, Acts of Thekla, Acts of Paul (Ephesus and Martyrdom episodes), and Acts of John at Rome. It investigates the literary function of references to political figures, observing that their presence both decorates the literary backdrop and serves to advance the plot. The essay also argues that these narratives should not be described as "anti-imperial," drawing on Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana as a reference text.