Faculty of Divinity Newsletter www.divinity.cam.ac.uk
ISSUE 1, OCTOBER 2013
A Welcome from Judith Lieu, Chair of the Faculty Board
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t is always a challenge to be at the start of something new — here writing as Chair of the Faculty Board for the first of what we hope will become an established line of occasional Divinity Faculty newsletters. As you read this, it may be as someone who has had recent experience of the Faculty, who recognises most of the names of the contributors over the following pages, and who can picture us going about our business; others may not have had much direct contact with the Faculty for many years, and may even never have visited the new (2000) building on West Road. Perhaps you have as yet no link with us, but may be considering coming to Cambridge, and are looking for a taste of what we do.
A reflection on nearly three years as Chair of the Faculty Board is a good place to start. But you should not expect the sort of report the Chair of a major company might make, carrying on her shoulders much of the responsibility, and accountability, for the success, or otherwise, of the enterprise. The Faculty Board (and not its Chair) makes decisions across a wide range of issues, such as the shape and content of what we teach, the use of any extra funding within our control, and even what colour to paint the Student Common Room (although we entrust such a choice to the Building and Safety Committee); it also helps formulate strategy, and anticipates where we might hope to be in five or more years time. Yet, the making of such decisions probably passes unnoticed by many most of the time. Faculty Board may approve courses, but it is the enthusiasm and love of subject by the teachers that will inspire students. Moreover, the research by individual members of the Faculty, which undergirds what they teach, lies outside the remit of the Faculty Board; yet it is the ‘researchitch’ which drives them to strike out in new directions or dig yet deeper into familiar questions, and which gives us our reputation as a dynamic and stimulating place to be.
Those two appointments illustrate well our commitment to maintaining the core areas traditionally associated with Theology and Religious Studies, while also responding to new developments in the field. Another new appointment is that of the endowed Sultan Qaboos Chair in Abrahamic Faiths and Shared Values, Professor Garth Fowden, who joined the Faculty in July; the Sultan Qaboos Professor is also Academic Director of the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme, ensuring the integration of research in the field both with public engagement and with the Faculty’s other activities. We also look forward to welcoming Dr. Ankur Barua, the new lecturer in Hindu Studies (following the retirement of Professor Julius Lipner), and are currently in the process of making an appointment in Theology and Science, to succeed Dr. Fraser Watts as Starbridge Lecturer on his retirement. Those who take up these lectureships will be encouraged to form collaborative networks with those whose teaching and research overlaps in interest elsewhere in the University. There has perhaps been a tradition for Faculties and Departments to look inwards, and the structures of degrees and examinations can make sharing of courses at undergraduate level difficult; but increasingly we are being encouraged to develop creative partnerships outside the Faculty. Theology and Religious Studies is itself an interdisciplinary subject, and has a range of natural partners, from Anthropology to Middle Eastern
Elsewhere in this Newsletter you will read pieces by two recent appointments to the Faculty, one in Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, Dr. Nathan MacDonald, and one in World Christianities, Dr. Joel Cabrita.
INSIDE
Faculty of Divinity West Road, Cambridge CB3 9BS
New Faces in the Faculty
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The Life of a PhD Student
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New Testament Greek on the Web
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40 years on (nearly)!
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A day in the life of an undergraduate
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News from the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme
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Recent Publications from the Cambridge Faculty of Divinity
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Upcoming events of interest
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Studies, and from Classics to Music; some potential partners may be less predictable — at a meeting recently someone from Plant Sciences named Religious Studies as a possible partner although I await details! As I write this the Faculty is beginning to make preparations for the new academic year and for a new cohort of students. Theology and Religious Studies continues to attract enthusiastic and able students who come to the subject from a variety of backgrounds and with a wide range of interests. We have been concerned by the decision not to include Religious Studies in the various attempts by the Government to identify a set of core subjects (such as the ‘EBacc’), and have done our best to alert them to the importance of ‘religious literacy’ in contemporary society. There is a danger that this will lead to a decrease in the numbers of students taking the subject for examinations (although in recent years increasing numbers have been attracted, particularly to the ‘Philosophy and Ethics’ stream of the A Level). We are increasing our efforts to reach out to a wider range of potential applicants, and have recently appointed a part-time outreach officer to help us in this. Of course, the introduction of the £9,000 fee, which so easily militates against our desire to increase access and participation, is a further incentive. At the same time we have revised the structure of our MPhil programme and are glad to continue to welcome highly qualified graduate students from around the world. Mounting debts for UK graduates, and other pressures on funding mean that graduate students too are facing difficult times, and addressing and ameliorating this grave situation is one our utmost priorities. Also looming on the horizon is the Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise; this is the process by which the Higher Education Funding Council assesses the quality of the research undertaken in the University, both at the level of individuals’ published ‘outputs’, and at that of the overall research environment of the Faculty, through its various activities from graduate recruitment to high level events and visitors, and to the winning of research grants. For the first time we are also having to give an account of the ‘impact’ of our 2
research — although how to quantify and demonstrate, never mind how to define ‘impact’, has been the subject of considerable controversy! While such exercises may be a necessary part of accountability — and the University continues to be heavily dependent on government funding for research, — a commitment to excellence in research and to the identification of new and exciting paths to pursue comes from within. I hope that this Newsletter will give you some sense of the depth of that commitment in the Faculty and of the different directions to which it leads. Which reminds me — I now have a paper to finish writing for a conference next week … Judith Lieu is the Lady Margaret’s Professor of Divinity.
New Faces in the Faculty In this issue of the Newsletter, we introduce you to two of the most recent additions to our Faculty and to their current topics of research:
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conflict with one another – partisans in one area have frequently written obituaries for the other area. It is, however, at the meeting of these two areas that intellectual combustion takes place, and some of the problems generated have occupied my thinking. In my doctoral work I examined monotheism in Deuteronomy. For the past four years I have been leading a research team looking at the different forms of monotheism in the Persian period (538-332 BCE).
Other interests of mine are the study of the history of Israelite religion and theology of the Old Testament. These two areas have often been in
I joined the Faculty in January 2013 and returning to Cambridge is very much a coming home. Not only was I student here in the mid 90s, but Cambridge is the town of my birth. As a student I came up to Emmanuel College to study mathematics, but changed to do the Theology tripos and then an MPhil in Hebrew at (what was then) the Faculty of Oriental Studies. I spent three years in Durham doing my doctorate before going to St Andrews in 2001. At St Andrews I began as a teaching fellow before becoming a Lecturer and finally Reader. In 2007 I spent eight months as a guest researcher in Munich, and this initial stay in Germany was eventually to lead to a four-year secondment to the University of Göttingen.
Dr. Nathan MacDonald Lecturer in Hebrew Bible am a scholar of the Old Testament fascinated by how the biblical text came to be produced and how it has generated meaning in religious traditions (and continues to do so). These are not two separate research interests, for it is often the text’s complex history of composition and the interpretative problems that result which lead to the many different ways of understanding it. Although every part of the Old Testament interests me, I cut my teeth on the Pentateuch and it continues to provide most of the problems that occupy me. I completed my doctorate on the book of Deuteronomy, but have spent some time in recent years on the book of Numbers. This work should eventually result in an Old Testament Library commentary to replace the volume by Martin Noth.
‘drugs, doctors and chemists’. In 1904, in the aftermath of the South African War, Dowie sent four missionaries to Transvaal, South Africa, newly claimed as part of the British Empire. Initially aimed at the white English and Dutchspeaking inhabitants of cosmopolitan Johannesburg, Zionist faith healing practices were rapidly taken up by the black workers of the gold mines, as well as by the farmers in surrounding rural areas. These churches began to segment and reproduce at an extraordinary rate. By the 1940s, there were over one thousand black churches in South Africa that identified themselves as Zionist. An enduring feature of these complex and divergent organizations was members’ cultivation of their early links with ‘Prophet Dowie’, and the role that this connection played in the religious selffashioning of both South African and American Zionists.
My publications include my thesis published as Deuteronomy and the Meaning of ‘Monotheism’ (2003) as well as two books on food in the biblical period Not Bread Alone (2008) and What Did the Ancient Israelites Eat? (2008). I have also edited four books on various themes. Dr. Joel Cabrita Lecturer in World Christianities
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am a scholar of African Christianity, particularly focusing on the twentieth-century history of Christianity in southern Africa. My forthcoming book (Text and Authority in the South African Nazaretha Church) looks at how the large and influential Nazaretha church created new sacred scriptures, labelled by them as an updated version of the Christian Bible. My current research focuses on a Christian movement known as ‘Zionism’ (not to be confused with the Jewish nationalist movement of the same name). Zionism is one of the largest religious constituencies of contemporary South Africa and today numbers about twelve million African adherents. The main characteristic of this movement is their pursuit of bodily healing
through prayer. While Zionism has commonly been seen as a uniquely African application of indigenous healing rituals to Christianity, I have adopted a different perspective. My research focuses on the global rather than the local context for Zionism. In particular, I explore how Zionist Christianity in South Africa emerged as the product of complex interactions and connections between both black and white Zion believers in the United States and South Africa. The group’s origins lay in a ‘divine healing’ movement that started in the United States in the late nineteenth century, and rapidly spread across much of the English-speaking world. These Protestant Christians diagnosed sickness as the work of the devil, and they believed in God’s ability to heal physical affliction. This impulse reflected a widespread Western anxiety about the health – both physical and social - of the Anglo-Saxon race amidst rapid social change. Australian-Scottish minister John Alexander Dowie was the movement’s most famous – and notorious - representative. In 1900 Dowie bought an area of land near Chicago which he named Zion, and there settled several thousand Zionists, strictly forbidding the use of
Using archives in both South Africa and Zion, Illinois, as well as extensive interviews with contemporary Zionists, my research charts the often turbulent relationship between American and African Zion. I am particularly interested in tracing how Protestant ideas of bodily perfection played out in a South African context, interacting with, and transforming, local idioms of embodied health. Another focal point of my project is the circulation of printed matter that characterized this transatlantic healing movement. Periodicals, pamphlets and tracts carrying testimonies and graphic photographs of faith healings were all key to the rapid spread of Zionism in South Africa. I’m interested in shedding light on the ability of African Christianity to link believers to large-scale transnational communities. Christianity’s capacity to translate itself in a range of contexts - making the faith an apt vehicle for the expression of local religious, cultural and social values– has been well-researched. Building upon this, my work shows how Christian faith healing could also prompt believers to imagine themselves outside of their local contexts, and so, in the process, become strangers in their own homelands. 3
New Testament Greek on the Web Jane McLarty
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t’s a sad fact that fewer and fewer of our undergraduates have any substantial prior experience of learning a foreign language when they arrive to study Theology and Religious Studies. Yet we expect them to learn a complex, structured language, in an unfamiliar alphabet, and achieve reasonable proficiency with just 20 weeks’ teaching time. Until three years ago ‘Greek Week’ brought undergraduates up a week early to give them a head start with learning Greek or Hebrew while they had no other commitments to distract them. Now that this course can no longer be offered, teachers of first year Greek have noticed the impact: the set text has had to be shortened as more time has to be spent learning grammar. Yet the most rewarding part of the course is reading ‘real Greek’, and it’s the point at which one really starts to learn the language. This year Dave Goode (our Faculty IT Officer) and I were successful in a bid to the University Teaching and Learning Fund, and were awarded over £17,000 to develop an online equivalent for ‘Greek Week’. The purpose is to demystify the language, give students greater confidence in their ability to cope with it, and start them on learning some of the fundamentals of the grammar. We intend to achieve this with an engaging mixed media offering (text, audio, some video) which also checks that students are absorbing material by means of frequent quizzes. It will be accessible on a range of devices including PC and tablet. The project will be developed in collaboration with the University Language Centre, which has a great deal of experience in developing this kind of online provision, and we aim for the course to be available for those coming up to Cambridge in October 2014. Once up and running, there may be scope for expanding the material so that it offers enrichment and supplementary exercises for the entire first year; we could also look at rolling out something similar for the other Scriptural languages.
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The Faculty, rightly in my view, holds fast to the principle that it is unacceptable for our undergraduates to study the texts of the world’s great religions only in translation. This is daunting for potential applicants particularly from the state school sector who have had less access to language learning. We hope that this course will smooth the transition to university-level language learning for all, no matter what their educational background. Dr. Jane McLarty is Senior Tutor of Wolfson College and an affiliated lecturer in the Divinity Faculty.
A day in the life of an undergraduate Suzie Millar
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tudying theology in Cambridge, I can be quite flexible with how I spend my time. I don’t have an enforced routine, which is great a lot of the time, although it requires powers of self-motivation which I sometimes find lacking. Most mornings I’ll have a lecture or a class. Lectures tend to take you on a whistle-stop tour of the broad subject area. When they are done well (which in Divinity they almost always are), they really whet your appetite to find out more. In classes, we go more into the particulars and have the chance to interact. Hebrew classes are always my favourite (you’d be surprised how animated we can get over grammatical constructions). When I don’t have a class or lecture,
I’m usually amongst those who trickle into the Faculty Library between 9 and 10. Getting there early helps when staking out a good spot; I have to practice all the virtues a theology degree can teach you if someone is sitting at my desk when I arrive. The Library is a really great place to work. It’s light and airy, with plenty of desk space. All the resources you need are there, as are your friends, and it even comes complete with a (in my view compulsory) 11 o’ clock coffee break. The happy caffeinated buzz of the Div Fac foyer is always a nice informal setting to chat to other students, lecturers and members of staff, and the energy boost lets you power on through those library-hours ‘til lunch. A group of us usually go to Selwyn buttery for lunch, and we all do such diverse papers that it makes for very interesting discussion over our bowls of £1.05 mystery-soup. World religions, sociology, Biblical studies, languages, philosophy – the list goes on. I always love finding out about the profound, fascinating, and sometimes downright bizarre things my friends have been learning (the cult of the Flying Spaghetti Monster springs to mind). After lunch I might have a supervision. Not often enough do I stop to consider what a privilege it is to have one-on-one time discussing my ideas with the experts in the field, or just how formative this experience can be. Looking back on the work I did in first year, I can’t quite believe how far I’ve come. Cambridge – and particularly supervisions in Cambridge – have taught me how to think. There’s an enormous amount of satisfaction that comes with nurturing your own ideas and being able to debate and develop them further with some of the greatest minds in the country. Later on I might work in a friend’s room or a coffee shop, and then head home for an evening spent socializing or at a dance rehearsal or choir or (occasionally) in the throes of an essay crisis which threatens to continue until it’s time for the next 9am cycle ride to the Faculty... Suzie Millar completed her undergraduate degree this past summer and is staying on in the Faculty to pursue an MPhil in Old Testament.
Recent Publications from the Cambridge Faculty of Divinity Katharine J. Dell, Job: Where Shall Wisdom be Found?, Sheffield Phoenix Press, £12.95
Naures Atto, Hostages in the Homeland, Orphans in the Diaspora: Identity Discourses Among the Assyrian/ Syriac Elites in the European Diaspora, Leiden University Press, £50
David F. Ford, The Future of Christian Theology, WileyBlackwell, £19.99
Nathan MacDonald, Mark W. Elliott, and Grant Macaskill, eds., Genesis and Christian Theology, Eerdmans, £23.99
James A. Andrews, Hermeneutics and the Church: In Dialogue with Augustine, University of Notre Dame Press, £29.95
Catherine Pickstock, Repetition and Identity, Oxford University Press, £12.99
Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’, Cambridge University Press, £18.99
Mike Higton, A Theology of Higher Education, Oxford University Press, £25
James Carleton Paget and Joachim Schaper, eds., The New Cambridge History of the Bible: From the Beginnings to 600, Cambridge University Press, £125
Eamon Duffy, Ten Popes Who Shook the World, Yale University Press, £14.99
Simon Gathercole, The Composition of the Gospel of Thomas: Original Language and Influences, Cambridge University Press, £60
Darren Sarisky, Scriptural Interpretation: A Theological Exploration, WileyBlackwell, £60
Daniel H. Weiss, Paradox and the Prophets: Hermann Cohen and the Indirect Communication of Religion, Oxford University Press, £47.99
Timothy Jenkins, Of Flying Saucers and Social Scientists: A ReReading of When Prophecy Fails and of Cognitive Dissonance, Palgrave Macmillan, £37.50
Douglas Hedley, Sacrifice Imagined: Violence, Atonement and the Sacred, Continuum, £19.99
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The Life of a PhD Student Raphael Cadenhead
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s my time in Cambridge comes to an end, I’d like to share some thoughts about my experiences as a doctoral student in the Divinity Faculty. Firstly, let me say a few words about my own field of research. My work focuses on the ascetical theology of the Eastern, ‘Cappadocian’ Father of the late fourth century, Gregory of Nyssa (circa AD 335-395). Its aim is to retrieve Gregory’s full range of thinking on the challenges and maturations of the ascetic life. My research grew out of a personal sense of disillusionment with contemporary ecclesial and secular discussions – both ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ – on the much contested issues of ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’. I wanted to look afresh at the questions raised by these discussions and to reexamine their underlying theoretical presumptions from the perspective of a late antique vision of moral transformation. My research also seeks to correct otherwise exciting scholarly developments in the study of ‘asceticism’ which have arisen over the last few decades in late antique studies. These have tended to interpret the bodily disciplines of the ascetic life through the distorting lens of Foucauldian and
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Freudian categories of interpretation. It is against this backdrop of misrepresentation that my research seeks to mark a new moment in the reception of Gregory’s ascetical theology – one that, I believe, holds creative promise for the dilemmas that are writ large in contemporary society and the churches.
Divinity Faculty at Cambridge. And if pressed to single out one aspect of my time here which has made it all so worthwhile, I would point to the supportive community of postgraduates whose varied research interests provide a fertile ground for conversation, friendship and mutual encouragement.
I spend most days in the University Library or the Divinity Faculty Library. It is easy to take for granted the wealth of resources – books, articles, manuscripts – to which we have access. An invaluable resource for my own research has been the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG), a collection of digitised literary texts written in Greek from Homer to the fall of Byzantium in AD 1453 based at the University of California, Irvine. It still seems remarkable to me that, at the click of a button, I can access any text of my choosing from Gregory’s oeuvre.
Raphael Cadenhead is completing his doctoral studies in the Faculty this year.
One of the great advantages of studying at Cambridge is getting to meet the big names of academia in ‘Senior Seminars’. These seminars are held on a fortnightly basis on each of the main research areas in the faculty. Esteemed scholars, from Cambridge and beyond, present their research findings to all and sundry – from the budding first-year doctoral student to the Regius Professor of Divinity – and there are plenty of opportunities for lively discussion during the Q&A itself or afterwards over tea and biscuits. What I’ve enjoyed most of all about Cambridge is the opportunity it has afforded me to pursue my research interests alongside other nonacademic commitments. My flexible working schedule, for instance, has enabled me to train for a marathon and a half-marathon during my time here. As a member of Selwyn College Chapel Choir, I also regularly attend rehearsals, services, concerts and recordings. And finally: I’m a listening volunteer at the Cambridge Branch of the Samaritans – work which is both challenging and rewarding. These commitments provide structure to an otherwise amorphous week as well as muchneeded respite from research. So to sum up: it has been a great privilege and honour to study in the
40 years on (nearly)! Julius Lipner
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ince I shall be retiring at the end of nearly 40 years (39 to be exact!) of teaching in the Faculty at the end of September 2013, I have been asked to give my impressions of changes in the Faculty over these four decades – a sort of farewell bird’s-eye view as this particular bird of passage vanishes into the horizon. I joined the Faculty as ‘Lecturer in the Comparative Study of Religion’ in January 1975. Over the years, based on my linguistic and academic strengths, this has been refined to ‘Professor of Hinduism and the Comparative Study of Religion’, and I’ve been happy to live with that. In fact, subject-wise, all those years ago, I replaced no one. When I came to the Faculty I occupied the very first post in the study of non-Christian and comparative religion in the oldest Faculty of the University of Cambridge (hence the ancient term
‘Divinity’ has stuck: I remember a debate in the Faculty some years ago as to whether we should change the name to something more modern. Finally, we decided to keep the old name in the light of general agreement that since ‘Divinity’ as a title was so non-directive, it would be convenient to hang on to it so that we could pursue our collective academic programme as freely as we wished….). I learned afterwards that the Faculty decided to apply to the University for this new post after a great internal debate. Was it right to start a new trend at that time in the core teaching and research interests of the Faculty? Collectively, the Faculty answered ‘yes’, and I was the first beneficiary of this decision. I should like to record here that regardless of the individual positions taken during that debate (the details of which I have never bothered to find out), I was received personally by one and all with the utmost cordiality and good will, and that my subject-area was welcomed without reserve into the Tripos and postgraduate teaching of the Faculty. But how consequential for the Faculty that decision has been! I would like to think that a certain vision of a changing world, and of the role of the academic study of faith and religion in the University, prevailed as a result of that debate. And today, four decades on, besides Hinduism and to some extent Buddhism (and, of course, Christianity, as the historic tradition studied in the Faculty), the world-faiths of Judaism and Islam are also studied in depth with the others, amid a mix of such disciplines as the interpretation of scripture, the study of the relevant scriptural languages, of the history and meaning of ideas, doctrine, literature and institutions, of the relationship between theology and science, of the role of Christianity in Africa (a new acquisition), as well as the anthropology and sociology of religion, and the philosophy of religion. A number of relatively new posts in these areas and disciplines have been the result of money found through personal initiatives by members of the Faculty, and this has considerably enhanced the profile of the Faculty in the University. Indeed, it seems to have become University policy to encourage such initiatives, and the Faculty has acquired considerable experience in
this regard. Today, we are a properly contemporary Faculty with a properly contemporary agenda for studying the vital phenomenon of religion in the modern world. Over the years, concomitant with this change in academic content, there has been a change in location and in the building that houses the Faculty. When I arrived in 1975, we occupied the so-called Divinity School in St. John’s Street (owned by St. John’s College, and recently refurbished and re-commissioned) in the heart of the city-centre. The lease was due to run out at the end of the 90s, and we were tasked with finding a new home. I remember the discussion at that time as to where we should go. The decision was taken that we should move to the Sidgwick site on West Road among other Faculties of the Arts and Humanities. This was a wise decision, I think, for however convenient for city-centre shopping the old Divinity School was, as a Faculty we were somewhat out on a limb physically, while symbolically we ran the risk of appearing to be out of touch with mainstream concerns in the Arts and Humanities in the University. Religion is an integral and vital dimension of our world, and its study in the University should reflect this fact, both academically and symbolically. To implement this developing vision, the content of the Tripos has changed too. We still struggle, I think, to produce a finely balanced and integrated Tripos syllabus over the three years, but our current blend of faiths and disciplines represents marked progress over the schemata of earlier phases of Tripos reform. Perhaps the quest for a perfect Tripos syllabus should necessarily be elusive – to allow for continual growth, re-appraisal and redefinition. This, together with due care and attention for the learning needs of our students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, is the only way to arrive at a formula for educational success. The dominant academic model in the University in disciplines such as ours when I first came was of the scholar, head down and ploughing a lonely furrow. I am glad that this has changed in favour of a paradigm that increasingly requires inter-disciplinary and inter-Faculty collaboration, but
this must be based on two facts: (i) due expertise in one’s own field, and (ii) the realization that such expertise has porous boundaries. Let me conclude by expressing an enormous debt of gratitude to my colleagues, both past and present, and to the whole student body of the Faculty and to all members of the assistant staff, for a ‘Cambridge experience’ that I shall treasure beyond words. Julius Lipner recently retired from the Faculty as Professor of Hinduism and the Comparative Study of Religion.
News from the Cambridge Interfaith Programme
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he Cambridge Inter-faith Programme (CIP), based in the Faculty of Divinity yet with a national and international reach, brings together academic research and public education about religions. 2012/13 has been an eventful year for CIP with the culmination of its two major research projects, and exciting developments with its public education work. On the research side of CIP’s work, the Online Inter-faith Dialogue Platform project, which sought to test the possibility of inter-faith dialogues on the internet through a specially designed web forum, has been completed. The project led to the development of nurani.org where members of different faiths can participate in facilitated discussions around the Qur’an, the Christian Bible and the Tanakh. The project also led to a beautiful new website for Scriptural Reasoning, the interfaith practice underpinning all of CIP’s work. To find out more about Scriptural Reasoning, and take a look at the new resources we’ve developed for the website, you are invited to visit scripturalreasoning.org. CIP’s second main research project, Religion and the Idea of a Research University, brings together scholars from the Faculties of English, History and Psychiatry to examine the 7
entangled relations between religion and the Western research university, in both historical and contemporary terms. From ideas of academic virtue and religious literacy to the concept of good global citizenship in the age of secularity, this project considers the sometimes unwieldy, always debateworthy role that religion does or does not play in the modern secular research institution. The project has just hosted an international, interdisciplinary conference, with keynotes from scholars in History, English, Psychiatry, Philosophy and Theology, and a public debate led by leaders from the political and higher education sectors (April 2013). Essays and commentary can be found at ideaofauniversity.com. While CIP’s work had historically focused on Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the past year has been a time of thinking seriously about the interaction of non-Abrahamic faiths with our work. CIP’s Director, Professor David Ford, was invited to lecture in China where for the first time he took part in six-text Scriptural Reasoning – text study with not only Jewish, Christian and Muslim texts but also Daoist, Buddhist and Confucian texts. The main setting for this was in the new Institute for Comparative Scripture and Interreligious Dialogue in Minzu University of China in Beijing, which has been set up to develop a Chinese version of Scriptural Reasoning. Professor Ford and CIP Senior Adviser Professor Peter Ochs of the University of Virginia are members of its Academic Board, and it already has a research programme with nine projects. Chinese Scriptural Reasoners also sponsored a one-day Round Table on Scriptural Reasoning at the International Association of Comparative Literature annual meeting in Paris in July. Complementing our academic research, CIP works with partners around the world to develop projects that deepen public understanding of religion (or ‘religious literacy’), and improve relations between religious communities. Our work with the Coexist Foundation continues, with a long-term aspiration to support the creation of a landmark visitors’ centre in London where exhibitions, training and programming about religions will take centre-stage. Our dream is for a centre in which people in all walks of
‘Few things are likely to be more important for the twentyfirst century than wise faith among the world’s religious communities. That calls for fuller understanding, better education, and a commitment to the flourishing of our whole planet.’ Professor David F. Ford life can learn more about religions in a colourful and dynamic environment. Work has begun to develop the kind of contents that would eventually find a home in this centre. Also part of our public education portfolio is the Cambridge Coexist Leadership Programme, which brings together senior leaders from UK Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities. The first year of this programme, which involves three residential meetings in very special venues (Trinity College, Cambridge; St George’s House, Windsor Castle; Cumberland Lodge) is nearly complete and our inaugural cohort of leaders have found the experience of meeting, doing Scriptural Reasoning, and developing their leadership skills together, very powerful. A similar endeavor but for younger religious leaders from around the world, is CIP’s annual Summer School. Summer 2013 marked our third annual Summer School , with emerging Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders joining us from Nigeria, China, Singapore, Egypt, the UAE, Israel, Bosnia, Morocco, Germany, the USA and the UK. The programme covers three weeks of Scriptural Reasoning, lectures, dialogues and visits around the UK. Most importantly the group has plenty of opportunities to eat, converse and relax together, forming a close-knit worldwide alumni group of future religious leaders. If you are interested in finding out more about CIP’s work, or getting involved, we’d love to hear from you. On our website, you can read more about our work, browse our fantastic resource bank of papers, lectures and multimedia resources. You can also sign up to receive CIP’s newsletter, or send us a message. You can find us at interfaith.cam.ac.uk.
Upcoming events of interest 2013–14 Hulsean Lectures, to be delivered by Prof. Richard Hays (Duke University): ‘Reading Backwards: Israel’s Scripture through the Eyes of the Evangelists’. 12–13 November 2013; 11–12 February 2014; 29–30 April 2014. 2013–14 Stanton Lectures, to be delivered by Prof. Stephen Mulhall (University of Oxford): ‘The Great Riddle: Wittgenstein and Nonsense, Theology and Philosophy’. Six weekly lectures, commencing Monday 20 January 2014. Inaugural lecture of Garth Fowden, Sultan Qaboos Professor: ‘Abraham or Aristotle?’ 4 December 2013. Open Days for prospective undergraduates: Joint Oxbridge Theology and Religious Studies Open Day: Tuesday 25 March 2014. General Cambridge University Open Days: 3 and 4 July 2014. For more details concerning these various events, please visit the Faculty website: www.divinity.cam. ac.uk
Note to alumni Laura Jeffrey is the Faculty’s new Outreach Officer and is very keen to hear from alumni who could help to promote Theology and Religious Studies by letting her know the impact of the degree on their career or by getting involved in Open Days in Cambridge or around the country. If you are interested, please contact her at outreach@divinity.cam.ac.uk or on 01223 763958.
The Divinity Faculty Newsletter is edited by Dr. Daniel Weiss, Faculty of Divinity West Road, Cambridge CB3 9BS Please send comments or communications to newsletter@ divinity.cam.ac.uk or via the Faculty address above.