Key facts

Type	Summer Schools -
Location	Oxford
Dates	Sun 12 to Sat 25 Aug 2012
Subject area(s)	Religious Studies Theology and Religious Studies
Fees	Programme Fee: £1040 Single Ensuite Fee: £180
Application status	Closed to new applications
Course code	O12I021CAR
Course contact	If you have any questions about this course, please email IPTheo@conted.ox.ac.uk.

Overview

The Oxford Theology Summer School comprises two one-week sessions, offering high-level theology seminars to an informed international audience. It is the only University course of its kind here in Oxford. The programme is directed on behalf of Oxford University Department for Continuing Education by Edmund Newell, Sub-Dean of Christ Church, Oxford. Among the tutors and lecturers are members of Oxford University’s Theology Faculty such as Jane Shaw, Dean of Grace Cathedral, and Keith Ward, former Regius Professor of Divinity, as well as distinguished theologians and church leaders including Angela Tilby, the Canon of Christ Church, and Henry Wansbrough, translator of the Jerusalem Bible.

Description

The overall theme for the Theology Summer School 2012 is ‘Texts and Images’. The seminars and lectures will focus on the key role that texts play in Christianity and other religions. This will include exploring how texts are interpreted by various faiths; how to handle difficult Biblical texts; how scientific and philosophical texts have impacted on Christianity; the communication of theology through creative writing, including the work of CS Lewis; how to read theological concepts expressed through the imagery of icons; and the cultivation of moral imagination. The Summer School is suitable for all interested in further studies in theology, including clergy as part of their Continuing Ministerial Development.

The academic programme comprises

• study in small seminar groups taught by members of Oxford University's Theology Faculty, distinguished theologians and prominent church people.
• plenary keynote lectures given by Canon Dr Edmund Newell, Sub-Dean of Christ Church, and Canon Professor Sarah Foot, Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Canon of Christ Church.

Keynote Lectures

• Week 1: Theology and Fairy Tales: Religion and the Brothers Grimm Edmund Newell
• Week 2: Texts in the Liturgy: Reflections of Bach's St John Passion Sarah Foot
  Members of the Public: We are pleased to announce that a limited number of lecture tickets are available to members of the general public at no charge. To apply, simply write to the programme administrator at the address given at the foot of this page, stating your choice of lecture and enclosing a stamped self-addressed envelope.

Programme details

In each week participants will work in two seminars, one in the morning (09.00-12.00), and the other in the afternoon (13.30-16.30). Seminars will normally contain a maximum of 20 participants. Those attending both weeks of the programme will be able to participate in four seminars. Teaching will take place in Christ Church, one of the largest of the colleges of Oxford.

Week 1: 12-18 August 2012

MORNING:

The Influence of Philosophy on Christian Theology

‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ This course will answer that question, examining the influence of key works by Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Kant, Hegel, and Whitehead on Christian theology.

Tutor: Rev. Professor Keith Ward, Fellow of the British Academy, Professorial Research Fellow, Heythrop College, London, and Emeritus Student of Christ Church, Oxford.

The Medieval Mystery Plays

The medieval mystery cycles were the dominant form of drama in Western Europe for over two hundred years, combining solemn reverence, spectacle, melodrama and humour. Functioning simultaneously as carnival celebration and doctrinal instruction, they were preceived by later ages as crude and irreverent. It is only in the last half-century that their dramatic power and theological profundity have been rediscovered. This course will study a selection of individual plays, which between them show how the medieval dramatists reflected on the text of the Bible, seen through the lens of medieval devotion and legend.
Tutor: Dr Santha Bhattacharji is Senior Tutor of St Benet's Hall, Oxford.

Prayer and Poetry after the Reformation

This course will examine the relationship between poetry and Protestant devotional forms in Post-Reformation England. We will examine changing English attitudes to personal prayer in the period immediately following the Reformation. As the reformers invented new, English, Protestant forms of worship and devotion, how did they understand the relationship between common prayer and solitary devotion? We will look at primary sources such as the Book of Common Prayer and devotional handbooks, and study the writings of Edmund Spenser, Aemilia Lanyer, George Herbert, John Donne, and John Milton.

Tutor: Rev. Dr Erica Longfellow, Dean of Divinity, Chaplain and Fellow of New College, Oxford, is a specialist in the literature of the English Reformation.

AFTERNOON:

C.S.Lewis and Theological Imagination

Lewis is one of the most widely-read and influential theological writers of the last hundred years. But what makes his work so popular? This course examines Lewis’s beliefs about the centrality of imagination in all our knowing. It also studies the way he put his beliefs into practice as a writer of fiction and Christian apologetics. Suitable for anyone who wishes to think more deeply about successful communication, this course also provides an accessible overview of Lewis’s concerns as an academic, looking in particular at how his professional expertise as a medievalist informed his writing of the Narnia Chronicles.

Tutor: The Rev. Dr Michael Ward is Chaplain of St Peter’s College, Oxford, and a leading expert on the writings of C.S. Lewis.

Icon and Image, the Word made Visible

Icons are rooted in the ‘deep ‘history of Christianity and they show that imagery is part of the tradition of expressing theology and faith in ‘visible words’! The development of the ‘Icon’ as a unique art form is not accidental; it is bound up with the meaning of the ‘Incarnation’ and the theology of the ‘indwelling Holy Spirit’. Our course will examine the riches of this particular form, looking at its history, theology and place in the liturgy and prayer life of the Church. We will examine the technique of ‘writing’ icons and explore the rich variety of them.

Tutor: Rev. Dr Robin Gibbons is Director of Theology and Religion Programmes at OUDCE, Academic Director of the Centre for the Study of Religion in Public Life, Kellogg College and Pastoral Director of the Summer School.

The New Testament as Word of Life

This course will take participants on a rapid gallop through five of the key New Testament texts: the four gospels and the letters of Paul, with a view to discovering whether there is any excitement in them, or whether the wine has all turned into water.

Tutor: Nicholas King SJ is a Jesuit priest who teaches New Testament at Campion Hall in the University of Oxford, after many years of teaching in South Africa.

Week 2: 19-25 August 2012

MORNING:

A Christian Reads the Old Testament

Christianity can be understood only as the flowering and enrichment of Judaism. The purpose of the course is to view the Christian revelation against the background of Israel’s religious tradition, to examine and evaluate Christian presuppositions, imagery and theology. The five sessions will consists of five probes into different areas: how Israel reads its own history, Israel’s hopes for the future, the Christian developments on life after death, how the New Testament itself uses the Bible.

Tutor: Dom Henry Wansbrough is a Roman Catholic Benedictine monk, previously Master of St Benet’s Hall, Oxford, Chairman of the Oxford Faculty of Theology and Member of the Papal Biblical Commission, currently Professor of Biblical Studies at Liverpool Hope University.

Cultivating a Moral Imagination

This course will look at the ways in which the arts and humanities enable us to cultivate a moral imagination. We will explore how sacred texts, secular writings, the visual and performing arts enable us to enter another’s ‘shoes’, seeing the strange or the new, and creating prophetic hope. We will place this conversation in the larger context of the importance of the humanities; we will then look at story telling and the New Testament parables; visual arts and the sacred; poetry and the performing arts; and finally we will ask whether this conversation can relate to attempts to build a new market system that produces social good as well as financial returns.

Tutor: The Very Rev. Dr Jane Shaw is Dean of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, and former Dean of Divinity and Fellow of New College, Oxford.

Five Scientific Texts and their Ecclesiastical Impact

In this course we shall explore five key scientific texts and their impact upon the life and teaching of the Church. These include Aristotle’s Physics, Galileo’s Dialogue, Newton’s Principia, Darwin’s Origin, and a set of writings linking quantum theory to the idea of multiple universes, among which ours, we are told, may be only one of many. In each case the scientific texts have posed challenges to the Church’s thinking on crucial matters, including most importantly its image and concept of God. Examining these encounters afresh can inform the Church’s ongoing scientific engagements at a time of their increasing significance

Tutor: The Rev. Dr Shaun C. Henson serves as Chaplain to St. Hugh’s College and teaches in Oxford University’s Faculty of Theology.

AFTERNOON:

The Eyes of Faith: Seeing Salvation in Western Art

From the 3rd century baptistery at Dura-Europos through icons of Orthodoxy and acknowledged masterpieces of the Renaissance to Chris Ofili’s elephant dung: we combine history, theology, aesthetics and self-reflection in the study of individual works of art both (i) as set back within the devotional and liturgical communities in/for which most of them were made and (ii) as we currently have access to them in churches, museums and reproductions. The structure is broadly chronological, the emphasis is on the arts of Europe and Russia. Our own engagement with the works – and indeed the difficulties we find in such engagement – is important; I look forward to honest and open discussions.

Tutor: The Rev. Robin Griffith-Jones, Master of the Temple at the Temple Church, Visiting Senior Lecturer at King’s College London.

The Prophetic Voice of Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton continues to speak more than forty years after his death with a prophetic voice. But what is the basis of his fascination, of his international reputation, and of his relevance in today's world? The course will explore the many aspects of his life - as Trappist monk, as writer, as contemplative, as social critic, and (in the context of world faiths) as ecumenist. It will consider the discontents that intrigued and perplexed his contemporaries; and it will ask us to look again at our preconceived ideas in the light of all that he had to say about the natrural world, the prevailing culture, the abuses of power, institutions and the freedom of the individual, questions of war and peace, contemplation and action, and - Merton's primary concern - the search for God.

Tutor: The Very Reverend Dr John Moses is the Dean Emeritus of St Paul's Cathedral, London, UK.

What Makes Scripture Sacred?

An exploration of attitudes to sacred scripture in the pre-Christian, early Christian, Reformation and modern worlds. It will demonstrate the evolution of lectio divina as the human response to the divine word in prayer and liturgy and show its dependence on a hierarchy of scriptural meanings which dominated the Church until the Reformation. It will explore why the Reformers abandoned this for the principle of sola scriptura, and whether this or any other approaches can offer a satisfactory understanding of the Bible as sacred.

Tutor: The Revd Canon Angela Tilby is a the Diocesan Canon at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford and Advisor on Continuing Ministerial Development for the Diocese of Oxford.

Certification

• All students who satisfactorily complete the programme will receive an `Attendance Certificate`.
  (Please note that, as the University of Oxford does not offer credit, those wishing to obtain credit from their home institution for attending this programme must make appropriate arrangements with that institution in advance.)
• Students of the Graduate Theological Foundation should consult the Provost for further information.

Contact Hours

The programme provides a minimum of 26.5 contact hours per week, comprising:

• 25 hours of seminar meetings (12.5 per course)
• 1.5 hours of lectures (1 lectures lasting c1.5 hours)

Participants will have access to the Continuing Education Library.

Computing Facilities

Internet access is available in the Junior Common Room at Christ Church for reading/sending emails and browsing the Web. Please be aware that there are no printing or word processing facilities available to participants.

Level and demands

Who is it for?

• Members of the clergy
• Theologians
• Teachers of religious education
• Lay people with an interest in theological study at university level
• Although the direction of the summer school is essentially Christian, religious leaders and members of other faiths will be warmly welcomed as participants

This is an intensive programme of study taught at Masters level to an informed international audience, and applicants should be confident that they are academically and linguistically prepared for such a programme.

Non-native speakers of English are required to submit evidence of their English language competency with their application (IELTS 6.5 or proof of an equivalent level of competence).

Participants are expected to:

• undertake preparatory reading in advance of the programme
• attend all lectures and relevant seminar sessions
• be actively engaged with their seminar topics

Accommodation

Participants who choose to be resident on the programme will have a single study bedroom in Christ Church. They will take breakfast and lunch in Christ Church's Tudor Hall, with dinner available on the first Sunday and final Friday of the course.

A very limited number of rooms have private bathroom facilities (shower, washbasin and toilet) and these are available for an additional fee. Most are single rooms but a few are twin-bedded (ie contain two single beds). These are on the main site and in an annex across from the main entrance to college. Early application for these rooms is essential.

Accommodation preferences should be indicated on the application form, with a note of any mobility problems.

Participants cannot be accommodated at Christ Church either prior to or beyond their programme dates. Family members and/or friends who are not enrolled on this programme cannot be accommodated in college.

Participants who choose to be non-resident on the programme are responsible for finding their own accommodation. Information on accommodation on Oxford can be found on the Internet at: www.visitoxford.org. Demand for accommodation in Oxford during the summer months is high. Please note that the non-resident fee includes lunch every day, and dinner on the first Sunday and final Friday of the programme.

Disabled Students (including those with Mobility Difficulties)

The Department`s aim is to treat all participants equally and welcomes applications from people with disabilities. Individuals` needs are taken into account as far as possible, providing reasonable adaptations and assistance within the resources available. We ask that people let us know of any disability or special need (confidentially if required) so that we can help them participate as fully as possible.

When applying for the Department`s college-based summer programmes, prospective participants with mobility difficulties or visual or hearing impairments may want to make preliminary enquires to the Programme Administrator, as the age and layout of these colleges often makes them user-unfriendly (although adaptations are often possible). Oxford, as an ancient city, tends to be difficult to navigate for people with disabilities. The number of very old buildings, designed in an age less sensitive to issues of disability, makes access to much of the city centre difficult. However, the Department will do as much as it is able to make study with the Department possible.

Participants should contact us if they will need a bedroom on the ground or first floor, or if they will have problems gaining access to a teaching room located on upper floors or to the Dining Hall (accessed via two flights of stairs).

Fee options

Programme Fee

Week 1 Programme Fee (inc. accommodation and meals): £1040.00

Week 2 Programme Fee (inc accommodation and meals): £1040.00

Week 1 Non-Resident Programme Fee: £790.00

Week 2 Non-Resident Programme Fee: £790.00

Accommodation

Week 1 Single Ensuite Upgrade: £180.00

Week 1 Twin Ensuite Upgrade: £90.00

Week 2 Single Ensuite Upgrade: £180.00

Week 2 Twin Ensuite Upgrade: £90.00

Apply for this course