What does it mean to be free? - 3rd May 2022 - Ben examines how thinkers in the Christian tradition have analysed the nature of human freedom and its relationship to causality, from Augustine to liberation theologians. What does freedom mean for human animals in relation to all the causal processes that constitute, constrain and affect them? What does it mean in relation to God as an all-knowing creator? If human agency is corrupted or enslaved, how may it be restored? How such questions are asked and answered linked cosmology, anthropology and eschatology to urgent questions of spiritual and political practice.

Emptiness and the Heart Sutra - 10th May 2022 - How does the Buddha’s teaching of ‘Dependent Arising’ becomes interpreted in Mahāyāna Philosophy as ‘Emptiness’? Wendy considers the account of Emptiness in the text of the Heart Sūtra, and in the hugely popular work of Vietnamese teacher, Thích Nhất Hạnh. She asks how far this key Mahāyāna teaching aligns with early Buddhist ideas about the nature of reality, and reflects on whether or not the answer to that question really matters.    

The Miracles of Jesus - 17th May 2022 - Paul will examine the miracles attributed to Jesus in the gospels. He will consider different ways of approaching miracle stories, including questions of historicity, theology, and significance.

Islam and science - 31st May 2022 - Caroline explains some of the history and context behind core debates surrounding the compatibility of Islam with modern science. She focuses on the evolution-creationism debate, looking at arguments given on either side by interrogating their theological claims as well as the cultural and political contexts that shape them.

Texts of Judaism - 7th June 2022 - You probably know that the Torah is the central text of Judaism, but what else is there? Alana will explain how we can trace the development of Rabbinic Judaism through various layers of textual history: Torah, Tanach, Talmud, and later sources, and how questions of interpretation produce diverse forms of Judaism from the same textual tradition.

The faith of Immanuel Kant - 14th June 2022 - Kant is often known as the philosopher who fatally undermined famous arguments for God’s existence like the cosmological and ontological arguments, someone who rejected tradition for the quest for knowledge. Yet Kant also declared that he sought to uphold faith by critiquing such arguments. In this talk, Ben explains how Kant can be understood as a religious thinker and how he radically reinterpreted the subjective nature and objective content of faith in order to save it.

Religious Language: How to speak and not speak of God - 21st June 2022 - Valentin explores the potential and limits of human language to speak about God. After surveying the thought of A.J Ayer, Anthony Flew and Ludwig Wittgenstein, as three popular examples of analytic philosophical approaches to the topic, Valentin asks to what extent and in what ways narrative, symbolic and metaphorical expression can go beyond these and allow us to speak about – and perhaps also to better understand – God and humanity’s relationship to the divine.  

Rosemary Radford Ruether & Mary Daly: debating the maleness of God - 28th June 2022 - Through conversation with Rosemary Radford Ruether and Mary Daly, Hannah debates whether the maleness of Christ is significant and whether it must necessarily indicate that God is male. She will ask: is it the maleness or the message of Jesus that matters? What significance should we give to his male identity and why is it difficult to dismiss this feature when thinking about how to understand the Christian God? She will consider whether the concern with Jesus’ maleness is mainly a white, middle-class concern and draw on Womanist voices to suggest that the significance of Jesus as Redeemer is found in his liberating praxis, not in his gender.

How do feminists read the Bible? - 5th July 2022 - content to follow

Does the Ontological Argument work? - 12th July 2022 - The ontological argument is quite different from other arguments for the existence of God in that it does not use observations of the world as evidence. Can we take the ontological argument seriously as a way of arguing for the existence of God? Steve takes a look at the premises on which the argument is based and asks can we move from the concept of God in our minds to that of God in reality by the logical employment of reason alone?