Sidney Sussex College in the mid-summer sunshine in Cambridge this week … the venue for the IOCS summer school from 24 to 29 July (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)
Patrick ComerfordThe final programme for the 12th annual summer school of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies has been announced in Cambridge. Once again, this year’s summer school takes place in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, with daily services in the Chapel of Sidney Sussex College, lectures and seminars in in the William Mong Hall, and meals in the Dining Hall.
“We are all looking forward to what seems to be one of the most exciting line-ups of speakers and topics yet,” Razvan Porumb, Development Officer of the Institute, told me in Cambridge this week.
The theme of this year’s summer school is ‘The Challenge of a Secular Age,’ and the programme includes a day-long retreat in the Patriarchal Stavropegic Monastery of of Saint John in Essex.
Participants in the IOCS Summer School last year in the grounds of Sidney Sussex College, CambridgeThe summer school opens on Sunday 24 July with registration from 4 p.m. and Vespers in Sidney Sussex Chapel at 7.30, followed by a reception outside the IOCS offices in the gardens of Wesley House.
On Monday 25 July, the Divine Liturgy marking the Dormition of the Righteous Anna, Mother of the Most Holy Theotokos will be served at 7 a.m. After breakfast, the conference will be introduced at 9.15 by Professor David Frost and Dr Christoph Schneider.
Monday morning’s lectures are by Dr Andreas Andreopoulos (University of Winchester), “Art: from Ritual to Voyeurism,” and Dr Mihail Neamţu (The Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and for the Memory of the Romanian Exile), “Communism: a Secularized Eschatology?”
On Monday afternoon, Dr Jonathan Chaplin (The Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics) speaks on “Between Theocracy and Secularism: Religion and the State in Britain Today.”
On Tuesday morning [26 July], Revd Dr John Hughes (Jesus College, Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge), speaks on: “Beyond the Secular Market: Christian Social Teaching and the Economic Crisis.” He is followed by Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia: “Our Orthodox Answer to Secularism I: The Transfiguration of Christ.” Metropolitan Kallistos continues this theme later in the evening after Vespers with a second lecture: “Our Orthodox Answer to Secularism II: ‘Pray without Ceasing’.”
On Wednesday [27 July], the day begins with a lecture by Alexander Ogorodnikov, (Moscow): “The Russian Orthodox Church in the face of the modern secular challenge.” Later in the morning, Irina Kirillova (Newnham College, Cambridge) speaks on: “‘If there is no God, then all is permitted!’ (F.M. Dostoevsky).”
After lunch, Dragos Herescu (University of Durham and IOCS) addresses “Secularisation and the Curious Case of the Orthodox Church.”
On Thursday morning [28 July], we have an early start at 6 a.m. to visit the Patriarchal Stavropegic Monastery of Saint John the Baptist at Tolleshunt Knights near Chelmsford in Essex, for the Divine Liturgy at 8 a.m., followed by breakfast, a tour, and a talk on the Summer School theme. The organisers point out that the monastery trip is taking place on the Thursday and not on the Wednesday as in previous years. Later in the evening, there is a special Summer School dinner in the Old Library of Sidney Sussex College.
On the closing morning of the summer school [Friday 29 July], there are two final lectures – Dr Brandon Gallaher (University of Oxford), “An Alternate Modernity? Orthodox and Roman Catholic Engagements with Secularism and (Post-)Modernity, and the Nature of Episcopal Authority,” and Professor Nicholas Loudovikos (Superior Ecclesiastical Academy of Thessaloniki): “An Orthodox Perspective on Psychology and Secularism.”
Speakers and Lecturers
Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, one of this year’s lecturers, with Patrick Comerford at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, last yearDr Andreas Andreopoulos is Senior Lecturer in Orthodox Christianity and programme leader of the MTh in Orthodox Studies at the University of Winchester. He has published widely on Sacred Art, Ecclesiology, Christian Semiotics and Liturgy. He is the author of This is my Beloved Son: the Transfiguration of Christ (Orleans, MA: Paraclete Press, 2010); The Sign of the Cross: the Gesture, the Mystery, the History (Orleans, MA: Paraclete Press, 2006); Art as Theology: from the Postmodern to the Medieval (London: Equinox Publishing, 2006); and Metamorphosis: The Transfiguration in Byzantine Theology and Iconography (Crestwood, NY: Saint Vladimir Seminary Press, 2005).
Dr Jonathan Chaplin is the first Director of the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics, a position he has held since 2006. He is member of the Divinity Faculty of Cambridge University, a visiting lecturer at the VU University, Amsterdam, and an Adjunct Faculty member of the Institute for Christian Studies (ICS), Toronto. He is a specialist in Christian political thought, and has authored or edited seven books and many articles in this field. His latest publications are God and Government (London: SPCK 2009), co-edited with Nick Spencer; God and Global Order: The Power of Religion in American Foreign Policy, coedited with Robert Joustra (Baylor University Press, 2010) and Herman Dooyeweerd – Christian Philosopher of State and Civil Society (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011).
Dr Brandon Gallaher is the Stipendiary Lecturer in Theology at Keble College, University of Oxford. In September, he begins a three-year British Academy post-doctoral fellowship at Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford, with a project on secularism and religious authority in modern Orthodox and Roman Catholic theologies. He holds a BA in English and Philosophy (University of British Columbia), an MA in Religious Studies (McGill University), an MDiv (Saint Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary), and an MSt and DPhil in systematic theology (Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford). His doctoral work, under Professor Paul Fiddes, was on the role of freedom and necessity in the Trinitarian theologies of Sergii Bulgakov, Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar. He has published on modern Russian theology (Bulgakov, Georges Florovsky and Vladimir Solov’ev). He is currently co-editing, with Paul Ladouceur a Florovsky Reader for Continuum/T&T Clark (Forthcoming 2013), with a foreword by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware.
Dragos Herescu holds an MA in Pastoral Theology with the IOCS and an MPhil in Theology from the Divinity Faculty, University of Cambridge. He is working on a PhD with Durham University, researching secularisation in both Eastern Orthodox and Pentecostal Christianity. Dragos is a tutor on the IOCS distance learning programme and he conducts the institute’s Byzantine chant choir. Before coming to Cambridge, he worked for the Metropolitanate of Moldova and Bucovina (Iasi, Romania) as administrator and as project officer responsible for accessing funds from the European Union for social assistance and cultural projects.
The Revd Dr John Hughes is the chaplain and acting Dean of Jesus College, Cambridge. He studied theology in Cambridge under Janet Soskice and in Oxford under Oliver O’Donovan, before completing a PhD on Theologies of Work with Catherine Pickstock and Jeremy Morris. This has been published as The End of Work (Blackwell: 2007). Before returning to Cambridge, he was a curate in Exeter. He teaches philosophy and ethics, with a particular interest in aesthetics and political thought. His published articles include one on Bulgakov in Sobornost, and a chapter in a forthcoming volume on the Crisis of Global Capitalism. He is working on a project on the role of divine ideas in the doctrine of creation.
Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) is Metropolitan Bishop of Diokleia (Assistant Bishop in the Orthodox Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain, Ecumenical Patriarchate). From 1966 to 2001, he was Spalding Lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Studies at the University of Oxford.
Irina Kirillova, MBE, is a retired University Lecturer in Russian Studies and a Fellow Emerita of Newnham College, Cambridge. Her publications include The Image of Christ in Dostoevsky’s writing (Moscow, 2010), which was published in Russian.
Professor Nicholas Loudovikos is Professor of Dogmatics and Philosophy at the Superior Ecclesiastical Academy of Thessaloniki, Greece, and an honorary research fellow at the University of Winchester. He is one of the most recognisable scholars of his generation in Greece. His most recent publications include The strive for participation: Thomas Aquinas and Gregory Palamas (Athens: Armos, forthcoming); A eucharistic ontology: Maximus The Confessor’s eschatological ontology of being as dialogical reciprocity (Athens: Domos, 1992; Boston: Holy Cross Press, 2010); The terrors of the person and the ordeals of love: critical thoughts for a postmodern theological ontology (Athens: Armos, 2009); Theopoiia: postmodern theological aporia (Athens: Armos, 2006).
Dr Mihail Neamțu is a Romanian historian of ideas, with a degree in Continental philosophy and a PhD in theology and religious studies from King’s College, University of London. He held post-doctoral fellowships at New Europe College (2005-2007) and at Woodrow Wilson Center (2009). He is the author of several books on the religious, political, and cultural encounter between Christianity and modernity. In addition to other scholarly studies in patristics, he has written a number of essays on the experience of Communism in Eastern Europe. He is scientific director of the Institute for the Investigation of the Communist Past and a member of the Christian Democratic Foundation in Bucharest.
Alexander Ogorodnikov is the former chair of the Russian Orthodox Argentov Seminar, survivor of the Gulag prisons, peace activist, and founder of several Russian humanitarian organisations. He was jailed during an aggressive Soviet suppression of religious activity. His grandmother secretly arranged his baptism as a child. He was singled out because his religious convictions defied Soviet “science” on the eradication of religious belief. He was the subject of an international campaign for his release in the 1980s.
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