Chapel Events: Hilary Term 2023

The first three Sundays of Hilary 2023 fall in Epiphany, the season celebrating manifestations of the divine in our world, beginning with the Wise Men following the Star in the East. The Chaplain invites everyone at the start of a new year to reflect on their own guiding star.

The Chaplain introduces our termly topic exploring what it means to ‘keep faith’. How do we balance our responsibilities and obligations to ourselves and our neighbours in our daily life, society more generally, and in global context? And amid so many harbingers of doom, how do we maintain equilibrium, and even optimism?

Professor Madeleine Reeves (St Hugh’s) is a social anthropologist with wide-ranging interests in borders, labour migration, sovereignty, time, and social reproduction, who has conducted field work in Central Asia and Russia. Drawing on her experience of silence in Quaker spiritual practice, she will help us think about our own journeys through the multifaceted challenges we face

William Parry works in Wadham’s Development Office, fundraising for student support. He has maintained a journalistic interest in Palestinian human rights issues for nearly two decades. Despite an increasingly bleak landscape on the ground in Palestine, and in the West for those defending Palestinian rights issues, he finds inspiration, hope and faith from different quarters.

Lucy Radford has worked in research, funding, and communications for primate conservation projects (notably Barbary Macaques and Sumatran Orangutans) in the UK and worldwide, and is currently based nearby at the OU Interdisciplinary Centre for Conservation Science. She honours human primates by serving as an accredited Humanist Celebrant for funeral and memorial services, and practices flying and static trapeze and aerial hoop in her spare time.

Wadham’s own Taras Bains is a fourth-year biologist in Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, just back from field work in Uganda studying the experience of local communities living next to wildlife-protected areas. He is passionate about conservation outreach—serving as a blog editor for Conservation Optimism, a Learning Officer for the BBO Wildlife Trust, the projects coordinator for the Oxford Nature Conservation Society, and the animator of last year’s badger-cam in Wadham gardens and a project to rewild the History Faculty.

Humans are moral and spiritual as well as material beings. The Chaplain marks the beginning of the Christian penitential season of Lent by considering our essential nature and purpose, and how we can be ‘true’ to it.

Pat Winslow is an author, poet, and Humanist Celebrant who ‘keeps faith’ with humanity as a writer-in-residence in hospitals and a high-security prison, and running community and school writing workshops. I’ve often been asked how I, as an atheist, can live without faith. My answer is always ‘fully and with compassion’. I could also add ‘with a healthy dose of curiosity’. Human beings are infinitely complex. We are the sum total of our whole lives, not bits of our lives. So, broadly, the subject is our propensity for change.

Please see the attached term card.