The talk examines the exception presented by the legally established Church of England to the restraints placed by secular liberal pluralism on the church’s ‘public authority,’ understanding ‘public authority’ as both 'the power to influence' and 'the moral power to rule.' It considers the theological understanding of the Church’s dual authority of proclamation and jurisdiction contained in the foundational Reformation formularies of the Book of Common Prayer and Ordinal, and the Thirty-Nine Articles.

In 1597 Joseph Hall – later a Bishop – declared himself England’s first satirist, writing in the manner of Juvenal and Horace in his satire Virgidemiarum. His declared purpose was to attack impiety in contemporary English society out of a sense of unavoidable moral duty (in Juvenal's words, difficile est saturam nōn scrībere). The Bishops' Ban of popular satire (1599) shows satire's vituperative style and personal attacks were considered too rancorous, licentious, and even seditious for the Christian public. How did satirists respond to this tension between Christian piety and Roman-style rancour? With pseudonymous personae, whose opinions matched the satirist’s, but whose heightened style the satirist could disown.

Must a systematic comparison of civilisations automatically lead to a historical relativism where truth becomes a mere matter of style? Or is it possible to identify, behind the uncompromising workings of history, a subliminal metaphysical sense that is neither a Eurocentric variation of the history of salvation, nor a vulgar theory of accumulation and process?

Jean-Marie Dominique Chenu famously located the “discovery of nature”—and the source of modern disenchantment—in the twelfth century. This lecture picks up on Chenu’s argument by tracing the separation of nature and the supernatural beyond the late Middle Ages to the theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas. In light of the theological changes introduced by Aquinas, we should sympathetically reappraise the traditionalist Bishop Stephen's condemnations issued in 1277. In short, the secularism of modernity requires that we read creation not primarily as substance but as relationship: the harmonious chant of the love that is God.

Professor Ellis will discuss how the universe can seem a purposeless and amoral place if one looks at it exclusively on very large or small scales. Indeed, many scientific specialists of the very large or very small have claimed that there is no purpose in the universe. Paradoxically, however, they are ignoring the nature of their own lives on the middle-sized scale at which they exist; more specifically, how their existence within the physical world as ‘open systems’ enables purpose, meaning, and ethics to be effective in causing physical outcomes. The middle-sized scale is particularly important for biology where meaning and function are often denied due to focussing on the molecular scale alone. Part of the colloquium 'Why Middle Sized Matters to Science, Theology, and Metaphysics, held in cooperation with the University of Texas at Austin.

Aristotle’s philosophy of nature dominated much of the world’s science from late antiquity until the 17th century and beyond. In this Aristotelian world, human beings and the middle-sized objects that we perceive and manipulate were among the first-class citizens of nature, imbued with real causal powers and potentialities. The period of “classical” physics (from Galileo to Rutherford) seemed to eliminate the need for key elements of Aristotle’s scheme, including substantial forms for composite objects, natural powers and potentialities, and teleology. I argue that the Quantum Revolution has altered the epistemic landscape in ways that re-open questions of natural philosophy that have long been taken to be settled, laying the foundation for a neo-Aristotelian or “hylomorphic” interpretation of quantum theory. This interpretation successfully bridges the gap between the domain of quantum entities and the world of actual experiments and observations, and, as a further bonus, reconciles what Wilfred Sellars called the manifest image of ordinary human life with our best scientific image of nature. Followed by a Question and Answer Session introduced and moderated by Jonathan Price. Part of the colloquium 'Why Middle Sized Matters to Science, Theology, and Metaphysics, held in cooperation with the University of Texas at Austin.