The Study Sessions will take place in the vicinity of St Paul's Cathedral, as follows:
Session 1: The Word transforming
The composer James MacMillan and the poet Michael Symmons Roberts
Chaired by The Revd Prof Ben Quash
Thursday 29 October
12.00-1.30pm
Wren Suite, St Paul's Cathedral
Session 2: The Church transforming
Dr Gemma Simmonds CJ and The Revd Dr James Walters
Wednesday 11 November
Chaired by the Revd Andrew Hammond
6.30-8.00pm
Wren Suite, St Paul's Cathedral
Session 3: Bread and Wine transforming
The artist John Newling and the art historian Andrew Spira
Chaired by the Revd Liz Adekunle
Thursday 19 November
12.00-1.30pm
The Chapter House, St Paul's Cathedral, St Paul's Churchyard
Session 4: People, Communities and Ethics transforming
The Revd Dr Matt Bullimore and the Revd Dr Julie Gittoes
Chaired by the Revd Dr Anders Bergquist
Tuesday 1 December
6.30-8.00pm
The Chapter House, St Paul's Cathedral, St Paul's Churchyard
Session 5: Time transforming
The Revd Professor Jeremy Begbie
Saturday 5 December
2.00-4.00pm
St Mary Aldermary (Watling Street, London EC4M 9BW)
The style of these sessions will vary. In some cases a speaker will give a paper, followed by a response from the other speaker; conversation will develop, which will then be extended to include the whole group. In other cases the two speakers will conduct a public conversation, which will then open out later to the whole group. Every session will have a chair (the names will be advertised presently), who will also bring their own expertise to bear.
The sessions, we hope, apart from being engaging and stimulating in themselves, will be seedbeds of ideas out of which the Lent Course will grow. Their conversational character will also carry through to the Lent Course. Transcripts and sound files will be made available on this website, so that the conversation can continue afterwards. The richer this preparatory work, the better the Course will be!
To register to attend any of the sessions, or for more information, please e-mail 
or telephone 020 7722 4766.
James MacMillan CBE is one of today’s most successful living composers and is also internationally active as a conductor. His musical language is profoundly shaped by his Christian faith, his social conscience and his Scottish heritage, and blends Celtic, Far Eastern, Scandinavian and Eastern European music with a classical Western tradition running from Victoria through Bach to Wagner and Messiaen. He has written several Mass settings, including one for children which is used in churches all over the world every week. www.intermusica.co.uk/macmillan.
Michael Symmons Roberts is an award-winning poet, novelist, librettist and dramatist. His works include the recent collection of poetry Corpus, and the BBC1 film Miracle on the Estate, screened on Good Friday 2008, which won the Premier Prize for Television at the Sandford St Martin Awards in June this year. He has collaborated on a number of occasions with James MacMillan. www.symmonsroberts.com.
John Newling has an international reputation and has installed works across Europe and the USA. He was awarded the first Fulbright Fellowship in Visual Art in 1985. He lives in Nottingham where he is currently Professor of Installation Sculpture at The Nottingham Trent University, and his recent projects include the award-winning Chatham Vines, which involved growing rows of vines hydroponically (without soil) down the nave of a redundant church, harvesting the grapes and having them consecrated at the first Eucharist of Easter in Rochester Cathedral. www.john-newling.com/about.
Andrew Spira is Course Director in Fine and Decorative Arts at Christie’s Education, London. He gained his first degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art and his MA in Museum and Gallery Management from City University, London. He was a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum where he published on ceremonial silver, ecclesiastical pewter and sacred metal work. He is an expert on the history of Russian icons and has published catalogues on Early Christian and Byzantine and Russian sacred art. His latest book is on the modern Russian icon: The Avant-Garde Icon, Russian Avant-Garde Art and the Icon Painting Tradition.
Jeremy Begbie is Thomas A. Langford Research Professor of Theology at Duke Divinity School in the U.S.A., specializing in the interface between theology and the arts. Previously Associate Principal of Ridley Hall, Cambridge, he has also been Honorary Professor at the University of St Andrew’s, where he directed the research project, Theology Through the Arts at the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts. A professionally trained musician, he has performed extensively as a pianist, oboist and conductor. He is an ordained minister of the Church of England. He is author of a number of books, including Voicing Creation's Praise: Towards a Theology of the Arts (T & T Clark); Theology, Music and Time (CUP), and most recently, Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (Baker/SPCK), which won the Christianity Today 2008 Book Award in the Theology/Ethics Category.
Julie Gittoes is Vicar of All Saints, Hampton, in the Kensington Area of the Diocese of London. She read theology at Durham University before training for ordination at Westcott House and Selwyn College, Cambridge. Her doctoral research focused on the theological understanding of the Eucharist within the Anglican tradition. Anamnesis and the Eucharist: Contemporary Anglican Approaches was published by Ashgate in 2008. She is actively involved in The Society for the Study of Theology.
Matt Bullimore was born and brought up in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. He read theology as a first degree and, after postgraduate study at Harvard, Manchester and Cambridge, he prepared for ordination at Westcott House in Cambridge. He was Assistant Curate in the parishes of Roberttown and Hartshead back in his home diocese of Wakefield. He is now Domestic Chaplain to the Bishop of Wakefield.
Dr Gemma Simmonds is a sister of the Congregation of Jesus and Lecturer in Systematic Theology and Spirituality at Heythrop College. She is also Course Convenor in BA Philosophy, Religion and Ethics and Co-ordinator of the Erasmus & Socrates Exchange Programmes. She has worked in spiritual direction as a teacher and retreat-giver after training in the Jesuit Centre for Spiritual Growth, Wernersville, PA, and has been involved in religious and priestly formation since 1993. Her work as a conference facilitator and simultaneous translator has also led her into translating theological works in French, Spanish and Portuguese. Most notable of these is her recently published translation of Henri de Lubac’s Corpus Mysticum.
James Walters is Assistant Curate of St John-at-Hampstead. He obtained a doctorate in systematic theology and ecclesiology at the University of Cambridge and has a forthcoming book on the theological implications of the work of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. He is an Honorary Associate of St Mellitus College.
This sacrament of transformation in which bread, wine and people are changed and put to new purposes has also inspired artists of all kinds. In particular, the words of the eucharistic rite have been transformed into a variety of musical forms. They have also inspired poetry and prayer. What changes when the words are ‘translated’ into a new medium? How do contemporary poets and composers find inspiration in the eucharist? And does this indicate that there is something about artistic creativity itself that has analogies with the eucharist: the processes by which ordinary things become graced; by which the divine depth or excess in material creation is opened up for our new appreciation?
The Church is not only the agent of transformation of things in the world around it. It does not simply make differences through the Word it preaches and the sacraments it administers, while itself remaining unaltered. The Church is also itself being transformed, all the time, by God’s grace in the actions it performs and shares with the world. In this study session, we open up a discussion about the way that the whole Church is made to participate in Christ, drawing upon the thought of Henri de Lubac who recovers in a profoundly influential way the idea of the Church as the true body (corpus verum) of Christ – a community made radically new.
The matter of the created world is essential to the eucharistic event and to the ministry and mission of the Church. In the incarnation, God assumes and redeems matter, while at the same time transforming it. In the eucharist, bread and wine – fruit of the earth and of human hands – are shown to have a second, or deeper, origin than simply the soil in which they grew. The implications of this have been explored in a radical way by the artist John Newling in his use of hydroponic (soil-less) techniques for growing grapes for eucharistic use – thereby making a wine with ‘no earthly origin’ to stimulate meditation on how the eucharist can cross territorial boundaries and open up ethical questions about our use of land and water.
Christian worship takes place in remembrance of the sacrifice of Christ and in the power of the resurrection of Christ. These are transforming events of cosmic proportions, which make possible hitherto unimaginable possibilities for living – living without fear of death, in radical forms of generosity and self-giving. This session will ask how Christ’s example, and the new ways of living that he gives to the Church, ground a new ethics that challenges the common-sense assumptions of individuals, communities and states.
All creatures live in time. Human beings in particular must structure their lives in relation to time, through memory and expectation. In this way, they seek to give unity and sense to the ‘spread-out-ness’ of their lives, and to understand their place in larger movements of history that reach backwards and forwards over generations. The presence of God in history, through the activity of the Holy Spirit and especially through the Spirit-inspired practices of the Church, gives Christians a transformed relation to time. They can understand their place in it in wholly new ways. Their activity of memory can become specifically an attitude of praise for past mercies; their activity of expectation can become specifically an attitude of hope. This session will explore this new and transformed sense of time with the help of insights drawn from music and art.
Ben Quash is Professor of Christianity and the Arts at King's College, London, and has devised these Study Sessions.
