Past tense, future perfect?
Learning from the history of faith
You are very welcome to come and hear the views of our preachers within the beautiful setting of Evensong on Sundays at 6.30pm.
This term’s sermon series invites the preachers to help our faith learn from the past. The preachers have chosen figures from the 16th and 17th centuries in order to suggest ways in which our faith might deepen through a closer encounter with their life and work.
George Herbert
Preacher: The Rev'd Dr Mark Oakley
Dean, St John's College
For the Dean's own page click here.
Elizabeth I
Preacher: The Rev'd Andrew Hammond
Chaplain, St John's College
For the Chaplain's own page click here.
William Shakespeare
Preacher: Professor Alison Shell
University College London
Sermon read on her behalf (owing to indisposition) by Mrs Heather Hancock, Master, St John's College
Alison Shell is a Professor of Early Modern Studies in the Department of English Language and Literature at University College London. She is the author of Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558-1660 (1999), Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England (2007) and Shakespeare and Religion (2010) and a number of book chapters and articles on post-Reformation English Catholic literature and the relationship between literature and religion within Tudor and Stuart writing.
Lancelot Andrewes
Preacher: Professor Peter McCullough
Lincoln College, Oxford
Peter was educated in the California state system, including for his first degree (BA) in English from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). After his doctorate at Princeton University, he came to Oxford as a post-doctoral Junior Research Fellow in English at Trinity College. He has been Fellow in English at Lincoln, with a joint-appointment in the Oxford English Faculty, since 1997
Richard Hooker
Preacher: The Rev’d Canon Dr Jeremy Morris
National Ecumenical Adviser for the Church of England
The Rev'd Canon Dr Jeremy Morris was appointed National Ecumenical Adviser for the Church of England in 2022.
In his role Dr Morris will manage the Church of England’s ecumenical relationships at home and abroad and will work through the Office of the Archbishops to support the Archbishops of Canterbury and York in their ecumenical engagements.
The Rev'd Canon Dr Jeremy Morris is a former Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He was previously Dean of Chapel of King’s College, Cambridge. He is a specialist in modern religious history, including the Anglican tradition, the ecumenical movement, and arguments about secularization, and has taught theology and church history in Cambridge for over 25 years.
John Donne
Preacher: Dr Sophie Read
Christ’s College, University Lecturer in English
Sophie Read is Senior Lecturer in the English Faculty, and a fellow and tutor at Christ’s, where she directs studies for Part II, and teaches Practical Criticism, Shakespeare, various Renaissance papers and Tragedy. She works primarily on seventeenth-century poetry, with a few excursions both backwards and forwards; she is interested in the intersection of literature and religion (theology, liturgy, the Bible), in literature and the senses, and in the shapes of rhetorical constructs. Her first book was Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination (Cambridge, 2013); a major edited collection, Western Literature and the Bible, Vol 2: The Renaissance, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2023. Her current monograph, provisionally entitled Speaking Sweet: Renaissance Rhetorics of Smell, is on perfume and the sense of smell in the early modern world. She has written on Shakespeare, Andrewes, Milton, Donne, Herbert, Herrick, Dryden and Swift at the early end of things; more recent subjects include W. S. Graham, Veronica Forrest Thomson, Michael Haslam, Ian Patterson, Denise Riley, Andrea Brady and Peter Manson. Sophie lives in Cambridge with her family and Pushkin the cat.
Mary Sidney
Preacher: Professor Helen Wilcox
Bangor University, Emeritus Professor of English
Helen Wilcox is Professor Emerita of English Literature at Bangor University, Wales, and an expert on literature from the early modern period, particularly works by women writers and texts on devotional or autobiographical subjects. Among her many publications are the Cambridge edition of The English Poems of George Herbert (2007), 1611: Authority, Gender and the Word in Early Modern England (2014) and The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Religion (2017, co-edited with Andrew Hiscock). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Learned Society of Wales.
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