May meeting

Monday 20th May, 7.30 pm
at Hugh & Rosemary's home

Taking inspiration from Richard Holloway's contribution to a recent edition of the BBC Radio 4 programme 'Something Understood', our topic this month is 'living with contradictions'. An edited excerpt from the broadcast can be downloaded and played by clicking here.

Calendar

North Oxford Group Meetings


Winter/Spring 2013

January 14th - Starting Afresh: a theme for Lent?
February & March - Alternative Lent Group
April 15th - Assisted Dying
May 20th - Living with Contradictions


Other dates for your diary -

Sea of Faith National Conference 2013


Make a note in your diaries of next years conference, our 26th
23th – 25th July 2013, at Leicester

For the Common Good

Exploring the part religion could play for the common good
 of our planet and of all living things.

Main Speakers: Tim Jackson, Alom Shaha and Chris Howson

I am confident that it is both possible and worthwhile to attempt a new secular approach to universal ethics. I am of the firm opinion that we have within our grasp a way, and a means, to ground inner values without contradicting any religion and yet, crucially, without depending on religion - The Dalai Lama 


Sea of Faith London Conference 2013

St John's Church, Waterloo Road, London
Saturday 21st September 2013

Secular Religion?

 Main Speakers: Don Cupitt, Richard Holloway and Stephen Batchelor

About Sea of Faith

Sea of Faith is a network of groups and individuals who share the understanding that religions and religious faith are human creations and explore together the implications of such an understanding for their moral, spiritual, and social values.

SOF
has no creed. It explores the implications for spiritual, social, educational and ecological issues that arise from embracing the provisional nature of religious insight.

It welcomes people from all faith and humanist communities, and those with no involvement in any organised religion. The membership reflects a range of experiential, intuitive and intellectual concerns.

The Network took its name from a BBC television series The Sea of Faith, presented in 1984 by
Don Cupitt, then Dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. The television series and the accompanying book had in their turn drawn their title from Matthew Arnold's poem of the 1860s, Dover Beach.

Cupitt argued that we should cease to mourn the decay of traditional beliefs. Instead he offered a vision for the future of religious faith as entirely human, centred in spiritual and ethical activity.

This vision prompted an exploratory conference in 1988. Further conferences have been held annually and it was out of these that the Sea of Faith Network emerged. There are local groups spread throughout the country.

These are autonomous bodies, some meeting monthly, some quarterly, some preferring open, unstructured discussion, others organising lectures, workshops and one-day events. Members receive bi-monthly newsletters and magazines, written primarily by the membership.

There are also Sea of Faith networks in
New Zealand and Australia.