October Meeting

Monday 19th October
7.30 pm at
Hugh & Rosemary's home

Challenges, Questions, Answers:
Thinking about Disability and Genetics

At this month's meeting we shall be exploring some of the issues raised by Tom Shakespeare's talk at this year's annual conference. Most of you have a copy of the latest edition of Sofia - the talk is on page 8; you can also find it by clicking here.

We could begin by addressing the three questions he asks us to discuss and see where that leads us:

Does it matter if we eliminate disability?

What, in a post-religious world, should we think about pre-implantation genetic diagnosis?

Enhancement of human characteristics - how far should we go?


Tom Shakespeare, Research Fellow at Newcastle University, is a social scientist and disability advocate, currently working as a consultant to the World Health Organization. He has written and broadcast widely on issues of disability, science and ethics, and his books include Genetics Politics: from Eugenics to Genome and Disability Rights and Wrongs. He is a member of the Religious Society of Friends.

Calendar

North Oxford Group Meetings:
Autumn/Winter 2009

17th August - The Excesses of Religion
28th September - Cupitt on Non-Realism and "Jesus & Philosphy"
19th October - Tom Shakespeare on bio-ethics
16th November - "Life's not fair" Is religion the answer?
15th December - TBA


Other Dates:

Sea of Faith Annual Conference
"Religion & Social Justice"
27th - 29th July, 2010
Leicester University

About Sea of Faith

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.