When starlings gather to join in their swirling dance at sunset over Brighton West Pier, it is called a Murmuration of Starlings. This year’s SOF Annual Conference could have been called a Murmuration of Members. Not only did it have three main speakers but also sent out the invitation ‘Come All Ye’, inviting members to lead forums or to give short talks on any subject that concerned them. That gives this Christmas issue of Sofia its title Come All Ye.

Five of these contributions are published here (there were many more). Jane Howarth led a forum asking some ‘Questions Left on the Beach’ when ‘the Sea of Faith’s receding tide draws our sense of a real God away’. Her chart is reproduced in the centrefold on pages 14–15 so that it could be used in discussions. It is accompanied by her introduction on pages 13 and 16 (thus printed on the back of the chart: contact Sofia Editor if you would like a pdf of these four pages to print as a leaflet).

The Conference title was The Necessity of Hope. David Paterson’s Short Talk was called ‘People and their gods evolve together’ and concludes with G. M. Hopkins’ sonnet ‘Carrion Comfort’, in which the poet wrestles with despair.

In this centenary year of the First World War Stephen Williams led a forum on A War to End War? With a question mark, because, of course, it didn’t.

Two people who ran forums at the Conference have sent in follow-up pieces to them. Martin Spence’s forum was on Terry Eagleton’s book Hope without Optimism. As this had already been reviewed in Sofia, he follows it up with a review of John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism (which Eagleton reviewed critically in The Guardian).

Carol Palfrey led a forum on women’s suffrage and struggle for equality and for her follow-up, she says, ‘it occurred to me that it would be relevant to write an article connecting women’s suffrage and women’s fiction and to consider whether securing the right to vote had had any impact on the lives and interests of women in general and of women writers in particular.’ She looks at some neglected, enjoyable novels written by women and mentioned in Nicola Beauman’s book A Very Great Profession (Virago, 1983). In her ‘Revisiting’ Alison McRobb offers another ‘take’ on Middlemarch by George Eliot, one of those twentieth-century women writers’ great predecessors.

This is the Christmas issue of Sofia and in the hymn ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’, we are invited to come to Bethlehem to see Mary and her newborn child. In our first article, ‘Hail, full of Grace! A Remembrance of Things Past’ Dominic Kirkham explores Egyptian parallels to the Christmas story of the holy mother and child and goes on to consider the extraordinary expulsion of ‘the feminine divine’ from the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In Christianity Mary did become honoured as theotokos — mother of God — but was expelled again at the Reformation.

In the story of the Annunciation, the angel Gabriel greets Mary: ‘Hail, full of grace!’ and in the prologue to John’s Gospel her son, the Incarnate Word, is called ‘full of grace and truth’. The second article explores nature and grace, both in classic theology and our everyday world.

Lastly, in his As I Please column — the title comes from George Orwell’s famous As I Please column in the Tribune — John Pearson urges us to see films at the cinema: ‘Try the real thing’. He is looking forward to Mary Poppins Returns, released on December 21st — a Christmas treat, perhaps? Wishing all our readers grace and peace and a merry Christmas, or if you prefer, Winter Festival.

Dinah Livingstone

Letters to the Editor

I am grateful to Ben Witney for his review of Robert Ellis’ The Christian Middle Way (CMW) (Sofia 128, June 2018). I also found CMW to be a difficult read.

Perhaps I should illustrate what I intend by this. On an occasional visit to the National Portrait Gallery, I came across a larger-than-life-sized head and shoulders portrait of Seamus Heaney by a Japanese artist. I was captured by it. I must have stood for at least 20 minutes engaged by the image. I probably have sufficient vocabulary to describe the portrait, perhaps able to point to what seem to me to be its strengths etc. Describing the portrait seemed irrelevant. What was important was what was happening to me and what I was doing in response. I wasn’t appraising the image in any objective way. It was an event in which I was engaged and which changed me.

Similarly, when reading certain books: I could mention many which have similarly engaged me but about which I would not wish to say anything of an objective kind. So it was, and is, with Robert’s book. Each reading in it is primarily an event. I am not really interested as to whether, or not, he has got something ‘right’. What I value in The Christian Middle Way is that it is the reflection by a well-travelled writer providing a defence for his current ‘take’ on what it is to be human: following a move from his upbringing within a Christian perspective to a Buddhist and then a move into a fresh Christian position — just the kind of account which sits in the middle of our SOF project.

Robert’s reflections, his detailed justifications — his recommendations, in effect — have the result of ‘nudging’ me to question and generally reflect on my own ‘final’ position — final in the sense that I have, as yet, no non-circular way of gaining a more confident view — or, in Robert’s terms, my ‘provisional’ position.

Robert’s writing is not to my taste — I would prefer a story which paid more attention to the notion of community and the ways in which our involvement with others helps to form us. However, what I find encouraging is that it is clear from our conversations that we are likely to act similarly in similar demanding situations. This recognition, this agreement if you will, offers hope. His book has an assured place on my shelf of SOF writers!

I am led to ask: What are we doing when approaching and reading books, poems and stories? I emphasise the doing, the action, deliberately. I frame my interest as a question in the hope of learning from others’ experience.

David Lambourn, Edgbaston, Birmingham

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