Author: Stephen Mitchell

Short biographies of the twelve members of the Network’s new Steering Group set up in 2024, including the Chair, Secretary, Treasurer and editor, with their backgrounds and routes into the Network.

Stephen Mitchell reviews Richard Holloway’s On Reflection, in which Holloway treats religion, like art, as a human creation and as a response to wonder and horror rather than an explanation.

Letter from Stephen Mitchell arguing that Church of England bishops no longer believe in an interventionist God ‘out there’ and should say so, to free the Church from an oppressive image of God.

A tribute to Don Cupitt on his ninetieth birthday and the Sea of Faith’s fortieth anniversary, recalling Hugh Dawes, solar ethics and Cupitt’s late writing on death and humanity’s future.

Stephen Mitchell uses Corpus Christi and Cupitt’s idea that the self is the analogy of God to reread real presence and the Holy Spirit as presence, imagination and attention to life.

Stephen Mitchell reflects on Jesus’s death and resurrection, arguing the risen body is a literary creation and that dying well matters more than debates about an afterlife. He also criticises ‘celebration of life’ funerals.

Stephen Mitchell argues that the language and ritual of Christian worship, including the ‘Body of Christ’, should stay poetic and not shrink to a historical Jesus. Faith is practice within a community.

Stephen Mitchell recalls the early years of the Network: the Leicestershire group, the first Loughborough conference, Ronald Pearse, David Paterson, the Anthony Freeman affair and his own later place in the church.