Library
The Sea of Faith Network has built up a large library of articles and recordings of speakers from our conferences. The full digitisation of these articles into a searchable format is ongoing, but a significant number are already searchable and viewable on this website.
You can browse our content below, including by written article, video or audio / podcast, as well as by author and topic.
You can search the digitised portion of our library using the search box below.
Ten hypotheses
What are we FOR? Sea of Faith is often faced with the challenge: “We know what you don’t believe, now tell us what you do”. And we reply that we have no dogmas, no creeds...
What in Me is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost
by Orlando Reade, Jonathan Cape (London, 2024), Hbk, 230pages, £22.00. Reviewed by David Rhodes My relationship with Milton’s Paradise Lost is quite recent; I first read it six years ago and have done so a...
City Walls and Magenta
City Walls I walk with ease through the streets of JerusalemI go lightly through her gates and along her wallsFor I am not seen here as a stranger Though I come from a distant land...
Poetic Responses – Sofia 157
In the June issue I mentioned that David Chapman, our Editor, had been reading Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”. Pam Wilkinson has written in to say, “I’m a big...
Mark: A Gospel of Resistance (Part 3)
I have been arguing that a major part of Mark’s project included writing something to sustain Judaism in the context of Roman brutality and, at the same time, to try to avoid the charge of...
What might Amos say to us now?
Amos prophesied in the middle of the 8th century BCE. A hundred and fifty years before him, according to the Hebrew Bible, the death of Solomon had precipitated the division of Israel into a northern...
Bonhoeffer: His theology
In the previous issue of Sofia I outlined the course of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life, dwelling in particular on his years of resistance to the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s. In this article I focus...
From Cave Paintings to Chatbots: Rewilding Religious Education with AI
In the midst of winter I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. Albert Camus, Return to Tipassa On a rain-soaked evening in 1983, somewhere between Valencia and the Straits of Gibraltar, I found...
Identities, AI, Religion and Hope
By Prof. Dr Beth Singler, Assistant Professor in Digital Religion(s), University of Zurich As an anthropologist, I am expected to reflect on my own approach to the field in which I study, to seek to...
Fostering curiosity: The Value of RE
By Louisa Jane Smith In recent years, the educational landscape has seen a significant shift towards academic rigour. This includes the implementation of structured activities, such as ‘do now’ tasks that aim to maximize learning...
Big Ideas for Religion and Science in Education: The Scopes Monkey Trial 100 years on
By Denise Cush, Dave Francis, Philippa Hulme & Michael J. Reiss Since its inception, in 1989, the Sea of Faith Network has been proactive in launching several educational projects and programmes. Notably, in 2013, Solarity¹...
Annual General Meeting 2025
The Sea of Faith Network’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) for 2025 will be held on Monday 6th October at 19.00 – 21.00 via Zoom.
Exploring Human Flourishing as Secular Spirituality
In preparation for your participation in this conversation, Paul recommends you to follow one two following links to have an idea of what is meant by ‘human flourishing’, so that we can all speak from our own experience of any practices that have helped enable us to flourish.
Education for this life
Our 2025 conference theme, Education for this Life, celebrated the growing educational work of the network through the Solarity online materials for Religion and Philosophy Clubs, and through being a key partner of the Big Ideas for Religious Education. Our first conference in 1988 arose from the series written and...
Reading Mark as I had suggested, what follows?
David Lambourn returned to the topic of Re-imagining the Gospel of Mark that he had proposed in May 2023, now asking the question: ‘Reading Mark as I had suggested, what follows?’
Penny Mawdsley
Penny Mawdsley, whose A Penn’orth column was a valued regular in Sofia, sadly died on Sunday 9th of March. John Pearson offers a brief reflection on her life.
Resisting Sofiac Religion
Here are some passing thoughts on the new ‘tag-line’ statement – I am not aiming to engage directly with the defence argued for in the March issue of Sofia. ‘religion’ was the lynch pin of...
Review: Paul-Francois Tremlett. Religion and Marxism. An Introduction
Paul Overend reviews. Paul-Francois Tremlett is a senior lecturer in religious studies at the Open University. This short book is introductory, written for both A-Level sociology students (p.vii) and a general reader, and takes a...
The Past, Present and Future of Sofia
This was a conversation about the past, the present and, most importantly, the future of our Sea of Faith magazine. As the new editor of Sofia, David Chapman started with a brief overview of the...
Resisting Oppression: The Arba’een Walk
Arif Master, Chain of Voice of Al Hussain, describes the background to the pilgrimage and how it has inspired figures over history.
Religion in my Life: Kurshida Mirza
Kurshida Mirza is a highly respected long-standing resident of Milton Keynes who became active in the community
in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in New York
The Notion that the Polite, Western Liberal Ever Stood for Anything At All.
Omar El Akkad is a journalist and Munther Isaac is a Church minister. They are both very angry. The proximate target of El Akkad’s anger is Western journalism, and of Isaac’s is Western Christianity, but...
An Untouchable State
Caroline Pickard offers an appreciation of ‘An Untouchable State: Lobbying for Zionism on both Sides of the Atlantic’ by Ilan Pappe