Library

The Sea of Faith Merseyside & North Wales group meets on Saturday 14 November 2026, 1.00–4.00pm, at the Liverpool Quaker Meeting House.

An interactive In Conversation session on Wednesday 21 October 2026 at 7pm on Zoom, considering the role and opportunities of small groups for support, encouragement and learning.

The Sea of Faith London group meets on Saturday 10 October 2026 at 11am at Steve’s house in Friern Barnet, North London (N11), taking the conference theme as its starting point.

The Sea of Faith Merseyside & North Wales group meets on Zoom on Saturday 3 October 2026, 2.00–4.00pm.

The Sea of Faith Network’s Annual General Meeting takes place on Wednesday 30 September 2026, 7.00–8.00pm on Zoom.

A photograph from Cliff Polubinsky’s Habitat for Humanity work in Guatemala — a father teaching his son to lay masonry — offered for quiet contemplation on the theme of love in this world.

Dave Francis on the Sea of Faith Network’s RE education work — from the founding of Solarity to the Big Ideas for RE programme — against a backdrop of the rise of the religious “nones”.

Andrew Edgar reviews Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine — a compelling critique of technological modernity that is, at times, too conservative in the stories it reaches for instead.

Andy Kemp reviews Clare Carlisle’s Transcendence for Beginners, a philosophical life-writing that finds transcendence not beyond the world but in ordinary, devoted love.

Ben Wood, Quaker theologian and Hedge Druid, talks about faith seeking understanding, dual religious belonging, and a “liberal socialist” politics of grace.

Martin Spence reports from an Oxford conference on “religious humanisms” — and finds himself persuaded that humanism might, after all, come in the plural.

Ross McCrory reviews Living (2022), Oliver Hermanus and Kazuo Ishiguro’s retelling of Ikiru, as a study in learning — almost too late — to live and love in and for this world.

Robert Boucnick reviews Nicholas Spencer’s Magisteria, a comprehensive history that dismantles the myth of perpetual war between science and religion.

Edward Nickell reviews Lamorna Ash’s Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever, a year-long journey through young Christian conversion that ends, unexpectedly, in faith.

Marking the 800th anniversary of St Francis’s death, Edward Owen TSSF reflects on what it means to live the Franciscan vows of prayer, study and work today.

Paul Overend compares three influential twentieth-century accounts of love — Nygren’s agape and eros, Lewis’s four loves, and Fromm’s art of loving — and argues Fromm speaks best to our situation today.

Sofia’s editors recommend recent publications in biblical studies, hermeneutics, religion and the environment, philosophy, and Islamic studies.

Žižek’s reading of Bartleby’s ‘I prefer not to’

Digby Hartridge reviews Ian Scoones’s argument that marginal communities in the Global South may be better placed than ‘sophisticated’ Western societies to cope with major disruptions.