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.
Faith Beyond Certainty: Rethinking God and Belief
Jessica Eastwood explores Don Cupitt’s religious non-realism and its potential to reframe engagement with religion beyond theism and atheism.
Pass it on
A small campaign to boost Network coverage Earlier this year the SOFN Steering Committee decided to reproduce a leaflet explaining what the Network does and who it might appeal to. You should find a copy...
Worldviews Navigator: Understanding the obvious
Is it just older people who begin most of their conversation starters with, “What I don’t understand is…”? You can complete the sentence with your favourite bugbear: “…why people think it’s OK to drop litter...
Religion in my Life: Kiran
Like all of the subjects of the Religion in my Life column this year, Kiran is an activist working for the good of the community and has resisted prejudice and injustice all her life. In...
How Minds Change The New Science of Belief, Opinion and Persuasion by David McRaney.
How Minds Change The New Science of Belief, Opinion and Persuasion by David McRaney. Oneworld (London, 2022) 352 pages. Pbk £11:99 Reviewed by Digby Hartridge Journalist David McRaney has written what amounts to a very...
The Joys and Troubles of a Missionary Life: Jowett Murray in the China of 1909-1945
by David Murray (Author), Ruth H Finnegan (Editor). Callender Press (Milton Keynes 2025) 212 pages, Pbk £19.99 Reviewed by David Chapman This is not a book I would have read were it not that I...
Consume! Note we have carrots, also sticks.
Halloween, Black Friday, Christmas, New Year – what an exemplary spending spree. But the advertisements showed just how happy and popular we would be: it’s only failures who can’t afford it and miseries who opt...
From Religion to Philosophy
There has always been ‘religion’ I have read somewhere though it makes me wonder if that has indeed been the case. ‘What is religion?’ This is not a serious question for me – the word...
Defend Our Juries: Lift the Ban
Defend Our Juries (DOJ) was established to “shine a light on the constitutional crisis taking place in our courts”: Juries of 12 randomly selected citizens put the moral intuitions of ordinary people at the heart...
Protest
John Pearson considers the efficacy of climate (and other) protests The Climate Crisis is not something that can be read about, reflected upon and then set aside. Each of us, individually, with our hearts and...
Johan Galtung – On Violence, Religion, and Peace Building
The Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung (1930 – 17 February 2024) was a central figure in the foundation and development of the discipline of peace and conflict studies from the 1950s. His work conceptualised the nature...
Hope, Activism and Ubuntu
David Chapman in conversation with Fidele Mutwarasibo Dr Fidele Mutwarasibo is a Senior Lecturer in Work Based Learning at the Open University and is much in demand in the public life of the city of...
The Violence of (White) Nonviolence
In what follows, I offer a brief critical and exploratory reflection on the entanglement of non-violence with whiteness against the backdrop of what is almost two years of genocide enacted against the Palestinian people by...
The Ethics of Pressure
In November of 2024, I led an online discussion about the ethics of “pressure tactics” as a means to achieving a political end. This came up because of me questioning my own different reactions to...
Magical Thinking
In this conversation we explored the nature of magic and magical thinking, and considered
why so many people find it so attractive.
10 Hypotheses – 25 years on and counting…
The intention is that all of us will have the chance to familiarise ourselves with the ‘10 Hypotheses’ along with David’s original introduction, in which he invites all of us to: “discard what doesn’t hold good, improving whatever may seem useful”. The 10 Hypotheses were always intended as a starting...
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...