General Editor: David Chapman
My undergraduate degree was in physics, and I’ve sometimes said that if you scratch me, you’ll still find a physicist in there somewhere. My first job was as an electronics design engineer working in the telecommunications industry, but most of my working life, until I retired in 2019, was as a lecturer at the Open University. I taught information and communications technology, and my PhD was in optical fibre communications. However, my research later moved on to trying to understand the nature of information from a multi-disciplinary perspective.
I was baptised by the Church of England in Liverpool as an infant and have been an active church member all my life, currently at the city-centre Ecumenical Church of Christ the Cornerstone in Milton Keynes. I chair the Social Justice Committee at Cornerstone and chair the Board of Trustees of Cornerstone Music, a charity with links to the Church which brings high-quality classical music to the city of Milton Keynes. (Though I have no musical talent myself!)
Both in my religious beliefs and my politics, I seem to have been on a journey of radicalisation. I believe that religion, like all human knowledge, is a creation of people and communities, and is always provisional, partial, political, and flawed. Yet somehow, even as my faith has become less real (whatever that means), it has become more important. As a tall middle-class heterosexual white Christian CIS-gendered man in the global north, I have increasingly come to recognise my own privilege and the damaging hegemony of people like me. I believe that one of the roles of religion should be to undermine privilege and to resist hegemonies.
Perhaps the most controversial fact about me, however, is that I am a season ticket holder at the MK Dons!
I have a blog which was originally for musing on the nature of information but is now about anything I feel the need to share with the world: http://www.intropy.co.uk/
And on BlueSky: @daveofthenewcity.bsky.social
Poetry Editor: James Priestman
I joined the Sea of Faith Network after the previous editor, Dinah Livingstone, approached me at a poetry reading in Kentish Town and asked if she could publish one of my poems. “Mary’s Quilt” was published in Sofia issue 130 (Christmas 2018). I went to the SOFN Conference in summer 2019 and since then have had letters and articles published in Sofia.
I want to use my position as poetry editor to share poems by established poets and to include poetry by readers of Sofia. I will look particularly favourably on poems that are relevant to the theme of each issue. Please send your poems to poetry@sofn.uk.
I was brought up with Evangelical Christian beliefs and in 1986 I went to Sheffield University to read for a BA Honours in Biblical Studies. I completed the degree but stopped attending church. After university, I had a range of occupations including that of a commissioned Army Officer and that of a senior manager in a local authority. I currently work as a mental health social worker in the NHS in Ealing, where I live. In 2014, I began attending Ealing Quaker Meeting House (Religious Society of Friends). In 2018, I became a Member of the Quakers.
I use the nom de plume James Pendle for my poetry, and my poems have been published in Ambit (Carol Ann Duffy was the corresponding editor) and Acumen (one of the longest-running literary magazines). I have assembled my poems, many of which are explicitly Biblical, on a website: https://whatthebiblecouldhavesaid.com/
