Andy Kemp reviews Clare Carlisle’s Transcendence for Beginners, which links life writing and philosophy and finds transcendence in everyday devotion and love, an approach he relates to Don Cupitt’s immanent rethinking of transcendence.
Review of David Galston’s Restoring Humanism to Religion (2025), which argues that religion must recover its humanist roots through ‘religiousness’. The reviewer admires the book but doubts that ‘religiousness’ is the right word for a rich humanism.
Ten draft hypotheses on what Sea of Faith members might broadly say together: religion, gods and scripture are human creations, faith is of this world, and justice matters, offered for debate not as a creed.
David Rhodes considers how outsiders see the Network, including the charge of being ‘a bunch of atheists’, the Wessex group losing venues, and summarises a members’ survey on their involvement in other organisations.
Paul Overend reviews Paul-Francois Tremlett’s short introduction to Marx, Engels and later Marxists on religion, welcoming its accessibility but wanting fuller explanation of Marx’s view of religion as a human creation.
Alison Webster reflects on reconciling Don Cupitt’s non-realism with feminist and liberation theology, finding it too individualist, then drawing on queer theory, situated knowledge and post-human ideas.
Two papers debate the 2024 AGM’s change of the Network’s purpose to ‘religion and worldviews as human creations for this life’: Dave Francis argues for it, David Boulton against, with editor David Chapman’s introduction.
Martin Spence reports on the Gladstone’s Library conference on the Sea of Faith series, questions its individualism, and suggests Jessica Eastwood’s ‘spectrum’ of views on divinity and reality could reopen theology in the Network, using Psalm 82.
Andy Kemp reports on the July 2024 Cambridge conference marking forty years since the Sea of Faith television series, with talks on each episode, on Don Cupitt’s later thought, and on the archive of viewers’ letters.
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.