New and returning graduate students, Welcome to this new 2022-2023 academic year! You have come to this place and to this moment from a wide diversity of backgrounds, experiences, achievements, and challenges. But, nonetheless, one thing binds you together with a shared commonness: you have formulated a question. Your research Read more
This year I have been thinking often about exemplars – figures in history, or fiction, seen as admirable or exemplary in some way. The main reason for this is that I have been moonlighting as the assistant for an Oxford-based discussion group called Ethics through Fiction and Film, which has Read more
This week I will be giving my final lecture in a first-year university course that I’ve been teaching each Fall for a few years. It’s an overview of the Bible, Genesis 1 to Revelation 22, in one semester, based on the excellent book by Michael Goheen and Craig Bartholomew, The Read more
‘Do miracles really happen? Is there a God or gods who actively intervene in human history?’ Lydia McCutcheon reflects on engaging with accounts of divine intervention as a historian.
I’ve written before on FiSch, as well as elsewhere, about my research on prayer. Today I want to look at a particular idea which jumped out at me recently, speaking to my own life and practice as well as to the medieval recluses it was meant for. This is the simple statement in Ancrene Read more
As 2019 has come to a close, and a new decade is beginning, I have been thinking about a poem by Emily Dickinson – one of my favourites, for its enigmatic imagery and its expression of longing: ‘I did not reach Thee’. Here is the first stanza (you can read Read more
One of the figures in the Bible who I’m most fond of is the prophet Daniel: mainly because, like me, he was a literature student. Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it […]Then the king ordered Ashpenaz, chief of his court officials, to bring into the king’s Read more
Intellectual servanthood ‘Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, “Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all.”’ Mark 9:35 ‘“Suppose one of you has a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Will he say to the servant when he comes Read more
I’m drawing closer to the end of my doctoral work, and that means a lot of my work at the moment is revising drafts. In the last couple of weeks I have been redrafting the introduction to my thesis. This is slow, bitty work: fixing various details, doing small pieces Read more
In this post I’d like to reflect on a tension that I consider to be quite widespread within academia. ‘Critical thinking’ is often extolled as one of the core virtues necessary for the intellectual life: much university-level teaching is geared towards developing this skill, and it is viewed as foundational Read more