Temenos Academy Newsletter June 2026
Temenos Academy
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June 2026
Creating
Sacred Spaces: Spirits, Saints and Songlines From 12th-Century Britain
to Australia
Every culture needs a temenos or sacred place from which to draw inspiration. When oral traditions about such places begin to falter in the face of a newly dominant culture, a few brave souls may seek to record them in writing so that they are not fully lost. I look at this process in two places. One is a twelfth-century confrontation between memories of Arthur in Cornwall and devotees of relics of the Virgin. The other is Central Australia, where between 1932 and 1955, T.G.H. Strehlow (1908-78) collected a vast repertory of orally transmitted Indigenous songs in danger of being lost for ever. In particular, I consider songlines, orally transmitted sacred songs about journeys of a sacred ancestor (a bird, animal, even a honey-bee) that a community must perform to restore the land. There are vast differences between medieval and Indigenous cultures. Songlines can nonetheless help us renew our understanding of many different sacred texts about journeys, including what Christians call the way of the cross, promoting respect rather than violence. Constant J. Mews is Emeritus Professor in the School of Philosophical, Historical & Indigenous Studies at Monash University (Australia), where he taught history and religious studies 1987-2021. He had previously studied at Auckland, Oxford and Paris. He has published widely on Latin medieval culture and religious thought from late antiquity to the early fifteenth century, including The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France among many other books. Venue
& Admission
IMAGE CREDIT - Mimi Ngaire [My Mother], by Richard Patrick Campbell. The image, reproduced with the artist's permission and exhibited in Rome for the canonization (2010) of Mary MacKillop, the first Australian saint, now belongs to the Broken Bay Diocese, NSW. Campbell was born at Bowraville in 1958 to a Gumbainggirr mother and Dunghutti father, but is part of the stolen generation, removed from their families by government policies at the time.
The 20th-century Swiss Catholic Hans Urs von Balthasar intervened boldly in a Western tradition of aesthetics-a tradition that had largely turned its back on theological categories and frameworks-to reassert a link between beauty and goodness. Beauty, for Balthasar, is of its nature enrapturing, and thus requires a transformation in the one who encounters it. In his view, it is artificial to drive a wedge between the call of beauty and the summons to goodness. His bid to recover this link has unexpected allies from other, less explicitly theological, quarters, including Iris Murdoch and her robust rebuttal of the analytic philosophers' attempts to limit their consideration of goodness to questions of individual choice rather than the larger context of contemplative vision. Professor Ben Quash came to King's College London as its first Professor of Christianity and the Arts in 2007. He is Director of the Centre for Arts & the Sacred at King's (ASK), as well as general editor of The Visual Commentary on Scripture (TheVCS.org), a pioneering open-access collaboration between theologians, art historians, and biblical scholars from all around the world. He runs an MA in Theology, Bible, and the Arts in association with the National Gallery, London. His recent book Theology, Modernity and the Visual Arts (co-edited with Chloë Reddaway) came out in July 2024. In October 2026 he will take up the position of Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University. Venue
& Admission
This symposium celebrates the life and legacy of John Michell (1933-2009), an English artist and author who inspired many to explore the mysteries of landscape, symbolic geometry, and measure. His books The View Over Atlantis and City of Revelation were pivotal in the countercultural stream of the 1970s and beyond. Michell's revival of the research of Alfred Watkins, who discovered 'leys' in the 1920s, motivated many to go out in search of alignments. Guided by the works of Plato and Charles Fort, he authored titles on unexplained phenomena, megalithomania, and ancient metrology. Qualified as a land surveyor and as a Russian interpreter, Michell dedicated his final book How the World is Made to Keith Critchlow, whom he called 'our modern Pythagoras'. Speakers Venue
& Admission
For more information for all our events click HERE
Members of the Temenos community may be interested in the current exhibition on ' Sufi Life and Art ' taking place at the British Museum and which closes on 26th July. You can read a review of the exhibition by Temenos academic board member Emma Clark at our online essay archive
You can support the Temenos Academy by becoming a member for £60/year. Members benefits include free admission to our lecture programme, concessionary rates to seminars, study days and online courses, a free copy Temenos Academy Review 28 and Ten Basic Principles that Inspire the Work of Temenos on joining, and complimentary copies of forthcoming Temenos Academy publications as they are issued. To
become a member click
HERE
Our website Archive hosts many audio and video recordings of lectures and the texts of many articles from Temenos Academy Review. New material is added regularly. https://www.temenosacademy.org/videoarchive Many of our audio recordings are available as PODCASTS.
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