Temenos Academy Newsletter March 2025

[Temenos Academy]

NEWSLETTER March 2025 EVENING LECTURES Imagination: The Hospitality of Being DR VALENTIN GERLIER Thursday 13 March In the chair James Harpur For many artists and thinkers, the imagination has been a primordial realm for the discovery of wisdom, understanding and spiritual knowledge – an approach which underpins the expression ‘the learning of the imagination’. Far more than a mere mental faculty for creative and associative thinking, the imagination is here understood as the realm in which both ‘the True’ and ‘the Beautiful’, to borrow the language of the Platonic tradition, come to living form and articulation. This lecture, however, begins from the sense that the imagination is also the realm of expression of ‘the Good’. Through a meditation on the motif of hospitality, this lecture will seek to bring to light the scope of the imagination not only as creative or revelatory power, but also as a profound ability to welcome, to receive, to heal, to comprehend and to respond. To imagine, in this sense, means an openness to the radical surprise of the other, the stranger that turns up at the threshold of our being. Whilst other contemporary popular and seductive ethical stances call for prompt radical action and change, the ‘learning of the imagination’ elicits first of all a profound hospitality – a creative enactment of the goodness of Being as a gesture of love and receptivity towards one another and towards the things and beings of the world. VALENTIN GERLIER is Lecturer at Schumacher Wild and Research Associate at the Institut Catholique de Toulouse, France. He is author of Shakespeare and the Grace of Words (Routledge, 2022) and regularly teaches and lectures at the Temenos Academy. Venue & Admission St George the Martyr Church, 44 Queen Square, WC1N 3AH Doors open 6.10pm, lecture begins 6.30pm. £10 General Admission FREE for Temenos Academy Members and full-time students with ID E temenos...@myfastmail.com T 07513 883 335 [Image Credit – William Blake, Plate 100 of Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (detail). Source: The Blake Archive]   Humanity and Nature in Eastern Orthodox Christianity – SOLD OUT PAUL KINGSNORTH Monday 17 March In the chair Dr Jeremy Naydler What is our human relationship to the natural world, according to Christian cosmology? In an age of ecological overshoot and collapse, the question is urgent, and yet it is often assumed or claimed that the Christian faith has no answers to it. It is common to hear that Christianity is an anti-ecological religion, which separates humans from the rest of creation and instructs them to dominate and exploit it. Calls are sometimes made for Christians to ‘modernise’ their thinking in the face of climate change, or adopt an ‘eco-theology’ which departs from traditional Christian teaching. This lecture will explore the teaching of the Eastern Orthodox Church about the place of humanity in the world, and explain that, far from being anthropocentric or anti-creation, it in fact offers a deep, subtle and radical answer to the ecological crisis. PAUL KINGSNORTH is a writer and former ecological activist. He is the author of nine books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, including the Man Booker-nominated novel The Wake. He was received into the Orthodox Church in 2021, and now writes about his ongoing journey into the Eastern Christian tradition. Venue & Admission 18 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, WC2A 3ED Doors open 6.10pm, lecture begins 6.30pm. £10 General Admission FREE for Temenos Academy Members and full-time students with ID E temenos...@myfastmail.com T 07513 883 335   LAMPETER STUDY DAY The Learning the Imagination: These Several Streams Wednesday 19 March DR ROWAN WILLIAMS, JANE CLARK, DR VALENTIN GERLIER Places still available. For further details see HERE E temenos...@myfastmail.com T 07513 883 335 THE ARCHIVE Our website Archive hosts many audio and video recordings of lectures, digital versions of all thirteen issues of the journal TEMENOS, and the texts of seventy articles from Temenos Academy Review. New material is added regularly. https://temenosacademy.org/main-lecture-archive https://temenosacademy.org/temenos-journal-archive https://temenosacademy.org/temenos-academy-review-archive Many of our audio recordings are available as PODCASTS. PAYPAL GIVING FUND UK The Temenos Academy is registered with PayPal Giving Fund UK. When using PayPal if you choose you may also make a donation in support of the Temenos Academy. Thank you FURTHER INFORMATION EMAIL temenos...@myfastmail.com TELEPHONE 07513 883 335 PRIVACY POLICY https://temenosacademy.org/privacy-policy