Mr Oxford returns

In 1974 my parents went to Europe on their only overseas trip together. My mother brought me back a T-shirt from Oxford. I was wearing it on a summer holiday, walking on Mt Kosciuszko in 1976 when a jumper I had around my waist fell off onto the alpine path. A stranger called out to me: “Mr Oxford, you dropped your jumper”. The nickname stuck for a while. The T-shirt died about 10 years ago. An autopsy revealed the cause of death to be ‘loss of armpits’.

Today I bought a replacement in a dog-hair friendly colour.

Today is also the second week of the summer school. Some of the students from last week have left and some new ones have joined us, many from the US, as has a collection of new tutors for the various subjects. This means new reading requirements for this week’s courses. This evening I am reading something about St Athanasius’s view on sacraments or sacrifice, or both (not quite sure).

We are so blessed to have so many knowledgeable and excellent teachers available in this country. This morning I began a course on ‘Sacrifice in Liturgy and Life. Our tutor is the Revd Dr Keith Riglin is Chaplain and Assistant Dean at King’s College London, and visiting lecturer in its Department of Theology and Religious Studies. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a senior member of Wolfson College, Cambridge, and chairman of the All Saints Educational Trust. He is the co-editor and contributor to Reforming Worship (Wipf & Stock, 2012), and contributed to Mary for Earth and Heaven (Gracewing, 2002). His particular interests are in ecclesiology and sacramental theology, and in the application of theology and religious belief to public thought and practice. He is also the assistant priest at St Anne’s Church, Soho, London and an “authorised presbyter” at Wesley’s Chapel, London. His wife is a Methodist minister. Like ‘wow’.

This afternoon I began a course on ‘ How should we think about God’s work in Christ?’

For this course our tutor is the Revd Dr Andrew Moore, a Member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion at Oxford University since 2002. He has been responsible for the teaching of courses on the Christian Doctrine of Creation, and on Science and Religion; he also teaches modern doctrine, and the philosophy of religion, and has research interests in early church doctrine. His publications are mainly on topics on the borderlands of theology and philosophy, though he has also published works on preaching, and on theology and mountaineering. He is an Honorary Assistant Priest in the Diocese of Oxford. And he was ordained in Melbourne!

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