‘What is a Spiritual Education?’
This lecture offers attendees the opportunity to hear Professor Graham Ward examine the work of the Holy Spirit in the operation of salvation. It treats the formation and salvation of persons, and how the Latin persona becomes important. It treats the difference, though not in a derogatory way, between spiritual formation and well-being, building upon the Pauline distinctions between the body (soma), the mind (psychê) and the spirit (pneuma). Drawing upon Scripture and evolutionary biology, Professor Graham Ward describes the educational process involved in being formed, showing that form is an emergent property as it is in evolutionary biology. It is not something that can either be predicted or prescribed. The Spirit works upon us at profound emotional and dispositional levels, beneath cognition and language so we have to come to terms with all that is hidden (mystêrion). Suffering plays an important pedagogical role in that. Biographies play a role in that. They are the means by which we are “sounded through”, and in being “sounded through” we come into our distinctive personhood in Christ.
Date: 5 June 2025, 17:15
Venue: Campion Hall, Brewer Street OX1 1QS
Venue Details: Lecture Room and also online
Speaker: Prof. Graham Ward (University of Oxford)
Organising department: Campion Hall
Organiser: Hannah Bironzo (Campion Hall, Oxford University)
Organiser contact email address: events@campion.ox.ac.uk
Booking required?: Required
Booking url: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/myevent?eid=1308161288629
Booking email: events@campion.ox.ac.uk
Cost: Free
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Hannah Bironzo