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Gathering Young Children’s Unfiltered Thoughts about DisabilityWebinar presented to Virginia University Center for Excellence in Disabilities & Pediatrics. Aim: to examine children’s early understandings of disability and consider approaches that early year’s and primary/elementary practitioners can use to engage children in discussions around concepts of disability.
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How much History is in the Passion Narratives? Violence, Ideology, Historicity, and the Seditious Jesus HypothesisThis article reviews Fernando Bermejo-Rubio’s monograph, They Suffered under Pontius Pilate: Jewish Anti-Roman Resistance and the Crosses at Golgotha (2023). This book is the latest publication arguing for the ‘seditious Jesus’ hypothesis, the idea that Jesus was an armed revolutionary. It is argued that the volume rightly critiques some theological tendency in New Testament scholarship to downplay or ignore violence inherent in the Jesus tradition, but the argument that the men crucified with Jesus were either some of his disciples or sympathetic to his violent cause fails to convince. Despite arguing for historical minimalism in relation to the Gospel material, Bermejo-Rubio builds his case on the material he judges to be historical, but that is better explained by the imagination of the evangelists.
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A Reassessment of the Galli and the Archigalli of Magna Mater, their Differences and their Citizen Status in RomeAcademics have regularly debated the question of how the Galli, priests of Magna Mater/Cybele, fit into the Roman social milieu. Several have argued that membership of the Galli was restricted to foreign citizens only (citing Domitian’s legislation) whilst others have argued that the chief priests—the Archigalli—were Roman citizens, while the ‘lower’ Galli were non-citizens, thus separating both within the Cybele cult. These views remain prevalent in modern discussions on the cult, and have not undergone significant scrutiny or analysis. By assessing these views and the existing material and literary evidence for the Galli, this article argues that the Archigalli and Galli were indistinct in terms of behaviour and affiliation. Moreover, this article uses archaeological and literary evidence to suggest that the Galli most likely included Roman citizens among their members, contrasting with the prevailing view of them as foreign residents in Rome.
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Living amongst and with trees: Botanical agency and the archaeology of plant-human relationshipsThe last decade has seen a significant change in the way the humanities have approached the study of botanical life. Termed ‘the plant turn’, this questions traditional views of plants as a largely passive form of life, seeing them instead as living beings capable of acting upon and with other elements of the world. This paper argues that such a perspective offers significant potential for the archaeological study of human-plant relationships. Using a case-study on the lives of trees and humans at the early Mesolithic settlement at Star Carr (UK) it shows that by viewing plants as active participants in past worlds we can achieve a richer understanding of both non-human and human life, and the complex ways they interacted with each other. It also suggests that by making more of this approach, archaeology can help address our own, contemporary relationship with the botanical world.
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Covers Story: Hold the Front PageDr Matt Davies, senior lecturer in English Language at the University of Chester, looks through the Cheshire Life archive to see how the front page has changed in the decades since it first rolled off the presses in the 1930s (May 2024, pp.25-32). www.cheshirelifemagazine.co.uk
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Pandora's Box (2025)Founded 2003, Pandora’s Box is an annual literary periodical publishing a selection of the year’s best creative writing by students and staff at the University of Chester.
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Saturday (poem)Poem.
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Great works by great men? Rethinking linear earthworksIntroducing the sixth volume of the Offa’s Dyke Journal (ODJ) for 2024, the introduction surveys the contents and recent related research published elsewhere as well as the main Offa’s Dyke Collaboratory’s activities during late 2023 and 2024.
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Today’s Offa’s Dyke: Heritage interpretation for Britain’s longest linear monumentHow is Offa’s Dyke interpreted for visitors and locals in the contemporary landscape? The article considers the present-day heritage interpretation of Britain’s longest linear monument: the early medieval Mercian frontier work of Offa’s Dyke. I survey and evaluate panels, plaques and signs that follow the course of the surviving early medieval linear earthwork from Sedbury in Gloucestershire, north to Treuddyn in Flintshire, and along stretches away from the surviving earthwork and north to Prestatyn, Denbighshire along the line of the Offa’s Dyke Path National Trail. Critiquing for the overarching narratives and envisionings of Offa’s Dyke the first time, I identify how anachronistic ethnonationalist narratives pervade its interpretation: pertaining to the origins of both England and the English, and Wales and the Welsh. As such, the article provides a baseline for further research into the contemporary archaeology and heritage of Offa’s Dyke and affords insights of application to other ancient linear monuments in today’s world. I conclude with reflections and recommendations for future heritage interpretation of the monument in relation to the national trail, the border and borderlands identities.
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Theodicy and Hope in Hans Frei's TheologySusan Neiman has argued that the problem of evil in modern European philosophy concerns the absence of intelligibility, meaning and justice that threatens the trust in the world we need to understand it and act in it. In light of Frei's reading of H. Richard Niebuhr's theology as theodicy in similar terms, we may read Frei’s own Christological understanding of providence as a kind of theodicy, at once sombre, hopeful and restrained, with a practical, political force.
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More than a moment: German Jews and the First World WarWith the spotlight on the census, other aspects of the German-Jewish war experience gradually faded into the background. In the post-war years, few people wanted to talk about army rabbis or Jewish sailors. The charitable efforts of synagogue communities or Jewish female volunteers in hospitals and at railway stations was also quickly forgotten. What had once been an extremely varied and diverse experience of conflict descended into little more than a public battle over statistics. For the most part, this narrative of national sacrifice rewarded with a brutal betrayal has been the mainstay of historical writing too. Yet, for German Jews, the census was always just a single brief moment in what was a much longer First World War.
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What to do with the dead?Tim Grady explains what the treatment of German and British dead following the two world wars reveals about the two nations’ ongoing relationship.
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Tales of the peasantry and famineThis chapter considers the representation of the Irish peasant in nineteenth-century fiction: in the moral tales of Mary Leadbeater, national tales by Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan, the rise of Catholic novelists such as Gerald Griffin and the Banims, and those who emerge from the peasantry themselves, such as William Carleton; and the way representation is affected by social and political events such as agrarian outrages, the Famine, and the Land League.
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Book Review: George Hunsinger - The Legacy of Hans W. FreiHans W. Frei (1922-1988) was a widely influential historical and constructive theologian who was Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University. In this volume, George Hunsinger has gathered a range of pieces that make the case for different aspects of Frei’s theological achievements and clarify and interrogate his arguments. These are highly valuable expositions, assessments and it is helpful to highlight them in this volume. One wonders, however, what Frei’s legacy looks like to scholars from backgrounds further removed from his own kind of institutional and social setting.
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(Il)legal Bodies: Activism, Climate Fictions, Climate CullingWhen the non-violent environmental protest group Extinction Rebellion (XR) was created in late 2018, I was completing a Masters in Research in Science Fiction Literature. Although initially nervous, I understood the urgent need to non-violently protest the lack of governmental action on the climate and ecological crisis (as it has since become known). In November 2018, I took a copy of Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods with me to London, where I was joined by thousands of fellow activists on the streets around the Houses of Parliament and Downing Street, many dressed as animals, with banners and flags protesting the sixth mass extinction and ongoing anthropogenic climate-related genocides across the globe.
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The Vatican's adaptation to new media: an exploration of the strategies, benefits and impacts on the local churchThis thesis investigates how the Catholic Church has adapted to the emergence of new media, its strategies, benefits, and impacts on the local church. Religious institutions such as the Catholic Church have entered the world of new media in an effort to achieve their aims and objectives, emphasizing the power of new media as ‘new spaces for evangelization’. This situation requires a reorganization that takes into account the historic development of the Holy See’s structures of communication, unified integration, and management. As a result, the Dictionary of Communications was created to respond to the current demands of communication by factors of convergence and interactivity. To assess how the new Dicastery of Communications has fared in the face of recent changes, the study traces the historical evolution of the Church’s attitude towards the media, from one of outright hostility in the early decades of the twentieth century to a much more open and progressive stance today. Generally, the study aims to explore how the Vatican has adapted to new media and the strategies, benefits, and impacts on the local church. Specifically, the study identifies how the Vatican uses new media strategies to engage existing audiences and to market to potential adherents; to explore how the new Dicastery for Communications is taking full advantage of the benefits and opportunities presented by the new media and engagement paradigms; to examine the barriers to and dangers of the Vatican's adoption of new media strategies to engage existing audiences and to market to potential adherents; and lastly, to consider how new media strategies from the center cascade and impact local churches. The study employed the use of qualitative research methods, with the elite interview used as the medium of data collection in the research. Interviews conducted with nine elites, including three each of the members of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communications, local Church officials in the developing world, particularly the Archdiocese of Ibadan, and independent experts with knowledge about the Vatican's media, serve as major data employed to discover how successful Pope Francis and the Catholic Church as a whole have been in this endeavor of strategic communications and synodality. The initial stage of the data analysis procedure involved transcribing the interviews, prioritizing the objectives of precision and ethical reporting in documenting the participants' remarks. The transcribed data were further analyzed using thematic data analysis techniques. The study finds that the new media strategies adopted by the Vatican have succeeded in terms of enabling a more coherent internal communications structure but have largely failed to attract new converts to Catholicism. Overall, the findings suggest the church is still finding its way in the new media sphere. Conceptually, the church is on the right track. Its challenge now lies in implementing the practical steps necessary if the digital sphere is truly to become a modern space for evangelisation.
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Missional Capital: Volunteering and Faith CommunicationIn this thesis, I identify missional capital, which is a form of social capital comprising theological capital, bridging capital, and linking capital, collectively underpinned by bonding capital to explain how volunteering provides lay Christians with confidence they can participate with God in mission. Based on qualitative interviews and participant observation, I find that the experience of volunteering can give lay Christians assurance about sharing their faith commitments in their workplaces and communities, despite their general anxiety about sharing their beliefs with non-Christian peers. My participants believe that stories of their volunteering experiences are welcomed by their friends and colleagues and tell these in order to initiate discussions about their Christian beliefs. My research arises from my professional practice as volunteer and leader at a Christian witness and service project I pseudonymously name “The Chapel”. The Church of England recognises the importance of witness and service projects, such as The Chapel, to help address its crisis of declining attendance (Church of England Research and Statistics, 2020; The Church of England, 2022, Oct 22). However, since existing volunteer studies typically focus on recruitment and retention (Wilson, 2012), there has been little research into how Christian witness and service projects might also help the Church of England to equip lay Christians to communicate their beliefs beyond their faith community. My research shows how practices of prayer, listening and storytelling employed by The Chapel leverage the liminality and communitas inherent in volunteer witness and service projects to facilitate theological play. This play strengthens volunteers’ conviction that they can identify and participate in God’s existing activity in visitors’ lives. The attitudes and practices arising from this integrate belief and action creating missional capital. The church is usually conceived as either gathered in worship or scattered in witness and service to the world (Van Gelder & Zscheile, 2011). This study illustrates the service-learning potential of witness and service projects, such as The Chapel, which combine elements of corporate worship with individual witness. I suggest similar practices could be tested in other Christian witness and service projects to teach other lay Christian volunteers to communicate their faith more effectively.
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Book Review: Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans Under HitlerBook review of Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans Under Hitler
