Receptive Ecumenism Newsletter

Just short of 200 church leaders, theologians, national and international ecumenists, church officers, organisational experts, and local church practitioners gathered together at Ushaw College, Durham, last week, 11-15th January, to embrace and take forwards a new contribution to the ecumenical movement that has been developed by staff of the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University.

The department was recently ranked as the top department for research in theology and religion in the UK, according to the recent Research Assessment Exercise.

Building on the work of an acclaimed originating conference in January 2006 and complemented by a major innovative regional comparative research project in Receptive Ecumenism and the Local Church, the Receptive Ecumenism and Ecclesial Learning conference drew representatives of fifteen different ecclesial traditions together, accompanied by a Jewish philosopher, Prof. Peter Ochs of the University of Virginia, to focus on the explicitly self-critical, receptive question as to ‘What can we and what need we learn with creative integrity from our others?’

This second Receptive Ecumenism International, held in conjunction with the annual gathering of the Ecclesiological Investigations International Research Network, was again organised and jointly hosted by the Centre for Catholic Studies, Durham University and Ushaw College, the Roman Catholic seminary for the north of England.  Alongside an anonymous trust, other partner bodies and sponsors included: Churches Together in England, the Diocese of Durham, the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches, the Jerusalem Trust, the Northern Synod of the United Reformed Church, One in Christ, the Society for Ecumenical Studies, and The Tablet and The Pastoral Review.

Amongst the delegates from four continents and twenty-one countries were eight Roman Catholic bishops, including the new Bishop-elect of Hexham and Newcastle, Canon Seamus Cunningham, in his first public engagement as such, two Anglican bishops, a Greek Orthodox Metropolitan and Archimandrite, the Directorate of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches, the Directorate of Churches Together in England, and official representation from the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity bearing an endorsing opening message from the Council’s President, His Eminence Cardinal Walter Kasper.

In his opening message, read by Monsignor Mark Langham, Cardinal Kasper spoke for the fourth time in public of Receptive Ecumenism as offering ‘a new way forward on our ecumenical path.’  For their part, Rev. Dr David Cornick, General Secretary, and other staff members of Churches Together in England spoke enthusiastically of their desire to integrate the thinking and strategy behind Receptive Ecumenism into their core activities, even extending to the possibility of producing both a practical handbook for Receptive Ecumenism and the Local Church and a scripture-based small group resource pack to promote the practice of breaking the Word together as a privileged place for encountering and receiving of one another’s gifts in our own respective brokenness.  Similarly, Dr John Gibaut, Director, and Dr Tamara Grdzelidze of the Faith and Order Commission, spoke of the significance of Receptive Ecumenism as a complementary strategy in service of their common aims and of their intention to present the strategy to the next plenary assembly of the Faith and Order Commission in Geneva in October 2009 with a view to incorporating it into their work.

In due course, Receptive Ecumenism and Ecclesial Learning: Learning to Be Church Together will issue in a second major volume of essays to complement that deriving from the originating January 2006 colloquium, Receptive Ecumenism and the Call to Catholic Learning: Exploring a Way for Contemporary Ecumenism, Paul D. Murray (ed.), (Oxford: OUP, 2008).

The Program of the event can be accessed here.
 

Abstracts for the Parrallel Paper/Workshops can be accessed here.
 
 
Recording of the plenary papers can be purchased from Agape Ministries.

A collection of photos can also be viewed at Flickr

 

This September sees launch of Receptive Ecumenism and the Call to Catholic Learning: Exploring a Way for Contemporary Ecumenism, a major and much anticipated volume by Oxford University Press, 2008 (US publication date is the start of November) containing revised papers, plus additional commissioned essays, deriving from the first international Receptive Ecumenism colloquium held in January 2006.  For publication details and introductory offer please see below.The January 2006 colloquium at Ushaw College, organised by the then nascent Centre for Catholic Studies in conjunction with Ushaw, was held to mark the conferral by Durham University of the degree of Doctor of Divinity honoris causa on H. E. Cardinal Walter Kasper, President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.  (For further details of this internationally acclaimed event, click here).  Cardinal Kasper himself and Mgr Don Bolen (until very recently responsible for Catholic-Anglican and Catholic-Methodist relations within the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity) are amongst the 32 contributing authors, as are also Bishop Michael Putney, Nicholas Lash, Keith Pecklers SJ, Mary Tanner OBE and a host of other internationally recognised theologians and ecumenists from across the traditions. For full details of the essays included in the volume please click here.
For promotional discount, please click  here.

Book launch events and second international Receptive Ecumenism conference

Over the next few months there are to be three significant events related to the publication of this volume.

1.  The UK launch for the volume will take place at Ushaw College on Wednesday 10th September, 6.30pm, during the annual conference of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain, the theme of whose conference this year is Vatican II and the Church to Come (give a link to the CTA’s website).  
2. On Thursday 23rd October at 6.00pm, during the forthcoming Synod of Bishops, the Centro Pro Unione (off the Piazza Navone, Rome) is to host an international launch reception for the volume in the company of Cardinal Kasper and H.E. Francis Campbell, HM Ambassador to the Holy See.  All are welcome both to this event and to the Ecumenical Evening Prayer that is being hosted the evening in celebration of the volume by the Oratory of St. Francis Xavier, Via del Caravita, at which Bishop Tom Wright (Anglican Bishop of Durham will preach).  For further details of both events, click here
3. From 11th-15th January 2009 the second international Receptive Ecumenism conference will take place, Receptive Ecumenism and Ecclesial Learning: Learning to Be Church Together.  For further details, please click here, or contact Dr Marcus Pound, Deputy Director of the Centre for Catholic Studies, at m.j.p.pound@durham.ac.uk

Receptive Ecumenism and the Call to Catholic Learning: Exploring a Way for Contemporary Ecumenism
Edited by Paul Murray

Department of Theology and Religion
Durham University

This volume proposes a fresh strategy for ecumenical engagement – ‘Receptive Ecumenism’ – that is fitted to the challenges of the contemporary context and has already been internationally recognised as making a distinctive and important new contribution to ecumenical thought and practice. Beyond this, the volume tests and illustrates this proposal by examining what Roman Catholicism in particular might fruitfully learn from its ecumenical others.

Challenging the tendency for ecumenical studies to ask, whether explicitly or implicitly, ‘What do our others need to learn from us?’, this volume presents a radical challenge to see ecumenism move forward into action by highlighting the opposite question ‘What can we learn with integrity from our others?’

This approach is not simply ecumenism as shared mission, or ecumenism as problem-solving and incremental agreement but ecumenism as a vital long-term programme of individual,communal and structural conversion driven, like the Gospel that inspires it, by the promise of conversion into greater life and flourishing. The aim is for the Christian traditions to become more,not less, than they currently are by learning from, or receiving of, each other’s gifts.

The 32 original essays that have been written for this unique volume explore these issues from a wide variety of denominational and disciplinary perspectives, drawing together ecclesiologists, professional ecumenists, sociologists, psychologists, and organizational experts.
September 2008

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