Theology and the Arts: Our News and What’s Next
9th July 2026
Our first year – and what’s new for our second!
Fr Dominic White OP, Director of the Centre for Theology and the Arts at Blackfriars, provides the following update:
We are delighted with our first year of seminars, covering everything from literature to music and theatre to architecture, including at least one multimedia artist. As we’d very much hoped, the Centre has attracted staff and students both from Oxford Theology and other departments too, and also active artists from Oxford and further afield. Thank you all for your support. And we published our launch conference in New Blackfriars.
In 2026-27…
We’re planning to move up from two to three seminars per term, so that Theology and the Arts really becomes part of everyone’s diary!
The year will launch on Friday 23 October, 2-4 pm, with a special lecture-recital in Blackfriars Priory church, a new setting of Psalm 148 for soprano and piano commissioned from Fr Dominic White OP, by the Kirby Laing Foundation. It will be sung by soprano Lizzy Spight, with a musical response from Malcolm Atkins and poetic responses from Dr Edward Clarke (English Faculty) and Ariel Kahn (Woolf Institute).
Other confirmed speakers for 2026-27 include musician and theologian Dr Margarita Mooney Clayton (Blackfriars Hall and Princeton Theological Seminary), with a seminar recital on the medieval chant antiphon, and artist and philosopher Dr Gareth Polmeer (Royal College of Art and Margaret Beaufort Institute) on the use of AI as a creative tool.
…And save the date! Saturday 5th June 2027 is our summer conference, Theology, Art and Nature, jointly with the Las Casas Institute and the Pontifical University of St Thomas (Angelicum). A call for papers will be going out in the autumn.
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